The Church We Built Overnight
Reading edition
Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it.
— Psalm 127:1
1The Clip
The water in the stock tank was supposed to be ninety degrees.
Eli Mercer had learned the number the hard way, the first winter in the warehouse, when a pool heater bought off Craigslist quit on a January Sunday and a retired roofer named Big Ernie Salcido came up out of fifty-four-degree water shouting a word that was not in any hymnal. Thirty people had laughed so hard that somebody’s grandmother had to sit down on an amplifier. Ernie had laughed too, eventually, dripping and furious and forgiven, and afterward Eli bought a real heater with his own credit card and a digital thermometer that clipped to the rim, and from then on the water was ninety.
Tonight the thermometer said ninety on the nose. The tank sat center stage at the Monroe under a wash of warm white light, a galvanized oval eight feet long that had once watered cattle outside Wickenburg, and there were fourteen names on the index card tucked into the waistband of Eli’s black joggers.
He was standing in the water to his thighs. His T-shirt was already soaked from the first two. Under the lights, beyond the lip of the stage, the Night service went back and up into the dark in rows, eleven hundred people in the old theater seats and another hundred or so standing along the back wall because the ushers had stopped pretending the fire marshal would never visit. It was April, the last cool evenings before the city went to war with the sun, and the doors onto Monroe Street had been propped for an hour to let the air move. Somewhere outside a bus hissed at the light-rail stop. Inside, Micah was playing the bridge of “Morning Comes” so softly on the keys it was almost a thought.
Eli pulled the card out, blinked water off it, and found the third name.
Jonah Price.
Under it, in June Alvarez’s round handwriting, the two lines Jonah had written on his baptism card three weeks ago: I work nights. I have been angry my whole life and I thought God was for people who had it together. I don’t.
“Jonah,” Eli said into the headset mic, and the name went out across the room and came back off the plaster. “Come on, man.”
Jonah Price came up the stage steps like he was walking toward a dog he wasn’t sure about. He was twenty-two, tall and heavy through the shoulders, with a faded fade and a gray T-shirt that said ANCHOR CITY across the chest in the thin white font Grant had designed in the warehouse days. The volunteers had given him the shirt at the side door. They gave everybody the shirt. He stopped at the edge of the tank and looked down into the water and then out at the room, and Eli watched the size of the room hit him.
“You’re good,” Eli said, off-mic, and held out his hand. “It’s a hot tub. It’s the nicest hot tub you’ll ever get into for free.”
Jonah laughed through his nose and took the hand and stepped over.
Grant Pardee was crouched at the tank’s rim to Eli’s right with the gimbal rig balanced in both hands, low, the lens a foot from the water. A second camera on the jib swung slowly over the front rows like a patient bird. Eli had stood in this tank maybe four hundred times now, and he knew without looking exactly where both lenses were, the way a pitcher knows where first base is. He turned Jonah by the shoulder a half step, so that the light from the left caught Jonah’s face and so that Grant’s lens would have it clean. A man’s face at the moment of new birth deserved to be seen. He had told Grant that once, early on, and Grant had nodded like it was theology.
“Jonah,” Eli said, on mic again. “Do you believe that Jesus Christ died for your sins and rose from the dead?”
“Yes.”
“Is he your Lord? Like—“ Eli grinned. “You work nights. Is he your boss?”
A ripple of laughter went through the room. Jonah’s mouth pulled sideways. “Yeah,” he said. “Yes. He is.”
“Then based on your confession of faith, I baptize you, my brother, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
He put one hand flat between Jonah’s shoulder blades and the other over Jonah’s folded hands at his chest, and Jonah pinched his nose the way everybody did, and Eli laid him back into the water.
It was a small thing, going under. People always expected it to take longer. The water closed over Jonah’s face and his big shoulders and the gray shirt, and for one second there was nobody in the tank but Eli and a shape under the surface, the light breaking into wobbling gold lines across it, and then Eli lifted and Jonah came up.
He came up sitting. He didn’t stand. He sat in the water with it streaming off his head and blinked, and then he started to laugh, a big helpless bark of a laugh, and wiped his face with both hands.
“It’s cold,” he said.
“It’s ninety degrees, bro,” Eli said, and the whole theater lost it.
Jonah laughed with them. Then, in the middle of the laugh, something happened to his face. Eli had seen it before. He had seen it on grandmothers and on a Marine and on a fifteen-year-old girl whose mother had signed the parental consent line with a pen that kept skipping. It happened in the eyes first. Jonah looked up at him, still sitting in the water, and the laugh went out of him and something younger came into it.
“That’s it?” Jonah said. He wasn’t on mic, but the headset caught it. “That’s—I’m—“
Eli crouched until the water was at his waist and put his hand on the back of Jonah’s wet neck. “That’s it,” he said. “You’re clean. You’re his.”
Jonah put both arms around him and held on. He was heavy and soaked and he was shaking, and Eli held him back, and behind them Micah let the keys swell into the chorus, and eleven hundred people rose up out of the old theater seats and roared.
The rest went fast, the way the rest always did. Eleven more. A nursing student named Destiny who went under and came up and immediately said “My mascara,” to more laughter. A father and son baptized one after the other, the son eight years old and solemn as a judge. A woman in her sixties who whispered to Eli, just before he laid her back, “I did this in 1977 and I didn’t mean it,” and came up meaning it.
By the fourteenth name his lower back had the dull ache it always got, and his joggers were plastered to his legs, and the stage manager, a sharp-voiced ASU senior named Rae, was waving a towel at him from the wings like a cornerman. Micah brought the band up for the last song. Eli climbed out of the tank and let Rae drape the towel over his head, and for thirty seconds in the dark behind the black side curtain he stood with his hands on his knees and breathed.
Fourteen. On a regular Sunday night in April.
When he straightened up, Jonah was standing six feet away in the wings with his own towel around his shoulders, dripping onto the concrete, alone.
Eli had a practiced way of scanning a room for the people who belonged to someone, and he did it now without deciding to. The father and son had the mother waiting with a phone. Destiny had four girls from her nursing cohort shrieking at her. The woman from 1977 had a husband holding out her purse like an offering. Jonah had a towel.
“Hey,” Eli said, and went over. “Hey. That was real, man. That was really real.”
“Yeah.” Jonah’s voice was rough. “Yeah, I don’t— Yeah.”
“Did anybody come with you? Your roommate, your—“
“Pastor Eli.” Kenzie Lowe had materialized at his elbow with her phone held up and lit, which was the way Kenzie materialized everywhere. She was twenty-six and ran every social account the church had, and she had the face of someone holding a winning lottery ticket very carefully so it would not blow away. “Sorry. Sorry, Jonah, hi, congratulations, that was so beautiful. Eli, Grant wants you in the green room for thirty seconds before the benediction. He’s got a rough cut.”
“Already?”
“He cut it on the laptop during the last three.” She turned the phone toward him. On the screen was a frozen image of Jonah sitting in the water with his face tipped up and the light gold across the surface around him. It looked like a painting. It looked like something that should be on the wall of a museum in a city where it rained. “We want it up tonight. While it’s fresh.”
Eli looked at the image and felt it, the thing he always felt, a warm rush up the back of his neck that he had never once managed to separate cleanly into its parts. Some of it was joy. He knew that much. He had baptized a man tonight whose father, June had told him, had called him worthless in front of a Circle K. That was real, and the joy was real.
“Go,” Jonah said. “You’re good. I’m good.”
“I’ll find you after,” Eli said. “Don’t leave.”
“I got work at eleven,” Jonah said, but he was smiling, and Eli clapped his shoulder and went.
The green room at the Monroe had been a dressing room when the building was a vaudeville house in the thirties. It still had the long mirror with the bulbs around it, half of them dead, and a radiator that had not produced heat since the Eisenhower administration. Somebody had hung a string of café lights along the ceiling and put in two gray sectionals from IKEA, and the rest of the space was given over to laptops, cables, a mini-fridge full of LaCroix, and a whiteboard that still said, from that morning, 9AM — 362 / 11AM — 479 / NIGHT — ?
Grant was on the sectional with the laptop balanced on his knees. He was thirty, lean and bearded, with a wedding videographer’s permanent squint and a way of holding himself very still while something he’d made was playing, as if movement might ruin it. He didn’t look up when Eli came in dripping.
“Sixty-one seconds,” he said. “Watch.”
It opened on black and the sound of water. Then Micah’s keys. Then Jonah’s face, close, before the dunk, eyes wide, a muscle jumping in his jaw. Eli’s voice, clean through the mix: Is he your boss? The laugh from the room, pulled low so it felt far away. The plunge in slow motion. The light breaking over the surface. Jonah bursting up and sitting there, and It’s cold, and Eli’s line and the roar, and then Grant held on Jonah’s face through the change, through That’s it?, and cut to black on You’re his with the chorus of “Morning Comes” rising underneath like a tide.
The caption at the bottom, in the thin white font: He thought God was for people who had it together.
Nobody in the room said anything for a second. Dex Holloway, twenty-four, who cut most of the short-form clips and who had once described his spiritual gift as “knowing when to cut,” exhaled through his teeth.
“Bro,” Dex said.
“Yeah,” Grant said. He finally looked up at Eli. “Yeah?”
Eli had watched it with his arms crossed and his towel around his neck, and his throat had closed on That’s it? the same way it had closed in the tank. It was beautiful. It was true. It was also, he could feel with a precision he didn’t examine, going to do numbers.
“Yeah,” he said. “Post it.”
Kenzie was already typing.
He changed in the bathroom down the hall into dry jeans and a flannel, which was too warm for April in Phoenix but was the only other thing in his bag. He pronounced the benediction from the stage with his hair still wet, and the room laughed when he shook it like a dog, and then the house lights came up and the Night service broke apart into its pieces and flowed toward the lobby.
The lobby was where Eli used to be best.
In the warehouse days, when the whole church could fit in the space between Gil Arvizu’s stacked dining chairs and his half-sanded armoires, Eli had known every name. Thirty names the first month. Eighty by Christmas. He’d kept a photo directory on his phone and quizzed himself at red lights like a kid with flash cards, and he’d been proud of it in a way he told himself was pastoral. When a girl walked in the second time, he said her name. When a guy’s mother was in the hospital, Eli knew which hospital, and which floor, and what the nurses were like on that floor. He had gotten to two hundred names before the first clip. After the first clip there had been no two hundred and ten or two hundred and fifty. There had been, very suddenly, a thousand.
Now he came out into the Monroe’s high old lobby with its restored tile floor and its chandeliers and its merch table selling hoodies, and within ten steps a young woman with a nose ring and a denim jacket was in front of him, lit up.
“Pastor Eli! Hi! You prayed for my grandma in February, remember? The one in hospice? She’s—she’s still here! The doctors can’t explain it!”
She said it as if they were old friends. Maybe they were. He had no idea.
“Hey, you,” Eli said, and hugged her, and the warmth of it was genuine even though the name was gone, even though he could see that she was waiting for him to say it. “That’s incredible. That’s God. Tell her I’m still praying.”
“I will! I’ll tell her you remembered!”
He kept moving. Hey, you. Hey, man. Hey, friend. He had a dozen of them now, ways of saying hello that did not require a name, and he used them the way a man with a bad knee favors the other leg. A guy in a Suns jersey asked for a selfie and Eli said sure and smiled for it. Two girls from Oklahoma told him they’d driven fourteen hours because of the warehouse clip, and he asked where in Oklahoma and pretended to know Ada. A dad wanted to talk about the Gilbert campus, because he’d heard there was going to be a Gilbert campus, and was it true? Eli said pray for us.
By the time he got back to the side door, it was nine forty. Jonah was gone.
He stood in the doorway a moment, looking out at the loading zone on Third Street, where the last cars were pulling away under the orange streetlights. The air smelled like hot asphalt cooling and, faintly, like the orange blossoms that were almost done for the year. He should have gotten a number. June would have a number. June always had a number.
He pulled out his phone to text her and saw that he already had forty-one notifications.
Theo was asleep when Eli got home. Their house was a 1940s brick bungalow in the Coronado neighborhood with a grapefruit tree in the yard that dropped more fruit than two men could eat, and a window unit in the back bedroom that rattled like a truck idling. Theo Lang kept the kitchen clean and the rent paid on the first and had, for three years, served as the volunteer treasurer of a church whose annual budget had gone from eleven thousand dollars to four million, and he went to bed at ten-thirty on Sundays with the discipline of a man who had to be at a bank by seven.
Eli ate cold rice out of a takeout box standing up at the counter and watched the clip.
Four hundred and twelve thousand views on the main account. It had been up for an hour and fifty minutes.
He watched it again. Then he did the thing he told other people not to do and opened the comments. He knew better. He did it anyway, the way you press on a bruise.
CRYING at “is he your boss”
this is what the church is supposed to be 😭😭
the “it’s cold” “it’s 90 degrees bro” I’m DEAD
Staged. These churches plant people. Look at the lighting lol
that’s my coworker!!!!! he works overnight with me at the FC. I’ve never seen him smile like that. I’m so happy for you bro @jprice_22
Eli smiled at that one. He scrolled.
Where is this church? I’m in Glendale. I’ve never been to church but I watched this on my break and I’m in the bathroom at work crying. Is it weird to just show up
He read it twice. Then he typed back, with his thumb: Not weird at all. Sunday at the Monroe downtown. Come to the welcome table and ask for June. She’ll take care of you. He added a heart. Then he deleted the heart, because he didn’t know if a pastor should heart a crying stranger’s comment, and then he put it back, because Jesus would probably have hearted it, and then he laughed at himself and hit send.
Seventeen months ago, in November, Grant had filmed Marcus Tillman in the warehouse. Marcus had been a line cook at a brunch place on Seventh Street and had come up out of the tank wet and wild-eyed and yelled “I’m new! I’m new!” at the top of his lungs with his arms out, and somebody’s phone had caught it from the back row at a slant, and Grant had cut it with his own footage and posted it on a Sunday night the way Kenzie had posted this one. Marcus’s clip had forty thousand views by morning and four million by Wednesday and, eventually, somewhere north of thirty-eight million across every platform that counted. People had set it to music. People had made it a sound. A pastor in Brazil had preached a sermon about it. The next Sunday, three hundred people who had never been to Anchor City tried to fit into Gil Arvizu’s warehouse, and Gil had stood in the doorway in his sawdust-covered apron with his mouth open and said, “Pastor, the fire marshal,” and Eli had said, “I know,” and they had done three services that day instead of one, and they had never gone back.
The Faith & Current cover was framed on the wall of his office at the warehouse now. It had run in January. A photograph of the stock tank from above, empty, the water perfectly still, and the headline across it in serif caps: THE CHURCH BUILT OVERNIGHT.
His mother had bought eleven copies.
He finished the rice. His phone buzzed.
Mom: WATCHING IT AGAIN. Dad says tell Jonah he’s proud of him. I told him Dad you don’t know Jonah. He says doesn’t matter.
Mom: Are you eating
Mom: Love you mijo proud of you
His mother was not Mexican and neither was his father, but everybody in Yuma called their kids mijo, and Carol Mercer had never seen a reason to be the exception.
He wrote back, Eating rice. Love you guys, and then he stood for a while at the dark kitchen window with the phone warm in his hand. Across the street a neighbor’s sprinkler ticked. On the fridge next to him was a magnet from a pizza place and, under it, the index card from the tank, water-rippled now and drying stiff, with fourteen names on it.
He took it down and looked at it.
Jonah Price. He knew Jonah. He’d baptized him two hours ago. He knew that Jonah worked nights and had been angry his whole life and had a father who said things in front of Circle Ks. He did not know where Jonah lived or who his roommate was or whether anybody had driven him home or whether he was, right now, standing on a concrete floor under sodium lights somewhere off Buckeye Road with a scanner gun in his hand, soaked in something he couldn’t explain to the guy at the next station.
He should text June.
He opened the clip again instead. Six hundred and eighty thousand.
He went to bed with the phone on his chest, and when he woke at two-fifteen with the screen still lit and his hand gone numb, it said one point one million, and he lay in the dark and listened to the window unit rattle and felt something that he was almost sure was gratitude.
2Two Thousand People
The staff meeting was at nine on Monday in the warehouse on Grand Avenue, and by eight-forty there was a line at the espresso machine and somebody had hung a banner.
It was a paper banner, the kind you buy at Party City, rainbow letters on a string, and it said CONGRATS GRAD because that was what the Party City on Thomas had had in stock at seven in the morning. Dex had fixed it with gaffer tape. Over the CONGRATS he had taped a sheet of printer paper that said 2,041, and over GRAD he had taped a sheet that said NORMAL SUNDAY!!!!, so that the finished banner read, in its entirety, 2,041 NORMAL SUNDAY!!!! and hung sagging between two steel columns over the long folding table where the staff of Anchor City Church met every week.
Eli stood in the doorway of the warehouse and looked at it and laughed out loud.
“Not Easter,” Dex said, coming up beside him with two cups. He handed Eli one. “Not Christmas. Not a baptism Sunday. I mean, it was a baptism Sunday. But not a big one. Just a regular Sunday in April. Two thousand and forty-one humans.”
“Who counted?”
