“Is she done with high school?”

“Just graduated. Was going to Rocky Mountain College here, but her dad withdrew her.”

“Maybe I can chat with her about her options,” she says, and I stand up and kiss my mom on the cheek.

“Thank you,” I say.

Dad and Turk return after going to two AA meetings back-to-back, and Dad looks glassy-eyed and wasted. I notice his legs as he sits on the couch. They are so skinny. It makes me think of my grandfather, and how thin and frail he probably was at the end of his life.

“I don’t think this is going to work for me,” he says.

“You don’t need to think,” Turk tells him. He’s sitting on the other couch. I’m in the doorway, just listening. “Not right now. Just go in with an open mind and listen.”

“It won’t work. Not if we get to the point where I have to pray.”

“God wants you to be quiet.”

Dad squeezes his eyes shut. “Did you just tell me to shut up? Did you just tell me God wants me to shut up?”

“No,” Turk says. “Be quiet. There’s a difference.”

That night we have dinner as a family. Mom grills chicken breasts and Turk helps out in the kitchen, boiling corn on the cob and slicing tomatoes for everyone.

Mom sits next to Dad at the table and cuts up his food for him. The look in his eyes as he watches her care for him tells me he still loves her completely. And when I see how tender she is as she tucks a napkin into the lapel of his shirt, I see that she loves him too.

“Delicious,” my dad says.

“Thanks,” says my mother. “I’m glad you like it.”

“So when we head back to New York, where are Aisha and Dad going to stay?” I say, half kidding and half not kidding at all. I expect my mom to stare daggers at me for saying this, because obviously we don’t have the room. Unless Aisha sleeps with me and Dad sleeps with her…. Well, come to think of it.

“We’ll see,” Mom says.

“For the record,” I note, “that’s not a no.”

“Let’s be here now,” she says, and I don’t snort but I want to.

I savor the tart of the tomato against the roof of my mouth. “Can we get a dog when we go back to New York?”

“I would say that’s down the list of priorities quite a ways,” she says.

“Ours is a family that could use a dog. That would help.”

As Dad talks a bit about the drunks at the meeting and the things they said, and Turk keeps shaking his head and saying, “Anonymity, Matthew, anonymity,” I think about how amazing it is that we’re having dinner together as a family. Before Aisha arrived, Dad ate in his room, and Mom and I were like two ships passing in the night. Even after, we were this weird, fractured household. How did this happen?

I love it. I love sharing food with all these crazy-ass, totally imperfect people like me.

My mom stabs another piece of corn and puts it on my dad’s plate. “How are you doing?” she asks Aisha.

Aisha says, “Scrambled.”

I reach over and squeeze her arm. “Scrambled how?” I ask.

“I’m sad, but also I’m done,” she says. “Like truly done with them. And I’m done letting them own God. Nobody gets to use God as a weapon against me anymore. I just fucking reject that stuff. Nobody owns my God.”

I know my mom wants to say, “Language,” but she doesn’t. Turk smiles. “Good. Good for you.”

“You should trademark God,” my dad says.

Mom exhales. “I love you, Matthew. I do. But shut up, please. Really.”

My dad smiles and zips his lips closed.

Apple, meet tree, I guess. Because the sad truth is that the trademark comment came into my head too. So I zip my lips shut too, and my dad laughs.

Aisha says, “I think that’s the worst thing you can do to a person. Make them believe that whatever you think about them, that’s what God thinks too.”

That makes me remember Pastor Logan, because the one thing that has not happened today is the thing I most want to see. I want to know what in the world he was thinking, keeping what he knew a secret from my dad for so long, all while continuing to pretend to be this close, caring friend of the family.

“The pastor,” I say to Turk. “Let’s ambush him. I’ll go with you. Go over there and just watch his eyes pop out of his skull when he sees you. I want him to burn.”

Turk shakes his head. “I get it, but no. I don’t think so.”

I’m shocked. Outspoken religious rebel Turk? He’s not going to confront the pastor? I look over at Aisha for support, and she seems game.

Turk takes a drink of water. “Explain this to me. How did you find me? How did all this get started?”

I describe going over to ask the pastor a few questions, and Aisha seeing one of Grandma’s boxes. I tell him what it took to get the box, and how Pastor Logan came so close to catching me in his attic that he nearly sat on my head. My mom looks like she’s going to have a heart attack. My dad laughs.

“So do you want the twelve-step reaction to all this?” Turk asks.

This shuts my dad’s laughing up, and I shake my head. “No thank you, please,” I say, and I cut off a piece of chicken breast and stuff it in my mouth with my fingers.

When no one else says anything, I relent. “Fine, go ahead,” I say.

“We talk about cleaning up our own side of the street. We ask the question, ‘What’s my part in this?’ I cannot change someone else. It isn’t my job, actually, to tell the pastor what he did wrong. I’m happiest if I do the best I can do, and leave the rest to God.”

I stick my finger down my throat dramatically and look at Aisha.

She isn’t laughing. “That’s like me and my dad,” she says. “I can’t make him do the right thing. I just have to take care of me.”

“You got it, dear,” Turk says, putting his arm around her. “That’s it exactly.”

Aisha gives me a gloating look and sticks her tongue out at me.

“Teacher’s pet,” I say. “So I’m supposed to just let God punish him, as if God sits around punishing people for their ways?”

Turk shakes his head. “What business is it of yours whether he’s punished?”

“Well, he should be.”

“So you’re God now?”

I shrug. “I’d be a good one.”

“No doubt,” Turk says. “But maybe for now, you can figure that the pastor is punishing himself. You don’t think he feels a little bit guilty about his role in all this?”

I think about it. The pastor has been taking care of my dad for years. Of course there must be some guilt in there. I’d never thought about that before.

So after dinner, I go over to the pastor’s by myself.

He answers the door in his red-and-white striped pajamas. “Carson,” he says.

“I’m just here to say sorry for stealing that box.”

He sucks in his lips. “I had a feeling you might be responsible for that.”

“It was wrong of me to steal it, and I’m sorry. But the stuff in it belongs to my family, so we’re going to keep it.”

He lowers his gaze to the ground. “Do you know?”

I nod. “My granddad’s lover is next door.” I want the word lover to scald him.

“I’ve prayed about this,” he says. “I’ve prayed and prayed.”

I have so many things I want to yell. The rage is heating my chest from the inside. But Turk said not to. So I don’t.

“I promised your grandmother. It was her dying wish. She did not want your father to have to deal with who his father was.”

It’s like an apology without the apology. Instead of just saying sorry, which I would actually like to hear, all I’m getting is a rationalization.

So I put my trembling hand up. “Nope. Not interested. None of my business.”

I walk away with the pastor still standing there at the open door.