Page 2

“Oh, no,” Kinnick said. “When?”
“A month ago,” Leah said.
“Oh, Celia.” She’d always exuded a sort of frailty, as if she didn’t belong on this plane of existence. Kinnick fell against the doorframe, his side cramping. No wonder Bethany had run off. Her mother had been the closest thing she’d had to a compass.
“Grandma got lymphoma,” Asher said. So strange, such a big word coming from such a small mouth. Reminded him of Bethany when she was little.
“Oh, Celia,” Kinnick said again, and his eyes got bleary. He pictured her as she’d been when they’d first met, at the University of Oregonlibrary, forty years ago, her long hair swishing side to side like a show-horse’s tail. He was studying botany and natural sciences; she wanted to be a nurse. He remembered her asleep, turned away from him, the high curve of her cheekbone. Had anyone ever slept so peacefully? He used to put a hand in front of her mouth, just to feel her breath, make sure she was still there. They married a year after meeting, then finished grad school, welcomed Bethany into the world, and started their life together—until that life, like everything else decent and worthwhile, began to crack.
“I’ll bet she was a wonderful grandmother,” Kinnick said.
“Yes,” said Leah, her brother nodding at her side.
Oh, poor Celia, Kinnick thought. And poor Bethany. He didn’t picture her as she was now, lost mother to these two kids, but as his big-eyed baby girl, lying awake in bed every night, waiting for a story from her dad. And now, that girl, that woman, that mother, was without a mother. Oh, poor Bethany. And these poor kids, grandchildren he hasn’t seen in years, that he hadn’t even recognized on his front porch.
Rhys Kinnick nearly doubled over with a previously undiagnosed condition: regret. And this single, overwhelming thought:What have I done?
He cleared his throat. “Come in,” he said to his grandkids. He opened the door wider. “Please, come in.”
***
The dam burst seven and a half years earlier, in Grants Pass, Oregon, 2016, forty minutes before Thanksgiving dinner, when Rhys Kinnick realized there was no place left for him in this risible world. It happened during a televised football game, of all things, Kinnick’s son-in-law, Shane, running the remote, along with his mouth. Celia’s new (old) husband, Cortland, snoring away in a recliner. Rhys sat helplessly between the dim husbands of daughter and ex-wife, quietly nursing hisfourth beer. He was a terrible nurse. This patient wasn’t likely to make it, either.
Kinnick had agreed to drive ten hours from Spokane to Grants Pass for one more attempt at a calm, blended family holiday. “No politics,” Bethany had proposed, or maybe pleaded, Kinnick quickly agreeing to terms. He was the first to admit that he could get worked up talking with Shane about the recently decided dumpster fire of an election, and that, in Shane’s words, he was still “butt hurt.”
“I told Shane the same thing,” Bethany said. “No religion. No politics. Let’s just try to be a normal family.”
Normal. Sure. Family. Right. And the first two hours were fine. Leah colored, Asher toddled, small-talking adults small-talked. So far so—
Then Asher went down for a nap, Leah went off to play dolls, Celia and Bethany drifted into the kitchen to cook dinner, and Shane immediately launched into his nutty Christian nationalism rap: “It might make you feel better, Rhys, to know that this was all prophesied in the Book of Daniel—”
—it did not make Rhys feel better—
“—that a king would rise up in the West to make his nation great again,” Shane said, cracking a pistachio shell and eating the nut.
“Two thousand years ago,” Kinnick said into his beer.And, he thought,spoiler alert: Didn’t happen then, either.
“The Bible speaks to us inourtime, in every time,” Shane said. “Revelations 22:10: ‘Seal not the sayings of the prophecy of this book: for the time is at hand.’?”
Rhys had promised Bethany and Celia he wouldn’t make trouble, so he merely thought his answer:Yes, Shane, you know-nothing know-it-all, the time IS at hand, present tense, meaning 95 AD, when some long-dead author wrote that allegorical nonsense about the brutal reign of the Roman emperor Domitian, not about immigration or the deep state or whatever bullshit you’re confused about today.
Next to him, Cortland—fifteen years older than Celia and as political as a tree stump—hummed in his sleep. Rhys looked around Shane and Bethany’s tidy living room, with its cursive needlepoint (Bless the Lord, O, my soul) and framed Jesus-at-Sunset posters (Praise Him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens).
He glanced back at Shane, all self-satisfaction and mudflap mustache, chomping pistachios. It was blissfully quiet for a moment, and Kinnick thought the worst might be over. Then, on TV, a pass interference call went against the Green Bay Packers, and Shane leaned across the recliners and confided to Kinnick: “They’re in on it, too, you know.”
It, Rhys knew by now, was the elaborate and all-encompassing conspiracy to indoctrinate Americans into a Satanic liberal orthodoxy whose end goal was to subsume good Christians like Shane into an immoral, one-world socialist nightmare in which people pooped in the wrong bathrooms.
Kinnick urged himself to stay quiet. To not ask questions. If you didn’t ask Shane for more information, he sometimes just muttered off into silence. Rhys checked his watch. Thirty-five minutes to turkey. He could make that. Surely, he could be quiet for thirty-five—
“Who?” he heard himself ask. “The officials? You’re saying the refs are in on it?”
Shane turned his head. “Refs? Come on, Rhys. You think the refs have that kind of power? Think for a minute: Who pays the refs?”
“Okay. So—” Rhys tried to keep it casual, asking over the rim of his beer, “you’re saying the National Football League is engaged in a massive conspiracy... whose sole purpose is to deny victory to the teams you happen to like?”
“It’s got nothing to do with me,” Shane said. “It’s common knowledge that politics and professional football were rigged the same year—2008. That’s when the globalists put forward the final part of their plan: they’d already taken over universities, schools, every level of government, and they were about to give us a certain foreign presidentwhose name I will not say out loud, but whose middle name is Hussein. The final push. They were starting to control sports, too. Don’t forget who won the Super Bowl that year.”
“No idea,” Kinnick said.