“Naomi’s clickers. Plus the livestream’s another eleven thousand but she won’t let us count that.”
“She’s right not to.”
“She’s always right not to,” Dex said. “It’s her whole thing.”
The warehouse had been theirs for almost three years, though it had only been fully theirs for eight months. Before that it had belonged, in the practical sense, to Gil Arvizu, who restored antique furniture for rich people in Paradise Valley and who had let a twenty-six-year-old youth pastor and his friends meet in the front half of his space on Sunday nights for free because, Gil said, his late wife would have wanted him to. When they moved Sundays to the Monroe, Gil had retired to his daughter’s place in Tucson and sold them the lease for a dollar and a handshake and a promise that they would never take down the hand-painted sign above the roll-up door, which said ARVIZU & SONS — FINE RESTORATION even though there had never been any sons. Now the front half of the building was offices, glass-walled rooms built out of a kit, and the back half was the open floor where they still held Friday night prayer, and where the stock tank had lived before it moved to the stage downtown. There was a faint smell of lacquer that no amount of air conditioning had ever gotten out of the concrete. Eli loved it. He would have fought anyone who tried to take it.
By five after nine there were twenty-three people at the table and the banner overhead and a box of Bosa Donuts in the middle, half gone.
Eli stood at the head of the table and didn’t sit.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I just want to say something, and then Naomi’s going to make us do real stuff, because she’s a grown-up and she loves us.”
“I’m thirty-one,” Naomi said from the other end without looking up from her laptop. “Which in this room makes me Methuselah.”
“Excuse me,” said Tamsin from the far end of the table, and people laughed.
“Methuselah loves us,” Eli said, and people laughed again. “Three years ago this September, there were thirty of us in this building and we sat on Gil’s chairs, and if you sat on the wrong one he’d come over and tell you it was a Stickley and you had to get off. Some of you were there. Micah was there. Grant was there with a camera he borrowed from his uncle.”
“I still have to give it back,” Grant said.
“Two thousand and forty-one people,” Eli said. “On a regular Sunday. Fourteen baptisms last night. The clip’s at—Kenzie?”
“Four point four million across platforms,” Kenzie said. “As of eight-fifty. And rising.”
A couple of people whooped. Somebody banged the table.
“I don’t want us to ever get used to that,” Eli said. “I want to say that out loud. I want us to never be the kind of church that sees a number like that and goes, cool, next. Every one of those is a person. Every baptism is a birth. That’s not marketing, that’s Jesus.” He could feel the room leaning in, the way it did when he preached, the old current running. “So before we do anything else, can we just thank him? Micah, will you pray?”
Micah Reed was sitting three chairs down with his long legs stretched out under the table and his hands wrapped around a coffee cup, and he looked up with a half-second’s surprise before he set the cup down. He was twenty-seven and slight and sandy-haired, with the forearms of a guy who had carried his own keyboard up too many stairs, and he had been Eli’s closest friend since the week Micah moved onto the freshman floor at Sonoran Christian, where Eli, a junior, was the RA. Eli had heard a piano through the cinder block at two in the morning and knocked on the door to complain and stayed until five.
“Yeah,” Micah said. “Sure.”
Everyone bowed. Micah’s prayers were short and plain, and they sounded, always, as if he were talking to someone he’d known a long time and had not seen recently.
“Lord, thank you for last night,” Micah said. “Thank you for Jonah and Destiny and—I don’t know all the names. You do. Thank you for every single one. Help us deserve it. Amen.”
“Amen,” the table said.
Help us deserve it. Eli filed it away. It was the kind of line Micah dropped and then couldn’t explain if you asked him about it later. He decided he’d ask him about it later.
Naomi made them do real stuff.
She ran the meeting off a shared document she projected onto the white wall of the warehouse with a projector that had been donated by an optometrist in Ahwatukee, and the document had sections, and the sections had owners, and the owners had to say words out loud about their sections whether they wanted to or not. Naomi Wells had managed a refugee resettlement nonprofit before Anchor City, and she had spent four years getting families from Kabul and Kinshasa into apartments in west Phoenix with working swamp coolers and a bus pass by the tenth of the month, and she had no patience at all for people who said it’ll come together. She was the oldest of the original thirty, married to a Phoenix Fire captain named Chris who came to church in his uniform when he was on shift and slept through the sermon when he wasn’t, and she had a two-year-old named Miles whose car seat was always visible through the back window of her Corolla in the parking lot like a small, patient passenger.
“Facilities,” Naomi said.
Facilities reported that the Monroe’s landlord was finally fixing the loading-dock door and that someone had backed a church van into a bollard.
“Kids.”
Tamsin Greer, forty-four, who ran children’s ministry and who was the only staff member besides Naomi with a mortgage, reported that they had eighty-six kids in the nine o’clock service and not enough background-checked volunteers for the eleven, and that she would be happy to discuss it with anyone who had forty-five seconds after the meeting, and she looked directly at Eli when she said it.
“I have forty-five seconds for you, Tamsin,” Eli said.
“You say that every week.”
“And every week I mean it.”
“Media,” Naomi said.
Grant ran through it. The clip. The numbers. A request from a Christian streaming network in Nashville to feature the baptism footage in a documentary about “the new revival in the American West.” A request from a Bible app called Verse to partner on a “baptism devotional” series. A request from a clothing brand called Kingdom Supply Co. to sponsor Sunday baptism shirts with a small logo on the sleeve.
“We’re not putting a logo on the baptism shirts,” Eli said.
“That’s what I told them,” Grant said. “They said think about it.”
“We thought about it.”
“And Stories,” Naomi said.
The table went a degree cooler. Eli felt it, the way you feel a cloud pass over on a bright day, without being able to say where it came from.
Anchor City Stories was the testimony series, and it was, on the metrics Kenzie tracked every Monday, the best-performing content the church produced. Sixty to ninety seconds. One person, one chair, one light, one story. A former gang member. A nurse who’d lost a patient and her faith in the same week. A kid who’d been kicked out for being too much. Grant’s team shot them in the back room of the warehouse against a wall painted a dark blue so deep it read as black. The style was plain and close and it worked, and people stitched them, and people wrote I needed this today under every single one.
“We have three in the can,” Grant said. “Dex is finishing edits on one this week. We were thinking the Hernandez family for Mother’s Day, if the timing works.”
“Great,” Eli said.
“Did we ever follow up,” Naomi said, “with the woman from March? Tessa?”
She said it neutrally, looking at her screen. But she said it.
Grant paused. “I texted her. The next day.”
“And?”
“And she didn’t write back. Which—I mean, I get it. It was a whole thing.” Grant turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the table. “The clip’s down. Everything we control is down. There were some reposts we flagged. I think it’s handled.”
Eli remembered the Friday. He remembered it the way you remember an evening when you had a headache: a steakhouse on Camelback, Hal Brandt ordering a second bottle of wine that neither of them drank, the phone lighting up face-down on the white tablecloth, Naomi’s voice on the phone out in the parking lot, clipped. She withdrew consent, Eli. Before it went up. We need to take it down now. The hours after were a blur of texts. He’d been sure, at the time, that it had been handled right. It had been taken down. Grant had apologized. It was a mix-up in a busy week in a department that was running at four times the capacity it had been built for. They had talked about it, the next week, about process, and Grant had said they were going to tighten things, and Eli had said good.
“Grant handled it,” Eli said. “Right? We tightened stuff?”
“We’re tightening stuff,” Grant said.
Naomi looked at Eli for a second longer than necessary over the top of her laptop. Then she typed something and said, “Okay. Moving on. AWAKE.”
AWAKE took forty minutes.
AWAKE was the conference. It had been Hal Brandt’s idea at the steakhouse in the fall, and then Kenzie’s spreadsheet, and then Grant’s sizzle reel, and now it was a real thing on a real calendar with a real deposit on Valley Arena for three nights at the end of July. Nine thousand four hundred tickets sold. Two speakers from Atlanta and one from London. A night of worship that Keystone Worship, Micah’s label, wanted to record for a live album. Sponsors—Kingdom Supply Co., the Verse app, Mesa Pacific University, Hal’s own company, Brandt Comfort Air, whose trucks you saw everywhere in the Valley with a cartoon penguin on the side. The tagline Kenzie had written, and which was now on a billboard over the I-10 just west of the Seventh Street exit, was SOMETHING IS HAPPENING.
Eli loved AWAKE with a heat he knew was not entirely spiritual and did not totally mind. He loved the idea of eighteen-year-olds from Tulsa and Bakersfield and Boise pouring into downtown Phoenix in July, in hundred-and-twelve-degree heat, because they were hungry enough for God to be sweaty about it. He loved the thought of Micah on a stage that size. He loved it most, if he was honest, because of Yuma, although he would not have said that out loud at a staff meeting or anywhere else.
Naomi walked them through the risk register. Heat. Security. Medical tents. Water. Buses from the light rail. Ticket refunds.
“Refunds for what?” Kenzie asked.
“For whatever happens,” Naomi said. “Something always happens.”
“Something is happening,” Kenzie said, and pointed at the ceiling, where the billboard was not, and people laughed, and Naomi smiled a little in spite of herself and moved on.
Then Gilbert. The second campus. A former sporting goods store in a strip center off the Loop 202, fifty-eight thousand square feet, a letter of intent signed three weeks ago. They wanted to open by January. Micah would need to raise up a second worship leader. They would need a campus pastor. They would need, Tamsin said, and nobody laughed this time, background-checked volunteers for the kids.
And then the thing that was not on the agenda.
“I have one more,” June said.
She was sitting at the far end of the table near Naomi, where she always sat, with a paper notebook open next to her laptop. June Alvarez was twenty-four and small and wore her dark hair pulled back tight enough to be severe, and she had been hired in November—two weeks after Marcus Tillman—to do something that had not had a title yet, which was to call people. Now her title was Connections Coordinator, and she ran the welcome tables and the connect cards and the text sequences that went out to newcomers, and she did it with two part-time assistants and a volunteer team of retirees she referred to collectively as “my aunties,” although only one of them was hers.
“Go for it,” Eli said.
“I don’t have it ready,” June said. “I want to show you something Friday. Can I have an hour with you and Naomi on Friday.”
“An hour?” Eli laughed. “That’s a lot of June.”
“I know,” June said. She didn’t laugh. “I need it.”
“You got it,” Eli said. “Naomi, put it on my calendar. An hour of June. Friday.”
Naomi typed it. Then she closed her laptop.
“Last thing,” she said. “Before we pray out.”
She stood, which she almost never did. Down the table people glanced up.
“I want to say congratulations,” Naomi said, “because it’s real, and I was there on the Stickley chairs too, and I cried last night when Jonah came up. So. Congratulations.” She put her hand flat on the lid of the laptop. “And I want to say, for the record, that we had two thousand and forty-one people yesterday and we have one person who’s ever been to seminary, and it’s Eli, and he did two years online. We have no elders. We have a board of three and two of them live with Eli or have lived with Eli. We have Tamsin saying the same thing about volunteers for eleven weeks. I wrote a document fourteen months ago. I’m not going to read it to you. I’m just going to put it in the chat again. That’s all.”
The warehouse was quiet. The banner overhead stirred in the air from the vents. 2,041 NORMAL SUNDAY!!!!
“Naomi,” Eli said, gently. “Thank you. I mean it. I know. We’re going to do it.”
“When?”
“When we can breathe.”
“We’ll never be able to breathe,” Naomi said, “if we wait until we can breathe.”
It was a good line. He could tell she hadn’t planned it, because she looked a little surprised at herself. A couple of people smiled.
“Put it in the chat,” Eli said. “I’ll read it again tonight. I promise.”
“Okay,” Naomi said, and sat down.
Micah prayed them out. It was shorter than the first one.
Tamsin got her forty-five seconds in the parking lot, which turned into eleven minutes standing next to her minivan while the April sun came up off the asphalt in waves and a mockingbird went through its entire catalog on the power line overhead. Tamsin needed eighteen more volunteers who had been through a background check and a two-hour training. She needed a second check-in station. She needed a written policy for what happened when a noncustodial parent showed up at the door, because it had happened twice, and the second time a nineteen-year-old volunteer named Brayden had handled it, and Brayden had done fine, but Brayden should not have had to.
“You’re right,” Eli said.
“I know I’m right,” Tamsin said. “I don’t need you to tell me I’m right. I need eighteen volunteers.”
“I’ll say it from the stage.”
“You said it from the stage in March.”
“I’ll say it with more”—he made a fist—“anointing.”
Tamsin looked at him. She was the only person on staff who had kids older than ten, and sometimes she looked at Eli exactly the way he imagined she looked at her fourteen-year-old.
“Eli,” she said. “I love you. I love this church. My son got baptized in that tank. But you can’t keep inviting people to a house you haven’t built rooms in.”
He thought about that for a long time afterward. At the time, he just nodded and said, “Rooms. Got it,” and she shook her head and got in the minivan.
He spent the afternoon at the Monroe in back-to-back meetings. The Gilbert broker. A pastor from a church in Chandler who wanted to “learn what you guys are doing.” A thirty-minute call with a producer from the Nashville streaming network, who kept calling the church “the movement.” Eli liked her. He said yes to a preliminary interview. He texted Hal Brandt back—Hal had sent a video of himself in his truck at a job site, shouting “TWO THOUSAND!” and shaking the steering wheel—with a string of fire emojis.
At four he remembered the comment from the woman in Glendale, and texted June. Heads up—might have a woman from Glendale asking for you Sunday. Watched the clip in the bathroom at work. Never been to church.
June wrote back in under a minute. Name?
Didn’t get it.
A pause. Then: Ok. I’ll look for someone looking.
At five he remembered Jonah and texted June again. Do we have Jonah Price’s number? I wanted to check on him.
This time the pause was longer. Yes. Friday I’ll show you something about Jonah.
He frowned at that. Is he ok?
He’s fine. Just Friday.
At ten that night he sat on the back step of the bungalow with his feet on the dry grass and a grapefruit in his hand he wasn’t going to eat, and he opened the church chat and scrolled up until he found what Naomi had posted.
It was a link to a document. The document was titled Governance & Care Gaps — DRAFT for discussion. The date on it was February of last year. Fourteen months. He remembered it now. He remembered reading it in bed and thinking it was so good, so wise, so exactly what a church like theirs would need someday. He remembered replying.
He scrolled down under Naomi’s link from fourteen months ago, and there it was, his own reply, sitting under it in the chat like a coin somebody had left on a table.
Love this. So grateful for you. Let’s build structure when the dust settles 🙏
He read the document again. It had eleven items. Elder plurality. Membership. Staff supervision. A grievance process. A written care plan for hospital visits and deaths. Media consent procedures. Counseling referral list. Discipleship pathway. Volunteer screening. Financial controls—this one had a note in Theo’s handwriting, scanned in: Done. We’re good here. Leadership accountability for the lead pastor.
Ten of the eleven were still open.
He sat there a while with it. The grapefruit was heavy and cool in his palm. On the other side of the fence, the neighbor’s dog was barking at something that wasn’t there.
When the dust settles. He’d believed it when he wrote it. He believed it now. There would be a season—after Gilbert opened, after AWAKE, after the documentary—when they could slow down and do all the rooms. That was how it worked. You built the frame while the wind was at your back, and you did the drywall in the calm. Every church plant book said so, more or less. Nehemiah had built the wall with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other. You didn’t stop to hold a bylaws meeting with Sanballat at the gate.
He texted Naomi. Read it again. You’re right. After AWAKE, let’s block a whole week for this. I’m serious.
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared.
Ok, Naomi wrote. Holding you to it.
He went inside. He washed the grapefruit juice off his hands and brushed his teeth and checked the clip one more time before bed, standing in the bathroom with the light off.
Six point two million.
He turned the phone face down on the sink and looked at himself in the dark mirror, a shape, a haircut, nothing much, and said out loud, very quietly, the way he had said it most nights for three years: “It’s yours. It’s all yours.”
He meant it. He had always meant it. He went to bed.
3Tessa Uploads
The beagle’s name was Pickles, and he had eleven bad teeth.
Tessa Rowan counted them on the dental chart while Dr. Kim called them out, clipped and cheerful behind her mask—“Two-oh-eight, gone. Three-oh-nine, mobility two, gone. Oh, Pickles, buddy, who’s been feeding you Cheetos”—and the anesthesia monitor beeped its steady, boring beep, which was the best sound in the building. Pickles lay on his side on the table with a tube in his throat and his tongue lolled out pink over the edge of the towel. His paws twitched now and then as if he were chasing something slow.
“His mom says he’s never had people food,” Tessa said.
“His mom,” Dr. Kim said, “is a liar, and I love her, and I will say so to her face at discharge.”
Tessa smiled under her mask and wrote EXT next to 309.
She had worked at Desert Willow Animal Hospital for two years and four months, which was the longest she had held any job in her life, and she was good at it. She was good at finding a vein on a dehydrated cat. She was good at holding a Great Dane still for a nail trim with nothing but her body weight and a soft voice. She was good at the part where the family came in to say goodbye, and she knew when to be in the room and when to be the person bringing the tissues and closing the door on her way out. Dr. Kim had told her once, in the break room, that she had “the hands,” which was the highest compliment Dr. Kim gave. Tessa had driven home that night and cried in the car at a red light on Rural Road, not because anything was wrong, but because three years ago she had not been anyone that anyone said anything like that to.
She was twenty-six. She had been sober for three years, three months, and seven days.
Pickles’s monitor beeped. Dr. Kim held up a tiny brown tooth in the forceps like a jeweler with a diamond. “Look at this monster.”
“Beautiful,” Tessa said.
At lunch Luz found her in the break room.
Luz was nineteen and worked the front desk and had pink hair that Dr. Kim pretended not to notice, and she came in with her phone already out, already playing something, and dropped into the chair across from Tessa’s salad.
“Okay, you have to see this. Wait, you used to go here, right? This is your church?”
Tessa knew before she saw it. She knew by the music. There were songs that could come on in a store or a waiting room and you wouldn’t notice them, and there were songs that walked into the room and sat down next to you. The keys started, soft, and then Micah Reed’s voice, and she put her fork down.
On the screen, a big guy in a gray T-shirt was sitting in the stock tank at the Monroe, laughing, soaked. It’s cold. And Eli’s voice: It’s ninety degrees, bro. And the roar.
“I’ve watched it like nine times,” Luz said. “The it’s cold. I’m obsessed. Did you know him? The guy?”
“No,” Tessa said.
“Do you still go?”
“No.”
Luz looked up. Whatever was on Tessa’s face made her lower the phone a little. “Oh. Sorry. Was it, like, a whole thing?”
“It’s fine,” Tessa said, and picked her fork back up. “It’s a good video.”
It was. That was the worst part. It was a good video. The big guy—Jonah, the caption said, @jprice_22—had a face like a kid who had been told to wait in the car for years and had just been told he could come in. Tessa knew exactly what the water felt like at ninety degrees. She had gone down into it in the warehouse two Octobers ago, before the Monroe, before any of it, with Gil’s armoires stacked along the wall in their drop cloths like a congregation of ghosts. She had come up and the first face she saw was Eli’s, laughing, and the second was Margie’s, in the back row, in her reading glasses, not laughing, just nodding once like a woman watching a train arrive on time.
“Six million,” Luz said reverently. “In a day.”
“Yeah,” Tessa said. “That’s what they’re good at.”
The screenshots had been in her phone since Friday.
They were in a folder she had made and named, stupidly, Pickles, because it was the first word in her head at the time and she did not want to see the word Anchor on her own screen. Eleven images. She had looked at them so many times since Friday night that she could see them with her eyes closed, the rounded gray message bubbles, the little avatars, the timestamps.
She didn’t look at them at work. She had rules about that. She had rules about a lot of things now, a whole architecture of rules she had built one beam at a time over three years, and the rules had held her up when nothing else would. No drinking. No pills that weren’t hers. No pills that were hers without telling Margie. Call before, not after. Go to the meeting even if you don’t want to. Especially if you don’t want to. Don’t keep secrets from the people who are keeping you alive. Don’t look at the screenshots at work.
She finished her shift. She discharged Pickles to his mother, a very tan woman in tennis clothes, and watched Dr. Kim say, “Mrs. Hardesty, I say this with love,” and saw Mrs. Hardesty go pink under the tan. She cleaned the surgery suite and restocked the gauze and clocked out at five-fifty and sat in her Civic in the parking lot with the engine running and the air on high, because it was ninety-six degrees at six in the evening and it was only April.
Then she opened the folder.
Brynn Okafor had sent them on Friday at 11:52 at night. Tessa had not known Brynn Okafor well. She knew her as the twenty-one-year-old in the media office who always wore enormous headphones around her neck and who had once complimented Tessa’s earrings in the warehouse bathroom. Brynn was the one who had replied to Tessa’s email in March. Got it! Totally understand, I’ll make sure it doesn’t go up 💛. Tessa had kept that email, too. She had read it about a thousand times, the way you look at a door you locked after the house has already been robbed.
Friday night, out of nowhere, a message request. hi tessa it’s brynn from anchor media. you don’t have to reply. I’ve been sick about this for 5 weeks. you deserve to know what actually happened. I’m so sorry. please don’t say where you got these.
And then eleven images. And then: i’m so so sorry. i think i’m going to quit.
Tessa had written back at two in the morning, after she’d read them all, after she’d walked around her apartment in the dark with Biscuit weaving through her ankles and complaining, after she had called Margie and gotten voicemail and then texted I’m okay just need to talk tmrw because she was okay, technically, in the sense that she had not left the apartment and there was nothing in the apartment. She wrote: thank you. I won’t say. please don’t quit because of me. take care of yourself.
Brynn had not answered. Her account had gone quiet.
In the Civic, with the vents roaring, Tessa scrolled through the images once more. She did it the way you touch a stove you already know is hot—to confirm it, not to learn anything.
Brynn O. (Mar 9, 4:17 PM): tessa rowan emailed media@ — she doesn’t want her Stories testimony posted anymore. said some of it’s too personal re her family. I told her no problem 👍
Grant P. (Mar 12, 11:03 AM): She signed the release though. Everybody gets cold feet before their story drops. This one’s going to help so many girls.
Under Grant’s message, a row of reactions. Two hearts. A fire. And a pair of praying hands, and if you tapped the praying hands, the way Tessa had tapped it, it told you who: Micah R.
Dex H. (Mar 12, 2:44 PM): scheduled for 3:15 tmrw 🔥 this one’s a banger
Kenzie L. (Mar 13, 5:40 PM): can we let it run till tonight? it’s at 900K and people are literally getting saved in the comments
Eli M. (Mar 13, 8:02 PM): Wait did she sign a release? Are we exposed legally? What do we say publicly if she posts?
That one she had looked at the most.
She didn’t know what she had expected. She had gone to that church for a year and a half. She had sat in the second row at the warehouse on Friday nights with her eyes closed while Eli prayed over the room in that voice of his, so sure, so warm, a voice like somebody holding a flashlight in front of you on a trail. She had heard him preach on the lost sheep. She had heard him say from the stage, more than once, We will leave the ninety-nine. We will always leave the ninety-nine. She had not expected him to call her. She had told herself she didn’t expect it. But she had expected, maybe, that when somebody told him what had happened, his first sentence would have her in it.
Are we exposed.
She put the phone face down on the passenger seat and pulled out of the lot.
Her home group met Tuesdays at seven in the basement fellowship hall of a Methodist church a mile from her apartment. There was a coffee urn that made coffee that tasted like a hot penny, and a card table with the literature on it, and a laminated sign taped to the wall that said WHAT YOU SEE HERE, WHAT YOU HEAR HERE, LET IT STAY HERE. There were folding chairs in a ring. There were, most weeks, about twenty people, and Tessa knew every one of their first names and some of their worst nights, and they knew hers.
She didn’t share. She sat in her chair with her hands between her knees and listened to a roofer named Paul talk about his daughter’s quinceañera, where there had been an open bar and he had stood by the cake all night like it was a post he’d been assigned to guard, and when he said and I didn’t, the room clapped, and Tessa clapped too, hard enough that her palms stung.
Margie was across the circle. Margie Ellison was sixty-one years old and had been sober for twenty-two years, and she had a gray bob and a turquoise ring on every finger but her thumbs and a voice like a long gravel driveway. She worked mornings as the office manager for a dentist in Mesa and spent the rest of her life, as far as Tessa could tell, answering her phone for women like Tessa. She had never once told Tessa what to do. She asked questions. She asked questions like a surgeon uses a scalpel, small and exact, and then she waited, and the waiting was worse than being told.
After the meeting, while people stacked chairs, Margie came and stood next to her by the coffee urn.
“You look like a woman who’s about to do something,” Margie said.
“I’m going to post it.”
Margie nodded. She had seen the screenshots on Saturday, sitting across from Tessa in a booth at the Village Inn on Southern, turning Tessa’s phone slowly in her ringed fingers and reading every one twice without saying a word. At the end, she had handed it back and said, “Well. That’s a lot of people who were busy,” and then she had ordered a slice of French silk pie and made Tessa split it.
“Okay,” Margie said now. “What do you want to happen?”
Tessa had been ready for the question. She’d been rehearsing her answer in the car.
“I want them to stop saying it was a mix-up.”
“Who says it was a mix-up?”
“Grant. In his text. So so sorry for the mixup.” Tessa made her voice bright and stupid. “Two exclamation points. Praying for you.”
“Okay. What else?”
“I want people to know it wasn’t an accident. Not the way they mean it. Someone knew. Four people knew.”
“Okay.” Margie filled a Styrofoam cup from the urn and didn’t drink it. “What don’t you want?”
Tessa hadn’t rehearsed that one. She thought about it.
“I don’t want to be the girl who destroyed a church,” she said finally. “I don’t want people to use it to say Jesus is fake. I don’t want—“ She stopped. “I don’t want them to hate that guy in the video. The baptism guy. Jonah. He didn’t do anything.”
“Okay,” Margie said. “So what are you going to say?”
“What happened.”
“Just what happened?”
“Just what happened.”
Margie looked at her over the top of the cup for a while. Around them the chairs clanged into their racks. Somebody’s kid was running in circles in the hallway, and somebody’s mother was telling him to stop.
“Who’s it for?” Margie said.
Tessa opened her mouth and shut it.
“You don’t have to answer me,” Margie said. “I just want you to know the answer before you hit the button. That’s all. If it’s for you, that’s allowed. If it’s for the next girl, that’s allowed. If it’s to make them feel it, that’s allowed too, honey, I’m not the church police, I’ve done worse for worse reasons. I just want you to know.”
“It’s for my mom,” Tessa said, and was surprised to hear it.
Margie’s face didn’t change. She put the cup down.
“Then call me after,” Margie said. “Not before. After. And pray first. You can pray bad. Just pray.”
Her apartment was a one-bedroom on the second floor of a stucco complex off Apache Boulevard, the kind with a pool nobody swam in and a laundry room with one working dryer. She had a couch from a Goodwill in Mesa and a bookshelf she had built herself from a kit, badly, and a kitchen table with two chairs, one of which Biscuit believed was his. Biscuit was a large orange cat of no particular breed with a crooked left ear. He had been surrendered to Desert Willow as a kitten with a broken jaw and a family that couldn’t pay for the surgery. Tessa had held him while Dr. Kim wired the jaw. When nobody claimed him, she took him home. Margie said it was the first thing Tessa had ever adopted that wasn’t a bad habit.
She fed him. She changed into a sweatshirt, even though it was still eighty-five degrees outside, because she wanted to be wearing something soft. She set her phone up against the napkin holder on the kitchen table and looked at herself in the front camera—the ponytail, the circles under her eyes, the small gold cross she’d worn every day since her baptism and had almost taken off five weeks ago and hadn’t.
She did not write a script. She had thought she would, and then she hadn’t. She had the screenshots edited—she had blurred Brynn’s name and Brynn’s avatar with the markup tool, and Dex’s, and Kenzie’s, because they were kids, or near enough, and because Brynn had asked. She had not blurred Grant’s. She had not blurred Micah’s. She had not blurred Eli’s. She had gone back and forth about that for three days. Grant was the media director. Micah was a pastor. Eli was the pastor. There was a difference, she thought, between a kid who clicked schedule and a man whose job it was to stand in front of a thousand people and tell them he would leave the ninety-nine.
Before she pressed record she did what Margie said. She put her hands flat on the table on either side of the phone and closed her eyes.
“God,” she said out loud. Biscuit, on the other chair, lifted his head. “I don’t know if this is right. I’m pretty sure it’s not wrong. I don’t want to hurt anybody who didn’t hurt me. Please don’t let me lie. Please don’t let me make it bigger than it is. Please—“ She stopped. “Please help my mom. Amen.”
She opened her eyes. Biscuit put his head back down.
She pressed record.
“Hi,” she said. “My name is Tessa Rowan. I’m twenty-six. Some of you might have seen me in a video from Anchor City Church in March, for about seven hours, before it got taken down. I want to explain what happened, because the church has been calling it a mix-up, and it wasn’t one.”
Her voice was steady. She was surprised at how steady.
“I’ve been sober for a little over three years. From alcohol and from prescription pills, mostly Xanax. I was a member at Anchor City for about a year and a half. I got baptized there. I love a lot of the people there. That’s still true.”
She told it. She told it plainly, the way she would have told it in a meeting. That she’d shared her story at a women’s night with no cameras. That the media team had asked her to film a short version, and she’d said yes, and signed a form. That after filming, she’d realized she’d said things about her family that weren’t hers to say, and she had emailed on March ninth to ask them not to post it. That someone wrote back and said no problem. That on March thirteenth, a Friday, at three-fifteen in the afternoon, they posted it anyway.
“I found out because a coworker showed me on her phone,” Tessa said. “My mom found out because someone from her church sent it to her.”
She let that sit a second. She had not planned to let it sit. It sat on its own.
“It was up for about seven and a half hours. I’ve since seen the staff messages from that week. I’m going to show you some of them. I’ve blurred the names of the junior staff, because they’re young, and because I don’t think they’re the point. I haven’t blurred the names of the leaders.”
She held up the screenshots one at a time. She read them aloud, because she did not trust people to read them. She read Grant’s cold feet. She read Kenzie’s 900K. When she got to Eli’s, she read it slower.
“Wait did she sign a release. Are we exposed legally. What do we say publicly if she posts.”
She put the phone down beside the other one.
“That’s the pastor,” she said. “Nobody from leadership has ever called me. I got one text from the media director the next day. It said sorry for the mix-up and that he was praying for me. That’s it. That’s the whole response.”
Biscuit got down off the chair and walked out of frame. She let him.
“I’m not trying to hurt the church,” she said. “I want to say that really clearly. I know some of you are going to use this for that, and I’m asking you not to. I know people whose lives changed there. I know people who got sober there. I got baptized there. God is real and he was real to me in that building and he’s still real. That’s not what this is about.” She swallowed. “This is about the fact that I told them no, and they heard me say no, and they decided my no was less important than their numbers. And then when the pastor found out, the first thing he asked about was himself.”
She looked straight at the lens. It was only a phone. It was only a small black circle in the top of a phone propped against a napkin holder. She thought about her mother, twenty minutes south in Chandler, in the house with the brick-red door, with the Folgers can in the cabinet over the stove.
“I don’t want anything from you guys,” she said. “I just want you to know it wasn’t an accident. That’s all. Thanks for listening.”
She stopped the recording.
It was four minutes and eleven seconds. She watched it once, all the way through, with her hand over her mouth. She did not cut anything. She typed a caption—What actually happened with my Anchor City testimony.—and then, after a while, she deleted the period, because the period looked angry, and then she put it back, because it was the truth, and the truth was allowed to have a period.
At 9:48 p.m. she pressed post.
Then she turned the phone all the way off, the way Margie had taught her to do with anything that was pulling at her, and she opened the junk drawer by the stove and put it in, next to the takeout menus and the dead batteries and the spare key to an apartment she hadn’t lived in since she was twenty-three, and she shut the drawer.
The apartment was very quiet. The fridge hummed. Outside, somebody in the parking lot was playing a song through a car window with the bass turned all the way up, and then the car door shut and it stopped.
She called Margie from the landline she still kept for exactly this reason—an old cordless phone on the bookshelf that three people had the number for—and Margie answered on the first ring.
“It’s up,” Tessa said.
“Okay,” Margie said. “How do you feel?”
“Like I’m going to throw up.”
“Okay. Are you going to drink?”
“No.”
“Okay. Are you going to take anything?”
“No.”
“Okay,” Margie said, and Tessa heard her settle into something, a chair, a recliner. “Then tell me about the beagle.”
“How do you know about the beagle?”
“You texted me a picture of a tooth at noon, sweetheart. Tell me about the beagle.”
So Tessa sat on the kitchen floor with her back against the cabinet under the sink and the cordless phone against her ear and told Margie about Pickles, and his eleven teeth, and Mrs. Hardesty in her tennis skirt going pink, and Dr. Kim saying I say this with love, and somewhere in the middle of it she started crying and didn’t stop talking, and Margie didn’t tell her to stop either, and they stayed like that until almost eleven, until Biscuit came back and climbed into her lap and began, with enormous seriousness, to knead her sweatshirt.
The phone in the drawer stayed off. She did not open the drawer. She didn’t need to. She could feel it in there the way you feel a storm coming in over South Mountain before the first drop falls, the air going heavy and strange, the light gone yellow, every dog in the neighborhood suddenly, silently, looking up.
4The Group Chat
The phone on his chest said 5:41 when Eli opened his eyes, and under the time it said 94 notifications, and under that, a single preview from Naomi that had come in at 5:02: Call me the second you’re up. Don’t look at anything first.
He looked at everything first.
It took about four minutes. It took four minutes for Tessa Rowan’s face to fill the screen at her kitchen table in a gray sweatshirt with a napkin holder behind her head, and for her voice to say I’ve since seen the staff messages from that week, and for her to hold up the screenshots one at a time and read them in a flat, careful voice, and for her to come to his, and slow down.
Wait did she sign a release. Are we exposed legally. What do we say publicly if she posts.
It sounded worse in her voice. Everything sounded worse in her voice. He had typed it into his phone under a white tablecloth at the steakhouse on Camelback while Hal Brandt told a story about a warehouse fire in Tolleson, and he had typed it fast, the way you type in a restaurant, and he had meant—what had he meant? He had meant to find out what was true so they could do the right thing. He had meant to protect the church. He had meant a dozen reasonable things, and none of them had her name in them, and in her voice at her kitchen table it came out exactly like what it was.
The video had one point nine million views. It had been up eight hours.
He lay there. Down the hall, the kitchen light was on. He could hear Theo’s spoon going around in a mug, slowly, the sound a man makes stirring coffee when he’s reading something he doesn’t like.
He called Naomi.
“You looked,” she said.
“I looked.”
“Okay.” In the background, the warehouse air handler roared. She was already there. “Seven o’clock. Media team, Micah, Theo, me. Lawrence is calling in. I told Grant to bring his laptop and not to delete anything, and I told him I’d know if he did.”
“Would you know?”
“No,” Naomi said. “But he doesn’t know that.”
Theo was at the kitchen table in his bank clothes, pressed khakis and a blue shirt, with his reading glasses on his head and his phone flat on the table in front of him. He looked up when Eli came in.
“I’m sorry, man,” Theo said.
“Did you watch it?”
“Twice.” Theo took the glasses off his head and folded them. Theo Lang did everything in an orderly sequence, including bad news. “She’s very credible. She’s calm. She blurred the kids. She didn’t swear. She said she loved the church.”
“I know.”
“That’s the worst kind,” Theo said, not unkindly. “From a risk standpoint.”
Eli poured coffee and didn’t drink it. The grapefruit tree scraped the kitchen window in the wind. “Is it true?” he said. “The screenshots. Could she have faked any of it?”
Theo looked at him for a second too long.
“Eli,” he said. “You know what you wrote.”
The warehouse at seven in the morning had a gray, underwater quality, the overhead fluorescents buzzing in the front offices and the back floor still dark. Naomi had set up in the big conference room, the one with the long table made from a single slab of mesquite that Gil Arvizu had left behind and refused to take money for. The blinds were down. There was coffee. There were no donuts.
They filed in and sat. Grant with his laptop, unshaven, gray under the eyes. Kenzie with her phone face down in front of her and her mascara already gone at the corners. Dex, hood up, silent. Brynn Okafor, twenty-one, in an oversized Arizona State sweatshirt with her enormous headphones around her neck, who sat at the far end of the table and did not look at anyone. Micah, who came in last, and took the chair next to Eli without speaking, and put his hand briefly on Eli’s shoulder as he sat. Theo, who had called in late to the bank. Naomi at the head, with a legal pad.
On the speakerphone in the middle of the mesquite, Lawrence Tate, who had incorporated the church three years ago for four hundred dollars and a promise of future business, cleared his throat. “Everyone there?”
“Everyone’s here,” Naomi said.
“Good. First thing, and I’m going to say this slowly. Nobody deletes anything. Not a message, not an email, not a file on the content calendar. Nobody edits anything. If you already did, you tell me today, in private, and we deal with it. Grant.”
“I didn’t delete anything,” Grant said.
“Good. Second thing. Are the images authentic?”
Naomi looked at Grant. Grant opened his laptop and turned it so the room could see and scrolled up through the media channel in the team chat app, back through April, back through the Easter clips and the conference promo and the thread about the new gimbal, back to March.
It was all there. It was all exactly there. Brynn’s message about the email. Grant’s reply. The reactions. Dex’s banger. Kenzie’s 900K. And under it, a gray bubble with Eli’s face in the little circle.
“They’re real,” Dex said, from inside his hood.
“They’re real,” Grant said.
“Okay,” said Lawrence. “Thank you.”
Kenzie had started crying without making any noise. She held a napkin against her nose. “I didn’t— When I said let it run— I really thought—“ She stopped. “The comments. People were really—“
“I know,” Naomi said.
“People were getting saved in the comments.” Kenzie’s voice rose. “That’s not a lie. There was a girl in Ohio who said she’d been planning to—she said she was going to go to a meeting that night because of Tessa’s video. I screenshotted it. I have it. That was real.”
“I believe you,” Naomi said. “It was real. And she told us no.”
Kenzie put her face in her napkin.
“Legally,” Grant said. He had his hands flat on either side of his laptop. “Lawrence, just so everyone hears it. She signed the release. It says what it says.”
On the speaker, a pause. Eli could picture Lawrence in his office in the tower on Central, fifty-eight years old, in his shirtsleeves, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
“The release she signed,” Lawrence said, “is a standard media release that you guys downloaded off a church-planting website three years ago and I told you at the time to let me look at. I’ve looked at it now. It grants the church a license to use her image and story, and it says the grant is irrevocable. So, legally, as your lawyer, without having researched every angle yet, my honest opinion is that her ability to sue you for posting it is probably limited.” He let that sit. “I would like everybody in that room to hear me say that that is not the same thing as you being fine.”
Nobody said anything.
“I’m Presbyterian, for what it’s worth,” Lawrence said. “We are not known for our feelings. But I read that thread last night, and I’ll tell you, the part that bothered me wasn’t the release.”
“Which part,” Eli said.
“Mr. Pardee’s message,” Lawrence said. “Everybody gets cold feet. That’s a man deciding he knows what a grown woman wants better than she does. And then yours, Eli. I’m sorry. But you asked me about a lawsuit before you asked anyone how she was.”
Eli felt it land somewhere under his sternum and stay there.
“I was at dinner,” he said, and heard how it sounded, and didn’t finish.
They went around the table. Naomi made them. What happened, in order, from each person’s side, and nobody interrupts.
Brynn went first, because it had started with her, and she told it to the table in a small, rapid voice with her eyes on her own hands. The email came to the shared inbox on a Monday afternoon. She’d read it. She’d written back to Tessa right away. She’d posted in the channel. She’d meant to go into the content calendar and flag the clip as pulled, but the calendar was in a different app and you had to have edit permissions and she didn’t, she only had comment permissions, so she’d left a comment on the card, except she found out later that she’d left the comment on the wrong card, on the Hernandez family’s card, because the thumbnails looked the same. Then Tuesday was the conference promo shoot. Then it was Wednesday.
“I should have told someone out loud,” Brynn said. “I should have walked into Grant’s office. I just—he was in Nashville. And I figured the message was enough.”
“The message should have been enough,” Naomi said.
Grant went next. He’d been in Nashville with Micah for the label meetings. He’d seen Brynn’s message on Thursday, at the airport. He’d read it and he’d thought—he looked at the ceiling—he’d thought what he said. That everybody got nervous before their story dropped. That he’d filmed forty of these and half of them texted him the night before asking if they sounded stupid. That Tessa’s was one of the best things they’d ever shot, and that it was going to reach someone. That she’d signed.
“I didn’t think I was overriding her,” Grant said. “I thought I was—encouraging her. Like, you’re braver than you think. That’s what I thought.” He shook his head. “That’s not what I did.”
Dex had scheduled it. He hadn’t seen Brynn’s message; he’d been out sick Monday and hadn’t scrolled back. He’d seen it on the calendar, marked ready, and he’d watched it and it was great and he’d scheduled it.
Kenzie had seen it take off. She’d seen Brynn’s message for the first time around five, when Brynn, sick-faced, had pointed it out to her in the office. She’d messaged the channel. Can we let it run. She’d meant a couple of hours. It was helping people. She had screenshots.
Then Eli.
“Naomi called me at dinner,” Eli said. “Around seven-fifty. She said Tessa had withdrawn and we had to take it down. I stepped outside. I read the thread on my phone. I wrote—“ He stopped. The words were on Grant’s screen, in the gray bubble, a foot and a half from his hand. “I wrote that.”
“Then what?” Naomi said.
“Then you said take it down. And I said”—he closed his eyes—“I said let’s make sure we understand the legal thing first, and you said, Eli, take it down, and I said okay. And then I went back to the table.”
“It came down at 10:41,” Naomi said. “I did it myself, from my kitchen, because nobody else was answering.”
“I didn’t call her,” Eli said. “After.”
Nobody at the table answered that. It wasn’t a question.
Micah hadn’t said anything. When Naomi looked at him, he shrugged, one shoulder. “I was with Grant,” he said. “In Nashville. I saw the thread.” He paused. “I put the hands on it.”
“Why?” Naomi said.
Micah looked at the table. “I didn’t read it close,” he said. “I was at the gate. I think I just—I saw help so many girls and hit it.”
Eli glanced at him. Micah didn’t look back.
When the round was done, the room felt the way a room feels after an argument, though no one had argued. Lawrence had dropped off the call to prepare “a first pass at language.” Kenzie was reading her phone under the table, which Naomi had told everyone not to do, and her face was getting whiter.
“Kenz,” Naomi said.
“Sorry. It’s just—“ Kenzie turned the phone over. “It’s everywhere. It’s on the Steeple Receipts account. That’s like three hundred thousand people. There’s a hashtag. Somebody found my personal Instagram and— It’s fine. Sorry. And they’re—“ Her voice caught. “They’re doing it to Jonah.”
“What?”
“The baptism clip. They’re stitching it. With her video. Like, here’s how they film their fake testimonies, and then Jonah going it’s cold.” Kenzie pressed her palms against her eyes. “Someone put a laugh track on it. Someone said he’s a crisis actor. Someone found his account and— He doesn’t even have a lot of followers. He had like a hundred and forty followers on Sunday.”
Eli thought of Jonah alone in the wings with a towel, dripping on the concrete. I got work at eleven.
“Has anyone talked to him?” he asked.
“June’s on it,” Naomi said. “June was on it at six.”
Of course she was.
Eli leaned forward on the mesquite and put his hands together. There was a knot in his gut and it was hot, and some of it was shame, and some of it was something else that he could feel rising up under the shame like groundwater. It wanted a direction. It found one.
“Okay,” he said. “I want to ask something. Only people in the media channel could have had these.”
The room went still.
“Eli,” Naomi said.
“I’m just asking. Somebody took screenshots of an internal staff channel and sent them to someone outside the church. That’s—that’s a real thing. I’m not saying it’s the main thing.”
“Then don’t say it now.”
“Somebody here—“
“Eli.” Naomi put down her pen. She did not raise her voice. She never raised her voice. “That’s not the question.”
“It’s a question.”
“It is not the first one,” Naomi said. “It is not the tenth one. When we get to it, we’ll get to it. Right now the only person in this story who did what she was supposed to do is the woman who sent an email asking us not to post her testimony, and we are not going to spend the first morning finding out who told on us.”
Brynn, at the end of the table, had gone perfectly still in her ASU sweatshirt, her eyes on her hands. Eli didn’t look at her. He was looking at Naomi. Naomi was looking at him with the same face she used on Miles when Miles reached for the stove.
“Okay,” Eli said. “Fine. You’re right.”
“I’m not trying to be right.”
“I know. Sorry. You’re right.” He stood up. “I need a minute.”
His office was at the front of the warehouse, the only one with a real door instead of glass, a door Gil had salvaged from a bank in Bisbee with a brass mail slot in it that didn’t open onto anything. Inside was his desk, his books, a couch he slept on too often, and on the wall across from the desk, where he could see it every time he looked up from his laptop, the Faith & Current cover in a black frame.
THE CHURCH BUILT OVERNIGHT.
The empty stock tank from above. The still water.
He sat down and looked at it. His phone kept going off on the desk and he let it.
His mother had called twice. Hal Brandt had texted three times. Seen it. DO NOT apologize. Apologizing is blood in the water. Call my PR guy, Trent, he handled the thing with the HOA. Then: Trent is great. Then: Brother I’m praying for you. This is spiritual warfare. They always come after the anointed ones.
He wanted that to be true so badly he could taste it.
He picked up the phone and found Tessa Rowan in his contacts. She was in there. He didn’t remember putting her in. Probably the photo directory, back when he did it himself, two years ago. The contact photo was a tiny picture of her at the warehouse holding an orange kitten up to the camera like a trophy. She was laughing in it.
His thumb hovered.
Naomi’s knock was two short taps; he knew it. She came in without waiting and shut the bank door behind her and saw the phone in his hand and what was on the screen.
“Don’t,” she said.
“She said nobody called her.”
“She’s right. Nobody did.”
“So I should—“
“Eli.” Naomi sat down on the arm of the couch. She looked tired in a way he hadn’t seen before, older than thirty-one. “She just told two million people that the first thing you thought about was yourself. If the first thing you do this morning is call her so you can hear her say it’s okay—whose call is that?”
He put the phone down.
“We’ll reach out,” Naomi said. “Properly. Through something that isn’t you, at a time that isn’t today, with an offer she can say no to. I’ll write it. You’ll sign it. And you’ll mean it, and you won’t expect anything back.”
“Okay.”
“And we need to say something publicly. Today. Lawrence is drafting. I’m drafting. Kenzie has thoughts.”
“I’ll write it,” Eli said.
Naomi looked at him.
“I’ll write it,” he said again. “It’s my church. It should be my words. We don’t need Hal’s PR guy. We’re not a brand.”
For a second something moved across Naomi’s face, and he couldn’t tell what it was.
“Okay,” she said. “Write it. And then let me read it before anybody posts it.”
“Of course.”
She stood and went to the door and stopped with her hand on the brass handle.
“Eli,” she said, without turning around. “When I called you at dinner. In March. Do you remember what you said to me? Before you said okay?”
He didn’t.
“You said, it’s at a million, Naomi.” She opened the door. “You didn’t say it like a bad thing.”
She left. The bank door clicked shut behind her. The brass mail slot rattled faintly, the way it always did, as if someone somewhere had just tried to deliver something.
5The First Statement
By two in the afternoon there were three drafts, and Eli hated two of them.
Lawrence’s was four sentences long and said nothing. It said the church was aware of a video. It said the church took the concerns seriously. It said the church had removed the content in question and was reviewing its policies. It said no further comment would be made at this time. It read, Kenzie said, like the notice you get when your flight is delayed.
“That’s the idea,” Lawrence said on speaker. “Flights get delayed. Nobody sues the airline over the notice.”
Naomi’s was eight sentences long and Eli had read it five times, sitting at the mesquite table with the blinds down and the afternoon light coming through the slats in thin, hot bars. He had it printed out in front of him. He had not said anything about it yet.
In March, Tessa Rowan asked us not to publish her testimony. A member of our staff acknowledged her request. We published it anyway. That was wrong. It was not a misunderstanding; it was our failure, and it happened because we valued the story more than the person who told it. When I learned about it, my first concern should have been for Tessa, and it wasn’t. We are sorry. We are beginning an honest review of how this happened, and we will share what we learn. — Eli
“It’s good,” Eli said finally.
“But,” Naomi said.
“But it’s—“ He tapped the page. “It happened because we valued the story more than the person. That’s a motive. We don’t know that’s the motive. Grant didn’t value the story more than her. He thought he was helping her.”
“He thought he knew better than her,” Naomi said. “That’s what that means.”
“It’s going to get quoted. That line. It’s going to be the headline.” He turned the page face down. “And my first concern should have been for Tessa and it wasn’t—Naomi, I can’t write that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s going to be the only line anybody reads.”
“It’s the only line anybody should read.”
“It makes us sound like—“
“Like what we did?” Naomi said.
Across the table, Kenzie looked up from her laptop and then back down. Lawrence, on the speaker, said, “I’ll just note that the second draft contains two explicit admissions that I’d strongly prefer not be in writing on a public platform, and I’m going to leave it there,” and then, audibly, took a sip of something.
“I want it to be honest,” Eli said. “I do. I just want it to be—whole. There’s more to it than the worst thirty seconds. She signed a release. We took it down. Grant apologized to her. The church didn’t make up her story. The story was true. People are online right now saying we fake testimonies, and we don’t fake testimonies. Jonah’s getting called a crisis actor. Doesn’t the church get to say any of that?”
“It can,” Naomi said. “Just not first.”
“Why not first?”
“Because first is where you find out what we care about.”
He wanted to say something back and couldn’t find it. Outside in the hall a phone was ringing, the front office line, the one nobody ever called. It rang and rang.
“Let me take a pass,” Eli said. “At combining them.”
Naomi looked at him a long time.
“Take a pass,” she said. “Then show me.”
He took his laptop into his office and shut the bank door and sat under the magazine cover and wrote.
He was good at this. He knew he was good at it; it was not vanity to know it, any more than it was vanity for Tessa Rowan to know she was good at finding a vein. He had been writing words that moved rooms since he was nineteen and preaching at youth nights in Yuma in a borrowed polo shirt. He knew the weight of a phrase, where to put the turn, how to open with something steady and close with something that lifted. He knew that people in pain needed to hear that someone was in charge.
He started with We are aware. Lawrence was right that you had to start with something plain.
He put in the release, because it was true. He put in that they’d taken it down, because it was true. He wrote promptly and looked at it and left it, because compared to letting it run until morning, which some of them had wanted to do, seven hours was prompt; and because he had been the one on the phone at the steakhouse, and in his memory of that night he had said okay within a minute or two, and the rest had been logistics.
He put in that Grant had reached out to apologize. He put in that they loved her. He wrote her first name, Tessa, and felt good about it, because it was personal and warm and showed that she was a real person to them, not a problem.
He thought about Naomi’s line—my first concern should have been for Tessa—and tried three times to write a version of it that he could live with, and every version sounded like a man standing on a stage explaining why he’d earned a standing ovation for apologizing. He cut it. He’d say something like it in person, to Tessa, when she was ready. That was the right place for it.
He wrote about the leaked messages. He was careful. He did not accuse anyone. He wrote shared publicly and out of context, and he believed it; the context was a building with twenty-four staff and two thousand people and a media team doing four times the work it was built to do. The context was that nobody in that thread was a monster.
Then he got to the end, and he did what he always did at the end, which was lift.
He thought about Jonah in the tank, and the girl in Glendale crying in the bathroom at work, and the woman in Ohio Kenzie had screenshotted, and the four point four million, and the six point two million, and the thirty people on Gil’s chairs, and he thought about Nehemiah on the wall with Sanballat and Tobiah jeering at him from below, and he wrote the last lines fast, in one pass, the way the good ones always came.
He read it over twice. He felt, for the first time since 5:41 that morning, something like his feet under him.
He sent it to the group thread—Naomi, Kenzie, Lawrence, Theo, Micah—with here’s my pass. thoughts?
Then his mother called for the third time, and he answered it, because he had been ignoring her all day, and she was crying.
“They’re being so mean to you, mijo,” Carol Mercer said, from her kitchen in Yuma, where he knew she was standing by the window over the sink with the view of the alfalfa field, because that was where she stood for every hard phone call of his life. “Your dad won’t let me read the comments. He took my iPad. He put it on top of the fridge like I can’t reach the top of the fridge.”
“Don’t read them, Mom.”
“I read some. People are saying you’re a fraud. People who don’t know you.”
“Mom.”
“You built that church with your hands.”
He found that he had closed his eyes and was leaning back in his chair and letting it wash over him, her voice, the sound of her indignation on his behalf, sweet and uncomplicated as cold water. He knew he shouldn’t be. He knew it was like eating sugar when you were supposed to be eating dinner. He let it wash over him anyway, for about a minute, and then his phone buzzed against his ear with a message and he said, “Mom, I gotta go, I love you,” and hung up and looked.
It was Kenzie, to the group. honestly this is great. the ending especially. people need to hear that.
Then Theo: Reads well. Lawrence should look at the legal bits.
Then Lawrence: Remove “out of context.” Replace “we love Tessa” with no name. Remove “promptly” unless you can defend it with a timeline. Otherwise, I would still prefer my version, but I understand this is your decision.
Micah didn’t write anything.
Naomi didn’t write anything for eleven minutes. Then she knocked on the bank door, two short taps, and came in holding her laptop open against her chest like a shield.
“Don’t post this,” she said.
“Lawrence wants three changes. I’ll make two of them.”
“Don’t post this, Eli.”
“Which part?”
“The part where it’s about something.” She turned the laptop around. She’d highlighted the last five lines in yellow. “This. This is a sermon. It’s a good one. It’s the kind that gets people to stand up. You can’t give a sermon to a woman whose testimony you stole.”
“We didn’t steal—“
“She said no.”
“I know she said no. I’m apologizing for that. It says we’re sad about it.”
“It says we’re saddened,” Naomi said. “It says we’re saddened that the messages got out. It doesn’t say we’re sorry for anything we did. I read it three times. I looked. We’re sorry nowhere.”
He looked at his own screen. He read it again. She was—she was being unfair. It was implied. It was all over it. The whole thing was one long apology, it just had some dignity in it.
“Naomi,” he said. “I appreciate you. I do. But I’m the pastor, and it’s my name at the bottom, and I have to be able to say it and mean it. I can say this. I can’t say yours.”
She closed the laptop.
“Okay,” she said. “Then I want it on record that I asked you not to.”
“On record where?”
“With you,” Naomi said. “Just with you.”
They posted it at 8:30 that night, Wednesday, on every account, over Kenzie’s signature template—white text on the deep blue from the Stories wall—so it looked, Micah would say later, like a testimony.
A Statement from Anchor City Church
We are aware of a video circulating online about a testimony that was briefly shared on our channels in March. At Anchor City, we have always sought to honor the dignity of every story entrusted to us.
The individual involved signed a release granting permission for her testimony to be shared. When we became aware of her concerns, we removed the video and reached out personally to apologize. We deeply regret the hurt this has caused.
We are saddened that private staff communications have been shared publicly and without context. Our staff are young, sincere, and imperfect people who love Jesus and love this city. They are not the villains of anyone’s story.
To our Anchor City family: please pray for everyone involved. And please don’t lose heart. Every revival in history has been opposed. Nehemiah built the wall while his enemies mocked him from below, and he said, “I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down.” Neither can we. We will keep baptizing. We will keep telling the stories of what God is doing. We will keep going.
— Pastor Eli Mercer
He had taken out promptly. He had taken out her name. He’d changed out of context to without context and told himself that was different.
He read it on his phone in the bungalow kitchen at 8:31 with Theo beside him, and it was good. It was measured and warm and firm. He thought about the thousands of people in his church who had been refreshing their phones all day, frightened, reading strangers call their pastor a fraud, and he thought: they needed that. They needed a shepherd’s voice.
“Well,” Theo said. “It’s up.”
By midnight the statement had been shared forty thousand times, and almost none of the shares were kind.
He had not expected the speed of it. He had expected the haters—the Steeple Receipts people, the deconstruction accounts, the atheist guy with the fedora avatar who replied to every church clip with a gif of a clown. He had expected them to say whatever they were going to say, and he had braced for it. He had not expected the pastors.
A church planter in Denver he had met twice at a conference quote-posted it with one line: “When we became aware of her concerns” — she emailed you before you posted it. You were aware. Brothers, please. That one had nine thousand likes by eleven. A woman who ran a large recovery ministry out of Atlanta wrote a thread: This is what spiritual abuse sounds like when it’s being polite. “Signed a release.” “Without context.” “Opposed.” Notice who’s the victim in this statement. It’s the staff. It’s the church. It’s the revival. Tessa is “the individual involved.” A Christian comedian whose videos Micah sent Eli every week reposted it with the Nehemiah line highlighted and the caption: sir she is not Sanballat she is a vet tech.
That one hurt in a way the others didn’t, because it was funny.
At 12:40 Tessa Rowan posted a second video. It was thirty-eight seconds long. She was in her car this time, parked somewhere under a light pole, and she didn’t say much. She held up her phone to the camera with a screenshot of the church’s own post from March, from the archive somebody had made of it, showing the timestamp. Posted 3:15 PM. Then another screenshot, from Naomi’s takedown, which someone else had archived too. Removed 10:41 PM.
“Briefly shared,” Tessa said. “Seven and a half hours. It had one point three million views. That’s brief, I guess, for them.” She put the phone down. “When we became aware of her concerns. They were aware on March ninth. It’s in the screenshots. It’s in the email. It was four days before.” She looked out the windshield for a second, not at the camera. “And one text from the media director isn’t reaching out personally. That’s all. I’m not going to keep doing this. I just wanted that to be true.”
She didn’t say anything about Nehemiah. She didn’t have to.
Micah texted him at 1:14 a.m.
bro
Just that. Eli stared at it for a long time. Then June, at 1:22: I think we need to take that down. I’m sorry. I don’t think I’m supposed to say that. I’m saying it.
Then nothing from Naomi. Nothing at all.
He lay on the couch in the bungalow’s front room with the lights off and the TV off and the window unit rattling in the back bedroom where Theo slept, and he read the statement again on his phone. He read it the way the pastor in Denver would read it. He read it the way the woman in Atlanta would read it. He read it, finally—because he couldn’t stop himself, because some cruel, honest part of him insisted—the way Tessa Rowan would read it, sitting in her car under a light pole with her phone in her lap, and he got as far as the individual involved and stopped.
He had taken her name out because Lawrence told him to. He had been glad to take it out. It had made the whole thing feel cleaner. And now, with the lights off, he saw what he had done, which was write eleven sentences about a woman without once calling her by her name, and then use the same page to give himself a verse.
I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down.
He’d had it printed on the staff shirts in the warehouse era. Black shirt, white type, small, over the heart. I CANNOT COME DOWN. People had loved those shirts. Micah had one. Theo wore his to the gym.
He thought about deleting the statement. He opened the app and put his thumb on it. He knew exactly what would happen if he did. There would be screenshots of the statement and screenshots of its absence, and a third round, Anchor City deletes statement after backlash, and Lawrence would sigh on the phone in a way that cost four hundred dollars an hour. He took his thumb away.
At 1:51 his mother texted. Couldn’t sleep. Read your statement. It was beautiful mijo. So proud of you. Dad says it was a little long.
He laughed out loud in the dark, one short ugly sound.
Then he typed, Thanks Mom, and let himself hold on to it—beautiful, so proud—the way a man in cold water holds on to anything that floats, knowing exactly what it was, knowing it would not hold his weight, holding it anyway until he fell asleep.
6Micah Turns Off the Camera
Hannah had the statement open on her phone when Micah came into the kitchen on Thursday morning, and she didn’t look up.
She was standing at the counter in her scrubs with one hand on the small of her back, the way she’d started standing in the last month, and her other thumb scrolling. She was twenty-two weeks. The baby was the size of a papaya, according to the app, which also told them every Sunday what fruit it was, and which Micah had come to resent in a small, specific way, because it made the whole thing sound like a produce aisle. Hannah worked three twelves a week as a pediatric nurse at a hospital downtown, on the cardiac floor, and she had the face she used at work now, the face that could hear a monitor alarm from three rooms away and not change.
“It’s bad,” she said.
“I know.”
“The Nehemiah part.”
“I know.”
She put the phone face down. The kitchen of their rental in the Encanto neighborhood was small and yellow and always too warm in the mornings, because the landlord had painted the window over the sink shut in some previous decade, and Micah had never gotten around to fixing it. He’d gotten around to a lot of things in the last year. A record deal. A tour opening for a band out of Tennessee. A song on Christian radio that went to number four. Not the window.
“Did you put the hands on it?” Hannah said. “The message. Grant’s.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
He poured coffee. He’d told the room yesterday that he hadn’t read it close. He’d said it with the same small shrug he used when a band member asked if he’d heard a wrong chord and he had. It was an easy thing to say. It had come out before he’d decided to say it.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I was at the gate. I think I—“ He stopped.
Hannah waited. She was good at waiting. Nurses were.
“I read it,” he said. “I read the whole thing. I saw doesn’t want her Stories testimony posted anymore. I knew what it meant.”
“Okay.”
“And I put the hands on Grant’s anyway.”
She didn’t say why again. She came around the counter and took the coffee cup out of his hand and put it down and put her arms around his waist, the papaya between them, and held on, and didn’t say anything, and he stood there in the yellow kitchen with his chin on top of her head and his eyes shut and felt about eleven years old.
“You have to tell Eli,” she said into his shirt.
“I know.”
“Not the room. Eli.”
“I know.”
She pulled back and looked at him. “When?”
“Soon.”
She held his eyes for a second longer and then let it go, the way she let things go at work when there was nothing more she could do about them before shift change. She picked up her keys. At the door she turned around.
“Your label’s going to call,” she said. “Don’t let them tell you what to feel.”
Colby Stroud from Keystone Worship called at 11:15, while Micah was sitting in his car in the Sprouts parking lot on Seventh Street trying to remember what Hannah had asked him to buy.
Colby was forty and lived in Franklin, Tennessee, and had signed Micah after hearing the warehouse version of “Morning Comes” in a clip that had been set to Marcus Tillman’s baptism, the one with thirty-eight million views. He was a nice man. He sent Hannah flowers when she told him about the pregnancy. He called everyone brother and meant it, mostly.
“Brother,” Colby said. “Rough week. How you holding up?”
“I’m okay.”
“Good. Good. Listen, I’m not going to keep you. I just want to put a couple things in your ear.” Micah could hear him walking, a door, birds. “One. Don’t say anything publicly. Not on your personal, not in an interview, nothing. I know you. You’re going to want to. Don’t. Let the church handle it, that’s their lane. Two.” A pause. “I don’t want this to come across wrong. Streams on ‘Morning Comes’ are up thirty-one percent since Tuesday night.”
Micah closed his eyes.
“It’s not a good thing, obviously,” Colby said. “I’m just telling you what the dashboard says. People are going to the song because it was under her clip. That’s how this works. Attention’s attention. And it means AWAKE’s more important than ever. The live album is still green-lit on our end. The story now is resilience. The story is a church that got knocked down and kept singing. That’s a good story, Micah.”
“Her name’s Tessa,” Micah said.
Colby stopped walking. “What?”
“The clip that’s driving the streams. It’s Tessa’s. She’s a person. She asked us not to post it and we did it anyway and we put my song under it.”
There was a silence in Franklin, Tennessee.
“Brother,” Colby said finally, gently, “I know. I’m not trying to be cold. I’m telling you what’s going to happen, so you can be ready for it. That’s my job.”
“I know it is,” Micah said. “Thanks, Colby.”
He hung up. He sat in the car with the engine running and the air on and looked at the Sprouts across the lot, at the stacked watermelons in the window and a woman loading a cart of groceries into the back of a Subaru, and he remembered that Hannah had asked for almond milk, and he didn’t get out of the car for twenty minutes.
Thursday night rehearsal at the Monroe started at seven and always ran until ten, because Micah was a perfectionist in the specific, grinding way of people who had grown up playing piano for a pastor who changed the set list during the offering. The band was already there when he got in: Nate on drums, who drove for FedEx; Luis Sandoval on bass, who taught chemistry at a high school in Maryvale and graded lab reports on top of his amp during sound check; Sophie on electric, who had come to Anchor City from a Pentecostal church in Tolleson and still sometimes spoke in tongues under her breath during the bridge in a way Micah found both beautiful and slightly terrifying. Three singers. The lighting guy, Omar. Dex at the camera table, hood down tonight, with the switcher and the monitors.
Grant wasn’t there. Grant had texted the team that afternoon that he was “taking a couple days.” Nobody had asked what that meant.
They ran the set. Micah kept his head down and played. The set was good; he’d built it three weeks ago, before any of this, around the Nehemiah series, songs about building and walls and faithfulness. It was strange to sing them now. Sophie kept looking at him between songs. He didn’t look back.
At nine-fifteen they got to the end of the set, where the cue sheet said RESPONSE.
He had the cue sheet on his music stand the way he had it every week, printed by Dex in the same eleven-point font, one page for each service. He’d looked at a version of this page maybe a hundred times. He looked at it now.
RESPONSE — (post-“Stones Cry Out”)
MR to keys — soft pad, Db
Lights: full house to 20%, stage to BLUE WASH, single spot MR
MR spontaneous prayer (approx. 2–3 min) — invite response
JIB: sweep rows B–E, slow
HH: on MR, tight, then pull to congregation
HOLD on any tears — Dex call
Band re-enter on MR cue (“I just feel like...”)
HOLD on any tears.
“Micah?” Omar said from the booth. “We going to blue?”
Micah looked up. The house lights were at full, the old theater empty, eleven hundred seats in their rows going back into the shadows under the balcony. The jib arm was parked at the front of the stage like a sleeping crane. Dex had his hand on the switcher. The handheld operator, a volunteer named Garrett who did real estate photography during the week, was already on the stage apron, crouched, ready to come in tight.
“Yeah,” Micah said. “Go blue.”
The lights went down. The stage went blue. A single white spot came up on him at the keys, warm, and he felt it on his face and on the back of his hands, the old feeling, like standing in the only lit window of a house at night.
He played the pad in D-flat. It was a nice pad. He’d built it himself on the synth.
The jib began to move. He heard the faint whir of the motor. Out of the corner of his eye he watched it rise and swing out over the empty rows—B, C, D—slow, smooth, the camera pointed at seats with no one in them, practicing.
He knew what it would look like on Sunday, because he’d watched it on Sunday a hundred times. The lights low and blue. People standing with their hands open. Some of them crying—some of them always crying, because it was the end of a long week and the song was about God not leaving, and people’s lives were hard, and the chords were built to open you. The jib sweeping over them, finding them. Dex on the headset saying hold, hold, hold on the girl in the green jacket. And on Monday, Kenzie would pull the best four seconds of the girl in the green jacket and put them into a clip, and the clip would say Something is happening, and the girl in the green jacket would find out she’d been in it when her aunt in Albuquerque sent it to her.
He’d never once asked any of them.
Nobody had. It was a public service. That was what they told themselves, and it was technically true. There was a sign in the lobby, small, by the merch table: By attending you consent to being photographed or filmed. Grant had downloaded it from the same website as the release.
“Micah,” Dex said in the monitors, “whenever you’re ready. Go ahead with the prayer part, just so Garrett can get his pull.”
He was supposed to pray now. For practice. He was supposed to rehearse the spontaneous prayer so the handheld operator could practice the move from his face to the crowd, and the jib could practice finding the rows, and Dex could practice calling it.
He opened his mouth to pray, and nothing came out.
He sat there with his hands on the pad and the white light on his face and the blue behind him. The jib whirred back from row E, finished its pass, began another. He tried to think of what he’d say on Sunday. Lord, we just— He usually started with we just. He’d listened to himself on playback enough to know. Lord, we just want to thank you. Lord, we just want to open our hands. He tried to think what he wanted to thank God for right now, tonight, with nobody in the room, and what came into his head was Tessa Rowan’s face at her kitchen table, and the thirty-one percent, and Colby saying it’s a good story.
He stopped playing.
“Micah?” Dex said.
He got up from the keys. He walked across the stage in the blue light, to the front, where the jib’s base was bolted to its dolly, and knelt down next to it, and found the cable—he knew which one, he’d helped Grant run it the week they moved in—and pulled it out of the camera.
Up in the booth, on Dex’s monitor, the jib feed went black.
“Hey,” Garrett said, still crouched on the apron. “Hey—“
Micah stood up and held out his hand for Garrett’s camera.
Garrett looked at the hand. He looked at the booth. He was fifty years old and did real estate photography and loved Jesus in an uncomplicated, helpful way, and Micah watched him decide, and watched him hand it over.
Micah turned the camera off. He set it down on the edge of the stage.
“Micah, what are you doing?” Dex was on his feet at the camera table. “Eli signed off on the response cues. Like, six months ago. That’s the—that’s literally the Sunday.”
“I know.”
“Grant’s going to lose it.”
“Grant’s taking a couple days.”
“Dude, I’m just—“ Dex took his headset off. “I’m not trying to be— What’s the plan? What do I tell people? Are we not filming Sunday?”
“We’re filming Sunday,” Micah said. His voice sounded strange to him in the empty room without the mic, thin and unamplified. “Livestream. Wide shot. Same as always. I’m just not doing the—“ He gestured at the jib, at the camera on the stage edge, at the blue light. “This part. When people are praying, we’re not going to point a camera at their faces anymore. That’s all.”
“That’s all? That’s the best stuff we have!”
“I know,” Micah said. “That’s the problem.”
Behind him, the band was very still. Nate had his sticks crossed on the snare. Sophie had her hand flat on her strings. Omar, up in the booth, hadn’t touched the lights; the stage was still blue, and the one white spot was still on the empty keys where Micah had been sitting.
“Can we just talk about it with Eli?” Dex said. He sounded less angry now than scared. “Like—can we get Eli on the phone?”
“I’ll talk to Eli.”
“Tonight?”
“I’ll talk to Eli.”
Dex looked at him for a long moment across the orchestra pit. Then he put his headset down on the table, carefully, and sat back down.
“Okay,” Dex said. “Okay. So what do you want me to do?”
Micah didn’t know. That was the thing. He stood at the front of the stage and didn’t know. He had not planned this. He had not planned to do anything tonight except run the set and go home.
“Just—leave it off,” he said. “For the response. Put it on the wide. Let’s run it again.”
He went back to the keys and sat down under the spot and put his hands on the pad in D-flat. He waited for the band. He looked at the cue sheet on the stand—HOLD on any tears—and folded it in half so the words were on the inside, and put it under his leg on the bench.
“From ‘Stones,’” he said. “Last chorus.”
They played the last chorus. The lights stayed blue. When it came time for the response, he played the pad, and he didn’t pray, and nobody filmed him not praying, and after about a minute, Sophie, in the dark, began very softly to sing the chorus again without being asked, and then one of the singers joined her, and Nate came in on the rims, and they sang it through twice more in the blue, all of them, for nobody, and then it was over and the lights came up, and it was just the Monroe at 9:40 on a Thursday, full of empty seats.
In the parking garage on Third Street, he sat in his car and opened his phone to the thread with Eli.
bro
It was still sitting there from the night before, unanswered. Under it, nothing.
He started typing. I turned off the camera for the response tonight. He looked at it. It sounded like a man bragging. He deleted it. Can we talk tomorrow? There’s something I need to tell you. He looked at that too. It sounded like a breakup text. He deleted it.
He put the phone in the cupholder. The garage was mostly empty, concrete and fluorescent tubes and the smell of old oil, and the sound of the ramp fans somewhere overhead. He thought about Grant’s message in the channel, the way it had looked on his phone at the gate in Nashville with the Keystone lanyard still around his neck. This one’s going to help so many girls. He thought about the half-second after he read posted anymore, when he’d felt a small, clean, cold drop in his stomach, the kind you feel when you realize you’ve left the stove on, and then he’d scrolled one message further down and seen that it was Grant’s call to make, and Grant had made it, and the feeling had gone away when he let it.
And then he’d put the hands on it. It had taken less time than a breath.
His phone buzzed in the cupholder.
It was Dex.
for the record I think you were right tonight. I didn’t know how to say it in there. I hate the tears cue. I’ve hated it for like a year. I just thought that was my problem.
Micah read it three times.
It’s not just your problem, he typed back. Thanks, man.
He put the car in reverse. On the drive home down Seventh Street the lights were all green, one after the other, as if the city had decided to let him through, and he didn’t believe it meant anything, and he was grateful anyway.
7June’s Spreadsheet
June’s grandmother had lit two candles by Friday morning, and June knew exactly who they were for.
They stood on the shelf above the TV in the front room of the little block house on West Monterey Way, where the shelf had held candles for as long as June had been alive: tall glass ones from the Food City on 51st Avenue, with pictures of saints on the front. One was the Virgin of Guadalupe, standing in her starry mantle, whose candle Rosa Alvarez kept burning on principle more or less all year. The other was San Judas Tadeo, with his green robe and the little flame over his head, patron of desperate causes. The San Judas had been lit Wednesday. June had come home from the warehouse at ten that night and seen it flickering there and stopped in the doorway.
“Abuela.”
“¿Qué?” Her grandmother was in the recliner with the telenovela on mute. “Is a hard week. I know. I saw the television.”
“You don’t have to light San Judas.”
“I don’t have to do nothing,” Rosa said. “I’m seventy-eight years old.”
June had gone to bed without arguing. She had stopped arguing about candles when she was twenty-one and came home from a warehouse on Grand Avenue on a Sunday night with her hair still wet and told her grandmother she’d been baptized, and her grandmother had said, “You was already baptized, mija, at Saint Vincent, in 2002, I was there, you screamed the whole time,” and June had said it was different, and Rosa had said, “Is it the same Jesus?” and June had said yes, and Rosa had shrugged and said, “Then okay,” and gone back to her show. June had braced for a war. There had never been one. Her grandmother went to eight o’clock Mass at Saint Vincent de Paul every Sunday and prayed a rosary every night in the recliner, and June went to Anchor City and prayed out loud in her own words, and every so often Rosa asked her what the young pastor had preached about and nodded along and said, “Hmm. That’s good. Father Tony said that too.”
Now, Friday morning, June stood in the front room with her coffee and her laptop bag and her notebook and looked at San Judas burning next to the Virgin.
“Pray for me today,” she said.
“I been praying for you since Wednesday.” Rosa didn’t look away from the kitchen, where she was pressing tortillas. “Who you gonna see?”
“Pastor Eli. And Naomi.”
“The tall one. With the fireman.”
“Yes.”
“She’s smart, that one,” Rosa said. “She got good shoes.”
June had been building the spreadsheet since Easter.
She hadn’t meant to build it. She’d meant to answer a simple question for herself, which was how many people had filled out a connect card since the move to the Monroe and ticked the box that said I decided to follow Jesus today! She wanted the number because she prayed for them—she’d been praying for them by name since the warehouse, in the paper notebook she carried everywhere, a spiral one from Walgreens with a green cover, four of them filled now, rubber-banded together in a shoebox under her bed. At some point after Christmas, the names had started coming faster than she could write them down. She’d started skipping days. Then weeks. And then one night in March she’d opened the notebook and realized she hadn’t written a name since the middle of January, and she’d sat on the edge of her bed in the dark and felt as if she’d dropped something down a well.
So she’d pulled the data. And one number led to the next.
On Friday at two o’clock, in the mesquite conference room at the warehouse with the blinds down against the heat, she connected her laptop to the donated projector and put it up on the white wall.
Eli sat at the long side of the table with his hands folded. He looked awful. He looked like somebody who’d slept on a couch for two nights, which, from the flannel he’d been wearing on Wednesday, she guessed he had. Naomi sat at the end with her legal pad.
“Okay,” June said. “I’m not good at presenting. I’m just going to go.”
“You’re great,” Eli said.
“I’m just going to go,” June said.
The first tab said CONNECT CARDS — Oct 1 to Apr 19.
“We moved to the Monroe in August,” she said. “I started counting from October because that’s when the new card system went live. Since October first, three thousand eight hundred and twelve people filled out a connect card. Most of them digital, from the QR code on the seat backs. Some paper.”
“Wow,” Eli said softly.
“Of those, six hundred and eleven checked I decided to follow Jesus today.” She clicked. “Four hundred and two checked I want to get baptized. We’ve baptized two hundred and ninety-seven since October. That part’s good. Baptism’s the part we’re good at.”
She didn’t mean it as a dig. She saw Eli take it as one anyway, a little flinch around the eyes.
“Here’s what happens when you fill out a card.” She clicked. The next slide was a flowchart, boxes and arrows, which she’d made in the free version of some app and was a little proud of. “You get a text within five minutes. It’s from a number with Eli’s picture on it. It says, Hey, it’s Pastor Eli! So glad you’re here! That’s automated. Then three days later you get another one with a link to the Next Steps page. Then a week later, one asking if you want to join a group. Then a month later, one about serving. Then one about giving. Five texts. That’s the sequence Kenzie and I built in October.”
“That’s good,” Eli said. “Right? That’s more than most churches do.”
“Then there’s the part where a human calls,” June said. “That’s me, and Priscilla and Tom, who are part-time, and my aunties, who can’t do calls because three of them are hard of hearing. Between the three of us, since October, we’ve made voice contact with two hundred and eleven of the six hundred and eleven.”
The room was quiet.
“So four hundred people,” Naomi said, “who told us they gave their lives to Jesus—“
“Got five texts,” June said. “From a robot with Eli’s face.”
She clicked.
SMALL GROUPS.
“We have fifty-two groups. Fifty-eight trained leaders. Every group that meets on a weeknight is full. Most of them are past full; people are sitting on floors. Six hundred and four people total in a group, and a lot of them are the same people who were in groups at the warehouse. Of the six hundred and eleven decision cards since October—“ She took a breath. “Ninety-four are in a group.”
“Ninety-four,” Eli said.
“Ninety-four.”
He sat back in his chair. He looked at the wall a long time. June watched his face and saw it do something she’d seen it do a hundred times on a stage, a kind of gathering, the look of a man who was about to turn something toward the light.
“Okay,” Eli said. “Okay. June. Honestly? That’s a great problem to have.”
“It’s not,” June said.
“No, hear me out. I know it’s rough. But it’s a harvest problem. Jesus said the harvest is plentiful and the laborers are few. That’s literally this. That’s a church that God is sending more people to than it can hold. You know how many churches in this city would kill for this spreadsheet?”
“It’s not a great problem,” June said again. Her voice was shaking, which made her angry, because she’d told herself it wouldn’t. “It’s just a problem. I don’t need you to make it a good thing. I need you to be scared of it.”
Eli stopped.
“Can I show you something else,” June said.
She hadn’t planned to show him the calls. She showed him the calls.
On Wednesday morning, at six a.m., after Kenzie texted the group that people were stitching Jonah’s baptism, June had sat on her bed with the notebook open and the laptop open and started calling. Not Jonah first—she had called Jonah second. First she’d scrolled through the sheet for cards with the box checked that said Please call me. There were a hundred and forty-four of those since October. Fifty-one had been called.
She called the ninety-three who hadn’t been.
She’d gotten through twenty-six before she had to leave for the warehouse on Wednesday, and nineteen more on Thursday night, and eleven this morning before she came in. Most of them didn’t answer. A lot of the numbers were wrong. Some people said, oh, yeah, no, I’m good, and some said who is this, and one man asked if she was selling a timeshare. And some of them—
“There’s a girl named Kiana,” June said. “She’s nineteen. She works at a nail salon in Avondale. She filled out a card on February eighth. She checked the box that said I decided to follow Jesus. She checked please call me. In the comments she wrote, can someone call me, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”
Eli had his hand over his mouth.
“She got the five texts,” June said. “I called her yesterday. She was really nice about it. She said, Oh, it’s okay, I figured it was a big church thing.” June looked down at the notebook. “She said she came back twice more after that and then kind of stopped. She said she didn’t want to bother anybody.”
Naomi had put her pen down on the legal pad.
“And Jonah,” June said.
“Jonah,” Eli said.
“Jonah filled out a decision card in February. He checked baptism in March. He came to the Night service every Sunday for ten weeks. He didn’t have anyone to sit with, so he sat on the end of row Q, by himself. I know because I finally went and looked at the ushers’ notes and one of them wrote big guy, row Q, always alone, nice.” June swallowed. “Nobody called him. From February until Sunday. He got the texts. He got the baptism info email. He showed up to the baptism class and there were sixty people in it and he sat in the back and left right after. He got baptized in front of eleven hundred people and six million on the internet and then he went to work at eleven and nobody at this church had ever had a conversation with him longer than two minutes.”
“I talked to him,” Eli said, very quietly. “In the tank.”
“I know,” June said. “That’s the two minutes.”
She hadn’t meant it to be cruel. She saw it land and wished she could take it back, and also didn’t.
“When I called him Wednesday,” she said, “his dad had just texted him. His dad saw the stitches. The laugh-track ones. His dad wrote, Told you. It’s a show.” She stopped. “Jonah asked me if his baptism was for content. He asked me like he wanted me to tell him the truth either way. He said, I just need to know if it was real or if I was, like, a product.”
“What did you tell him?” Naomi said.
“I told him it was real.” June looked at Eli. “It was real. I was there. I cried. I told him that I’m not going to let him be alone anymore. I told him I’d call him every week. I don’t know how I’m going to call everyone every week. I can call Jonah.”
Nobody said anything for a while. The air handler kicked on overhead with a thump. Outside in the hall, somebody laughed, and then stopped laughing, the way people did in the warehouse that week, as if they’d forgotten.
“What do you need?” Eli said finally.
June had a list. She’d written it on the last page of the Walgreens notebook in pen.
“Stop the baptism Sundays,” she said. “For now. Not baptisms—just the big Sundays where we promote it and do fourteen at once. Do them in groups, with a leader who knows them, who’s going to call them the next week. Stop putting the QR code on the seat backs until we have somebody to call the people who scan it. Give me three more people who can make calls, and give Tamsin her eighteen volunteers, because she’s going to need them when the families come. Train leaders. Actually train them, not a one-hour video. Pause Gilbert.” She took a breath. “And I need you to say from the stage that we messed this part up too. Not the Tessa part—this part. The part nobody’s posting about. Because they’re not going to post about Kiana. Nobody’s going to make a video about Kiana. She’s just going to stop coming.”
Eli looked at the list in her hand. He didn’t reach for it.
“June,” he said, and she heard in his voice that he meant it, that it was going to be kind, and she braced. “This is so good. You’re so good. I’m so grateful you’re here. I want to do all of this. I just—Gilbert’s a signed LOI. AWAKE’s in three months. We are in the middle of the worst week this church has ever had. If I stand up on Sunday and say we’ve been failing new believers too, while everyone’s already saying—“
“Then everyone will be right,” June said.
He stopped.
“Everyone is right,” she said. “About that part. I’m not asking you to say it because it’s good PR. I know it’s bad PR. I’m asking because it’s true. And because Kiana’s going to be there Sunday, maybe, if I keep calling her, and I don’t want her to hear another sermon about how great we are.”
Naomi, at the end of the table, didn’t say anything. She had her eyes on June, and there was something in her face June had never seen there before. It took June a second to recognize it. It was relief.
“Let me think about it,” Eli said.
“Okay,” June said.
“I’m not saying no.”
“I know. You said let me think about it.” June closed the laptop. The projector went blue on the white wall, empty, like a lit stage with no one on it. “In March you said that about Tessa.”
That night she sat on her bed in the little back room on West Monterey Way with the door open and the swamp cooler in the hall window blowing wet, cool air that smelled like the pads needed changing, and she opened the Walgreens notebook to a fresh page.
She’d printed out the spreadsheet. Six hundred and eleven names, in a little font, twelve pages stapled at the corner. She started at the top.
She wrote each name by hand. She didn’t write anything else next to it, not the date, not the service. Just the name. When she’d written it, she said it out loud, quietly, and then said, “Jesus, find them,” which was the only prayer she had the energy for, and then went to the next one. Aaliyah Brooks. Jesus, find her. She knew most of them didn’t know her name. She knew some of them had already found another church, or no church, or had never meant it, or had meant it more than she’d ever mean anything. It didn’t matter. She’d had them for five minutes on a card and let them go.
Around the fortieth name she heard the recliner creak in the front room, and the soft snap of the TV going off. Then her grandmother’s slippers on the tile. Rosa stood in the doorway in her housecoat with her rosary looped around her fingers, the old wooden one from Guadalajara with the crucifix worn smooth.
“What you doing?” Rosa said.
“Names,” June said. “People I didn’t call.”
Rosa looked at the pages spread across the bed. She came in and lowered herself, slowly, onto the end of it, the mattress sinking, and settled her back against the wall, and did not say anything. She began to pray her rosary under her breath, in Spanish, the beads moving in her fingers one at a time. Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia.
June looked at her.
“Keep going,” Rosa said, without opening her eyes. “I’m doing mine. You do yours.”
So June kept going. Brandon Castillo. Jesus, find him. Beside her the beads clicked. Santa María, Madre de Dios. Kiana Ruiz. Jesus, find her—no, you found her, keep her. The cooler roared in the window. The candles burned on the shelf in the front room, the Virgin and San Judas, patron of desperate causes, who June was fairly sure would have approved of the spreadsheet. They prayed side by side like that, the old woman and the young one, each in her own words, until the names on the page stopped making sense and Rosa’s head had tipped back against the wall and her lips had stopped moving, and June took the rosary gently out of her grandmother’s hand and set it on the nightstand and covered her with the blanket from the foot of the bed and went back to the list.
She got to a hundred and twelve before she fell asleep.
8The Press Arrives
The Sunday in between had been strange in the way a room is strange after someone has been sick in it.
Nineteen hundred and eighty people came. Naomi’s clickers said so. The number was almost exactly flat, and nobody hung a banner. Eli preached the next sermon in the Nehemiah series as planned, chapter three, which was the chapter nobody preached, a long list of the names of the people who rebuilt each section of the wall—Next unto him repaired Uzziel the son of Harhaiah—and he’d planned it weeks ago as a kind of joke, a sermon on a phone book, and it had felt at the time like a clever idea and felt on Sunday like standing in front of two thousand people reading a list of strangers. He did not mention Tessa. Lawrence had asked him not to. Naomi had asked him not to, for different reasons. Not until you have something to say that isn’t about you, she’d said, and he hadn’t had anything.
At the end, when Micah went to the keys for the response, Eli stood in the wings and watched the jib arm stay parked at the lip of the stage, still as a heron. He watched the handheld camera sit on its case. Nobody moved in on anybody’s face. The lights went blue and the room prayed, some of them crying, and nobody filmed it except the wide shot from the booth. He found Dex afterward and asked, and Dex said, “Micah,” and Eli said, “Okay,” and did not go find Micah. He told himself it was because there wasn’t time.
Monday morning there was a news van in the dirt lot next to the warehouse.
It was white with a satellite dish folded on top like a closed flower and a station logo on the side, and it had been there since seven. A woman in a blazer was doing a stand-up in front of the roll-up door with ARVIZU & SONS — FINE RESTORATION painted above her head. Eli watched her from his car across Grand Avenue for three minutes before he drove around the block and came in the back.
“She’s local,” Naomi said when he came in. “Channel Nine. She’s not the problem. She’ll do ninety seconds at noon and leave. The problem’s at ten.”
“Priya.”
“Priya.”
Priya Natarajan wrote for the Arizona Ledger, which was the kind of paper people said they didn’t read anymore and then quoted at dinner. She covered religion and nonprofits and, on alternate weeks, the state legislature, and she had emailed on Friday afternoon a message so polite and so specific that Lawrence had read it aloud on the phone and then said, “Oh, she’s good.”
She was thirty-five or so, with short dark hair and wire glasses and a canvas tote bag that said PHOENIX PUBLIC LIBRARY, and she shook everyone’s hand in the mesquite room and sat down and put her phone on the table between them with the recording app open, and said, “Is it okay if I record? It’s just so I get the quotes right.”
“Yes,” said Lawrence, who was there in person this time, in a gray suit that looked expensive in a way that made the warehouse look cheaper.
“Great. And everything’s on the record unless we agree otherwise before you say it.”
“Understood,” Lawrence said.
Eli had told himself on the drive over that he was going to do this well. He was good at interviews. He had done sixty podcasts in the last year and a dozen videos with Christian outlets and a long profile with Faith & Current that had put the church on the cover. He knew how to be warm, and how to be funny early so people relaxed, and how to turn a question toward the thing he wanted to say. He had decided in the car that he would not turn a single question toward anything. He was going to answer what she asked.
He lasted about four minutes before he realized that was harder than it sounded.
“Tell me about the Stories series,” Priya said, first. “How does a person end up in one?”
He told her. Women’s nights, men’s nights, recovery groups, people who shared their testimony somewhere in the church and someone on staff heard it and asked if they’d be willing to film. He said the church had filmed more than forty. He said they’d reached millions of people. He heard himself start to say and we’ve seen incredible fruit, and stopped.
“How were people asked?”
“Usually someone from media would approach them. Or one of the ministry leaders.”
“And what did they sign?”
Lawrence answered that one. A standard media release, he said.
Priya reached into the library tote and took out a single sheet of paper and slid it across the mesquite.
“Is this it?”
It was. Eli recognized the clip-art anchor they’d used for a logo the first year. MEDIA RELEASE AND CONSENT. The paragraph in the middle, small. I hereby grant Anchor City Church and its agents an irrevocable, perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, and distribute my name, image, voice, and story in any media now known or later developed... Tessa’s signature at the bottom, a neat looping T. Rowan, and the date, and in the witness box, Grant’s scrawl.
“Tessa gave me a copy,” Priya said. “I’ve read it. I’m not a lawyer.” She glanced at Lawrence. “But my understanding is that irrevocable means what it says.”
“We don’t dispute that the release is what it is,” Lawrence said.
“So legally you were within your rights to post it.”
“We haven’t taken a position on the legal question,” Lawrence said, “because nobody has asked us to.”
Priya nodded and wrote something. Then she looked at Eli.
“When she asked you not to post it,” she said. “Did it matter to you what the form said?”
He opened his mouth.
“I’m asking you,” Priya said, “not your lawyer. If a person in your church tells you please don’t—does the form matter?”
“No,” Eli said.
Lawrence shifted.
“No,” Eli said again. “It shouldn’t have. We should have honored what she asked. It was her story.”
“Then why does your statement lead with the release?”
He didn’t have an answer that wasn’t about himself. He sat there without one. Priya let him. That was the thing he noticed about her; she let silences run. Most interviewers jumped in. She sat with her pen resting on the pad and waited, and the air handler roared, and after a while Naomi, at the end of the table, very quietly turned her own pen over in her fingers once.
“I think I was scared,” Eli said.
“Of what?”
“Of it being—“ He stopped. “Of it being a lawsuit. Of it being worse than it was.”
Priya wrote. Then she asked about staffing. How many people on staff had pastoral training. How many had been to seminary. Who supervised the media department. Who supervised Eli.
“The board,” Eli said.
“Who’s on the board?”
He told her. Himself. Micah Reed. Theo Lang.
“Mr. Reed is the worship pastor? On staff?”
“Yes.”
“So you’re his supervisor, and he’s also on the board that supervises you.”
“Technically.”
“And Mr. Lang?”
“Theo’s our treasurer. He’s a volunteer. He’s—“ Eli felt the word coming and couldn’t stop it. “He’s my roommate.”
Priya didn’t write that down. She didn’t need to; the phone was recording. She just looked at him for a second with no expression at all, and then turned a page.
At 10:40 she asked the question he’d been waiting for without knowing it.
“After it came down in March,” Priya said, “did anyone from the church’s leadership contact Tessa? Besides Mr. Pardee’s text?”
“No,” Eli said.
“Why not?”
“Grant had apologized. I thought—I thought it was handled.”
“She told me,” Priya said, “that her mother found out from someone at her mother’s church. Did you know that?”
He hadn’t.
He had watched Tessa’s video six times. She’d said it. My mom found out because someone from her church sent it to her. He’d heard the words and they’d gone past him in the flood of everything else—the screenshots, his own message in her voice—like a leaf going by on a river.
“She said,” Priya went on, reading from her notes, “that parts of the testimony were about her mother. Her mother’s use of prescription medication. That her mother hadn’t known she’d talked about it. That her mother hasn’t spoken to her since March thirteenth.” She looked up. “That’s six weeks.”
Eli put his hand flat on the mesquite. The wood was cool and very smooth, a hundred years of somebody’s hands on it.
“I didn’t know that,” he said.
“Okay.”
“I should have known that.”
Priya didn’t answer. She didn’t nod. She let it be his sentence.
“Is there anything else,” she said after a moment, “you’d like people to understand?”
He thought about it. He thought about Jonah in row Q, and the fourteen in the tank, and Marcus Tillman shouting I’m new, and the girl in Glendale in the bathroom at work, and he thought about how good it would feel to put all of that on the record. How true it was. How much it would help.
“No,” he said. “I think that’s—no. Thank you for being fair.”
“I haven’t written it yet,” Priya said, and smiled a little, and turned off the recorder.
After she left, Lawrence stayed behind in the mesquite room with his jacket off and his tie loosened, eating a banana from the staff kitchen, which he held in a way that suggested he had not eaten a banana out of a peel in some years.
“You did fine,” he said.
“I said I was scared.”
“You said you were scared, and you said the form shouldn’t matter, which will make my professional life more complicated, and you said you should have known about the mother, which is going to be the pull quote.” Lawrence put the peel on a napkin. “As your lawyer, I’d have preferred you say less. As a man who goes to church, I’ll tell you that’s the first time since Wednesday I’ve heard you sound like a pastor.”
Eli laughed, once, without much in it.
“The Channel Nine lady wants a quote for noon,” Naomi said from the doorway. “I told her no. And Faith & Current called. Ben Aldana.”
“He wrote the cover.”
“He wants to talk to you. He said to tell you he’s going to be fair. He also said—“ Naomi checked her phone. “He said, tell him I feel responsible for some of this, and I’d like to say that to him directly.”
Eli looked at her.
“I’ll call him,” he said.
He called Ben Aldana from the parking lot behind the warehouse, standing in the shade of the one mesquite tree Gil had planted thirty years ago, while the news van pulled out of the dirt lot on the other side of the building.
Ben was fifty and lived in Colorado Springs and had spent two days with Anchor City in December for the cover story, following Eli around with a notebook. He’d been kind. He’d been, Eli remembered now, a little dazzled.
“I’m writing a follow-up,” Ben said. “I’m going to be fair. I’m also going to say in the piece that the magazine helped build what happened. That’s true. We put an empty stock tank on the cover and called it overnight, and I was proud of the headline, and I’d do it differently.”
“It was a good headline.”
“It was a great headline,” Ben said. “That’s the problem with great headlines. They’re true enough to sell and not true enough to live in.”
Eli looked across the lot at the back of the warehouse, the cinder block painted a flat desert tan, a single steel door with a hand-lettered sign that said STAFF ONLY — GIL’S RULES.
“Can I ask you something,” Eli said. “Off the record.”
“Sure.”
“When you were here in December. Did you see it? Any of this?”
Ben was quiet a moment.
“I saw a young pastor who was very good at knowing where the camera was,” he said. “I thought it was a gift. I wrote that it was a gift. I don’t know that I was wrong. I just didn’t ask what it cost.”
Naomi sent the email to Tessa at two that afternoon. She read it to him first, in his office, under the framed cover.
Tessa—
This is Naomi Wells, the operations director at Anchor City. I’m writing on behalf of the church and of Eli. We are sorry. We would like the chance to meet with you in person, at a time and place of your choosing, with anyone you would like to have with you, to listen and to apologize without conditions. We will not bring a statement or ask you for one. If you don’t want to meet, that is entirely your decision, and we will respect it. If there is anything you need from us in the meantime—including help getting reposts of your testimony taken down—please tell me and I’ll do it personally.
You don’t need to reply to this.
— Naomi
“Is that okay?” Naomi said.
“It’s better than anything I would have written.”
“I know,” she said, and didn’t smile. “That’s why I wrote it.”
The reply came the next morning, Tuesday, at 7:10, from an address he didn’t recognize.
Ms. Wells—
Tessa has received your message. She is not ready to meet. She may be later. Please don’t contact her directly; you may contact me. Regarding the reposts, there are eleven that we know of. A list is attached.
Margaret Ellison, on Tessa’s behalf
Eli read it standing in the bungalow kitchen with his coffee. He read it twice. He felt the refusal land in him, the small cold weight of it, and he felt something in him rise up against it, the old reflex—if I could just talk to her, if she could just see—and he held that for a long moment and made himself put it down.
He texted Naomi. Got it. Whatever she needs. Can you take the reposts list and I’ll help if you want me.
Already on it, Naomi wrote.
Then, a minute later: That was the right answer, by the way.
He didn’t know why that made his throat close. He put the phone in his pocket and drove to the warehouse on the I-10, and just past Seventh Street he passed under the billboard Kenzie had written, fifty feet wide against the white April sky, black type on a field of blue, and he read it the way he’d read it every morning since March without ever really seeing it.
SOMETHING IS HAPPENING.
He thought, for the first time: to whom?
9Tessa’s Actual Story
The man came into Desert Willow on Wednesday at 3:20 in the afternoon wearing a golf shirt and holding a Bible with a leather cover, and he asked Luz at the front desk for “the girl from the video.”
Tessa was in the back, in the treatment room, holding a shepherd mix named Duke still for a blood draw. She heard it through the swinging door the way you hear your name in a crowded room. She heard Luz say, “I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know what you mean,” in her sweet, bright, nineteen-year-old front-desk voice. She heard the man say, “Tessa. Rowan. I drove from Queen Creek. I just want to pray over her.”
Duke’s vein rolled. Tessa lost it. She held the dog, and held very still herself, and watched the door.
Dr. Kim went out. Tessa heard her voice drop an octave, the way it did with owners who wanted antibiotics for a virus. She heard the words private medical facility and right now and, once, clearly, sir. The front door chimed. Through the high narrow window in the treatment room she saw the golf shirt cross the parking lot and get into a white Tahoe, and sit there a while, and finally leave.
Dr. Kim came back in and snapped a fresh pair of gloves on. “He said he was going to pray the spirit of offense off you,” she said. “I told him we already have an exterminator.”
Tessa laughed, and it came out wrong, and she stopped.
“You’re in surgery prep for a while,” Dr. Kim said. “Not front. Not exam rooms. I’m not punishing you. I just don’t want you where people can walk up.”
“Okay.”
“You want to go home?”
“No.”
“Okay.” Dr. Kim found Duke’s vein on the first try and drew the sample and capped it. Then, without looking up: “My mother still thinks I should’ve been a pediatrician. Twenty years. She tells people I’m a doctor and then changes the subject.” She pressed a gauze square on Duke’s leg. “Families are hard.”
The messages had been coming since Tuesday night, a flood and then a steady rain.
She’d turned the phone back on Wednesday morning and it had taken almost a minute to stop buzzing. She’d set rules. She read them at lunch and at night, in thirty-minute blocks, with a timer, and then put the phone back in the junk drawer. Margie had suggested the timer. Her counselor, Jen, had suggested she not read them at all. Tessa had compromised by reading them with a timer and telling Jen about it.
Most were kind. Hundreds of them. Women in recovery. Women who’d been in churches like Anchor City and had their own stories. I’m so sorry. Thank you for saying it. This happened to me in 2014 and I never said anything. A man in Minnesota who wrote that he was a pastor and he was going to go home and look at his church’s release forms. A girl from Anchor City itself, who’d been in the same women’s night, who wrote I was there when you shared. I’m so sorry. I’m staying but I’m praying for you.
Some were not kind. Jezebel. You’re attacking God’s house. Satan uses bitterness. You’re going to have to answer for every soul that doesn’t get saved because of this. A long one from a woman with a sunset profile picture, about forgiveness, seventy times seven, with a lot of verses, that ended I’ll be praying you let go of this before it destroys you.
And a few from people who wanted her. A podcaster. A lawyer in Scottsdale. The Steeple Receipts account, asking if she had “more.” A man named Beck Solano who hosted something called Cracked Pulpit and wanted her for a multi-episode series. She didn’t answer any of them.
She’d answered one reporter. The Ledger, Priya Natarajan. She’d met her at a Starbucks on Mill Avenue on Saturday and told her the facts in order and given her a copy of the release, and Priya had listened the whole time without once looking at her phone, and at the end she’d said, “Is there anything you don’t want in the piece?” And Tessa had said, “My mom’s name,” and Priya had said, “It won’t be.”
What she’d told Priya was the order of things. What she hadn’t told Priya was what it had been like.
It had been like this.
The women’s night had been last October, a year after her baptism, in the back of the warehouse on a Thursday. Folding chairs and fairy lights and a table of cookies from Costco. Forty women. No cameras; the flyer had said so. A safe space for real stories. Tessa had been asked by one of the leaders, a mom named Beth, because Beth had heard her share at a Friday prayer night, and Tessa had said yes because she’d been sober two years and nine months and had begun to feel, in a way that surprised her, that her story was not only a wound but a tool. That she could hand it to somebody.
She’d talked for twelve minutes. She’d told them about being fifteen and home alone after school in the house in Chandler, the house with the brick-red door, and opening the cabinet over the stove looking for the good granola bars, and finding instead the Folgers can at the back with no coffee in it, just the orange bottles with her mother’s name. About how she’d taken one, a white bar, and broken it in half with her thumbnail like she’d seen her mom do, and how, twenty minutes later, for the first time in her life, the humming in her chest had stopped. About how the Folgers can was where it started, and then there were friends’ parents’ cabinets, and then there was vodka because it was cheaper, and then there were doctors in Tempe who didn’t ask questions, and then there was a morning at twenty-two when she woke up in her car in the parking lot of a Filiberto’s with no memory of the night and her sister’s voicemails stacked on the screen like plates.
She’d told them the part that she’d only ever said out loud in meetings and to Margie and to God.
My mom still takes more than she should. She doesn’t know I know. I pray for her every day.
The room had been so quiet. Then a woman in the third row had started crying, and then another, and afterward twelve of them lined up to hug her, and one of them was Kenzie Lowe, who wasn’t a leader, just there, who hugged her hard and said, “Would you ever tell that on camera? For Stories? It would help so many people,” and Tessa had said, “Maybe,” and felt, driving home, like she’d been lit from the inside.
In February she’d filmed it. The blue room in the back of the warehouse, one chair, one light. Grant had been lovely. He’d made her laugh before they started, a story about a groom at a wedding he’d filmed who fainted into the cake, and he’d said, “Just tell it like you’re telling a friend. We’ll cut it down. You’re going to be amazing.” She’d told it. She’d told it shorter. She’d told the Folgers can, and when she got to the part about her mom she’d hesitated, and Grant had nodded behind the camera, gently, keep going, and she’d kept going.
Afterward, Brynn had handed her a clipboard. Tessa had signed it in the hallway with her coat half on. She had not read it. She’d never read anything she signed at church. You didn’t. It was church.
She’d sat in her Civic in the warehouse lot afterward with the engine off for twenty minutes, and somewhere in those twenty minutes she understood what she’d done.
It wasn’t the Folgers can. The Folgers can was hers; she’d been fifteen and it was her hand in the cabinet. It was the other line. My mom still takes more than she should. That was her mother’s. That was her mother at fifty-three, standing at her own kitchen window in Chandler in the mornings with a coffee she didn’t drink, a woman who went to a Bible church on Alma School Road and sang in the choir and had never said one word about the Folgers can to anyone, maybe including herself. Tessa had put her mother’s secret in front of a camera because a kind man had nodded keep going.
She’d called Margie from the parking lot. Margie had said, “Then tell them.” She’d waited two weeks, because she was embarrassed, because she didn’t want to be the girl who made a fuss. Then on March ninth, a Monday, sitting in the break room at Desert Willow with her lunch, she wrote it.
Hi Anchor City media team,
I filmed a Stories testimony with Grant on February 20. I’ve been thinking about it and I’m really sorry to do this, but I don’t want it posted. I said some things about my family that aren’t mine to share, and my mom doesn’t know about them. I’m grateful for the opportunity and I’m sorry for the trouble. Please don’t post it.
Thank you,
Tessa Rowan
Brynn’s reply had come at 4:17. Got it! Totally understand, I’ll make sure it doesn’t go up 💛
Tessa had shown it to Margie at the Tuesday meeting and Margie had read it and handed it back and said, “Well, good. That was brave,” and Tessa had felt, that whole week, a lightness she hadn’t expected, as if she’d put down something heavy she hadn’t known she was carrying.
Friday, March thirteenth, at 4:05 in the afternoon, Marisol, who’d worked at Desert Willow eleven years and had four grandchildren, held her phone out across the surgery prep table and said, “Tessa, mija, isn’t this you?”
It was her. In the blue room, in the chair, in the one light. From Pills to Purpose | Tessa’s Story. Under her voice, softly, Micah’s song. Weeping may endure for a night. It had four hundred thousand views.
She remembered only pieces of the rest of the afternoon. Calling the church office line from the bathroom and letting it ring eleven times. Emailing media@ again, all caps in the subject line, her hands shaking so badly she had to fix the typos three times. Messaging the church account directly. Dr. Kim sending her home.
At 6:10, in her apartment, her mother called.
Tessa had watched the phone ring with her mother’s name on it and known. She had answered anyway. You answered your mother.
“Is this how you talk about me?” Denise Rowan said. She wasn’t crying. Her mother didn’t cry; her mother got very clear. “To strangers? On the internet?”
“Mom, I asked them not to—“
“Pastor Jim’s wife sent it to me. Pastor Jim’s wife, Tessa. Sherry. She sent it to me with a prayer hands. Everybody in the choir has seen it. Everybody at Grace.”
“Mom—“
“She still takes more than she should.” Her mother’s voice said it back to her, flat, exactly, the way you repeat a phone number. “That’s what you think of me. That’s what you told a camera.”
“I asked them not to post it. I emailed. I asked—“
“But you said it,” Denise said, and hung up.
At 9:20 that night, Tessa was standing in the wine aisle of the CVS on Rural and Southern with a bottle of pinot grigio in her right hand.
She didn’t remember deciding to go. She remembered her keys. She remembered the automatic doors, the cold air, the smell of the photo counter. She remembered walking past the pharmacy window at the back—closed, a gray metal gate pulled down—and feeling her whole body lean toward it the way a plant leans toward a window, and making herself keep walking. And then the wine aisle. It was not a big aisle. It was a CVS. It had maybe forty bottles.
She stood holding the pinot grigio. It was cold. It had a picture of a bird on it.
She thought: nobody would know.
She thought: the whole internet knows everything else.
And then, from somewhere under that, very small and flat and stubborn, three years of Tuesdays: Call before, not after.
She called Margie from the aisle with the bottle still in her hand.
“Where are you,” Margie said. Not hello.
“CVS. Rural and Southern.”
“Okay. What are you holding?”
“Wine.”
“Okay. Can you put it back on the shelf?”
Tessa looked at the bottle. The little bird. She put it back. She put it back exactly where it had been, label out, the way she’d have wanted someone to leave a shelf at work.
“It’s back,” she said.
“Okay. Walk to the front of the store. Don’t walk past the pharmacy. Go out the door. Get in your car and lock it. I’m eleven minutes away. Stay on the phone with me.”
She did every one of those things. She sat in the locked Civic in the CVS lot with the phone against her ear and Margie’s gravel voice saying nothing important, just okay, okay, I’m on the 101 now, okay, I’m getting off at Southern, and eleven minutes later Margie’s Buick pulled into the space beside her and Margie got out in slippers and a housecoat with a turquoise ring on every finger but her thumbs and knocked on the window and Tessa unlocked the door, and Margie got in the passenger side and didn’t say anything, just held out her arms.
At 10:41, sitting in the CVS parking lot with her head on Margie’s shoulder, Tessa refreshed her phone and watched her own face disappear from Anchor City’s account.
It had been up seven hours and twenty-six minutes. One point three million people had watched her say her mother’s secret. By then, eleven of them had saved it and posted it again on their own.
Saturday morning Grant texted. So so sorry for the mixup!! We took it down. Praying for you!!
That was all. She waited a week. Then two. She watched the church post Easter. She watched fourteen baptisms. She did not hear from anyone else.
Thursday, after work, the week the video went up, she drove to Chandler.
She didn’t tell Margie first. She knew that was breaking a rule. She told herself it wasn’t the kind of rule that mattered—that one was about pills and bottles, and this was just a drive. She took the 101 south to the 202 and got off at Alma School and drove past Grace Fellowship with its big lit sign and its parking lot empty on a Thursday, and turned on her mother’s street, and parked across from the house with the brick-red door.
Her mother’s Camry was in the driveway. The porch light was on. It had a moth problem; it always had a moth problem. The mesquite in the front yard had gotten big. Her mother had put a new wreath on the door, a spring one, yellow and white silk flowers, and the sight of it undid something in Tessa that the man in the golf shirt and the Jezebel messages and the whole long week had not undone—that her mother had gone to Hobby Lobby at some point in the last six weeks and picked out a spring wreath and hung it on the door, and gone on living, and had not called.
She sat in the Civic with the engine running. She didn’t get out. She knew she wasn’t going to get out.
After a while the front blinds moved. Just an inch. Two slats bending, a pale shape behind them in the lamp-lit room. Someone looking.
Tessa didn’t move. She didn’t wave. She sat very still with her hands on the wheel at ten and two, the way her mother had taught her to drive in the parking lot of this same Grace Fellowship when she was fifteen, the same spring as the Folgers can.
The blinds stayed parted for a long time. Longer than a glance. Long enough that Tessa started to count.
Then they closed.
She sat another minute. Then she put the car in drive and went home, the long way, on surface streets, stopping at every light.
10Board Meeting with No Board
The Ledger story went up Wednesday morning at six, and Theo read it aloud at the kitchen table because Eli asked him to.
The headline was Fast-growing Phoenix church posted recovery testimony after woman withdrew consent. The subhead was Anchor City’s pastor: “I should have known.” It was eighteen hundred words, and Priya had been exactly as fair as she’d promised, which turned out to be worse than unfair. She quoted Tessa, including one sentence Eli read three times: On the night the video went up, Rowan said, she stood in the wine aisle of a Tempe drugstore holding a bottle for the first time in three years, and called her sponsor. She quoted the release. She quoted Eli saying no when she asked if the form mattered, and I think I was scared. She quoted a professor of practical theology at a seminary in California who said, without naming Anchor City, that “rapid growth in young churches often outpaces the formation of governance,” and a sentence later, a former Anchor City volunteer who said, “It felt like the most alive place I’d ever been, and nobody was ever in charge of anything.”
Near the bottom, Theo slowed down.
“Anchor City’s three-member board,” Theo read, “consists of Mercer; Micah Reed, the church’s worship pastor, whom Mercer supervises; and Theo Lang, a volunteer who serves as the church’s treasurer. Mercer confirmed that Lang is also his roommate.”
He put the phone down.
“I’d like to note for the record,” Theo said, “that I have been described in a newspaper as your roommate.”
“You are my roommate.”
“I’m also a credit analyst at a federally chartered bank.”
“She didn’t ask about that.”
“No,” Theo said. “She didn’t.”
The board met that night at the kitchen table, because that was where the board had always met.
It had not occurred to Eli until he looked at it through Priya’s eyes how strange that was. For three years the governing body of a nonprofit religious corporation with a four-million-dollar budget had convened at a Formica table from a thrift store on Indian School Road, under a light fixture Theo had installed himself, next to a fridge covered in pizza magnets. They’d passed the budget at this table. They’d approved the Monroe lease at this table, on a Sunday night, with Micah sitting on the counter because they didn’t have a third chair. They had voted on Eli’s salary at this table while Eli went out to the backyard and threw a tennis ball against the fence so as not to be in the room, which at the time had felt scrupulous.
Now there were five chairs, because Naomi had brought two folding ones from the warehouse, and Lawrence Tate was on Naomi’s laptop propped against the fruit bowl, and Micah was sitting in a real chair, and nobody was throwing a tennis ball anywhere.
“I’ve read your bylaws,” Lawrence said. “Twice. I’d like to walk through them. It’s going to be unpleasant.”
“Okay,” Eli said.
“Section Four. The Board of Directors shall consist of not fewer than three nor more than seven directors. Directors shall be appointed by the Lead Pastor.” Lawrence let that sit. “Section Four-point-three. The Lead Pastor may remove any director at any time, with or without cause. Section Five-point-two. The Lead Pastor may be removed by unanimous vote of the remaining directors.”
The kitchen was quiet except for the fridge.
“So,” Lawrence said. “The two people with authority to remove you are two people you appointed, whom you can remove at any time, without a reason, including in the middle of a meeting where they’re trying to remove you.”
“I would never—“
“I know you wouldn’t. That isn’t what bylaws are for. Bylaws are for the day someone would.” Lawrence took his glasses off. “I’m not saying this to be cruel. These are very common. They came off the same website as the release. A lot of young churches use them, and most of them are fine, because most of the time nothing happens. I’m saying it because a reporter just described your governing body as your roommate, and she wasn’t wrong.”
“There’s also no membership,” Naomi said, quietly. She had a legal pad on her knee and was taking minutes, the way she had taken minutes at every board meeting since the first one, though until tonight nobody had ever asked to see them. “So there’s no congregation that votes on anything. There are no elders. There’s no denomination or network. There’s no outside body at all.”
“We had a network offer,” Eli said. “In year one. Remember? That guy from Dallas.”
“You said they’d slow us down,” Naomi said.
“They would have.”
“Yes,” Naomi said. “That was the point of them.”
Lawrence went on. Compensation: the board set the lead pastor’s salary. The lead pastor set everyone else’s, including Micah’s. Conflicts of interest: there was no written policy. Micah had voted on the Keystone arrangement—the licensing deal that let the label use the church’s name on Micah’s records—even though the royalties went partly to him.
“That was fine,” Theo said. “I checked it. The split’s fair. It’s all documented.”
“I believe you,” Lawrence said. “I’ve looked at your books. They’re the cleanest thing in this entire organization. I’m not worried about your money. I’m worried about the fact that the man who benefits from the arrangement voted on the arrangement, and nobody thought that was odd.”
Micah had been sitting very still. He had his hands wrapped around a glass of water he hadn’t drunk.
“It was odd,” Micah said. “I thought it was odd. I just didn’t say anything.”
Eli looked at him.
“I’m asking something,” Micah said. He didn’t look up from the glass. “Lawrence. Hypothetically. If I thought Eli needed to step back. From preaching, from leading, whatever. What would I do?”
The fridge hummed. Theo turned slowly in his chair.
“Under these bylaws?” Lawrence said. “You’d need Theo to agree with you. The two of you would vote. It would have to be unanimous. And then Eli could, if he chose, remove you both before the vote was recorded, and appoint two new directors, and I’d advise him strongly against it, and it would be legal.”
“Right,” Micah said. “But I mean—would I? Would I actually say it?”
Nobody answered.
“I’m his employee,” Micah said. “He signs my checks. He’s my best friend. He was my best man. My label deal is with this church. My wife is pregnant and I’ve got a song on the radio because of this church.” He finally looked up, and his face was wretched. “I’m not saying I think he should step back. I’m saying I don’t know if I’d tell you if I did. And that’s supposed to be my job.”
The words went into the kitchen and stayed there.
Eli had known Micah Reed since Micah was eighteen. He had heard him play piano at two in the morning through a cinder-block wall. He had stood at the front of a church in Prescott with a ring in his pocket while Micah cried watching Hannah come down the aisle. He had never once, in nine years, thought of Micah as someone who might have to tell him no, and he understood now, sitting at the Formica table under Theo’s light fixture, that this was because Micah never had.
“The people holding me accountable,” Eli said slowly, “are my roommate—“
“Credit analyst,” Theo said.
“—and my best friend. Who I pay.”
“Yes,” said Lawrence.
“And my best friend who I pay,” Naomi said, “is the worship leader whose song was playing under Tessa’s testimony.”
She didn’t say it hard. She said it the way she read items off a risk register. Micah flinched anyway.
“Right,” Eli said. “Right.”
He looked around the table. His roommate, who took out the trash on Tuesdays and had once driven him to urgent care at three in the morning for a kidney stone and sat in the waiting room reading a biography of Alexander Hamilton. His best friend, who had written the song people sang at the warehouse the first night there were more than a hundred people in it. His operations director, who had written a memo more than a year ago. His lawyer, in a rectangle on a laptop, framed by the fruit bowl.
“Theo,” Eli said. “You borrowed my car this morning.”
“The Civic was making the noise again.”
“I’m just saying.”
“I know what you’re saying,” Theo said.
“I have a recommendation,” Naomi said.
She’d put the legal pad down. She had a folder in her lap, the manila kind, the kind nobody at Anchor City used anymore because everything was a shared document. Eli had a feeling he knew what was in it.
“Two things,” she said. “One. Lawrence has already said this and I agree: an independent review. Somebody from outside, who doesn’t know any of us, looks at what happened with Tessa and how we got here, and writes it down, and we publish what they find. Not us. Them.”
“That’s expensive,” Theo said.
“It’s cheaper than AWAKE’s catering.”
Theo opened his mouth and closed it.
“Two,” Naomi said. “We need someone outside the four of us in this room to help us figure out what to do next. Not a consultant. Not Hal’s PR guy. Someone who’s been a pastor for a long time and doesn’t want anything from us. Someone who’ll ask the questions we don’t know to ask.”
“Like who?”
“David Shaw.”
Eli frowned. “Who?”
“He was my pastor,” Naomi said. “Growing up. Second Street Bible Church. Over by Garfield. He was there thirty-five years. He retired two years ago.”
It took Eli a second. Then he placed it: a little brick church on a corner south of McDowell with a white steeple and a hand-lettered signboard out front, the kind that said things like GOD ANSWERS KNEE-MAIL. He had driven past it a hundred times on his way to the warehouse. He’d never been inside.
“The Second Street guy?” he said. “Naomi. That church had like sixty people.”
“Seventy,” Naomi said. “At the end. A hundred and ninety at the peak. In the nineties.” She looked at him steadily. “He baptized me when I was nine. In a tank in the floor with a heater that worked. He did my grandfather’s funeral and my dad’s. When my mom had her surgery he came to the hospital every day for eleven days. He never had a single clip go viral in his life. He’s the best pastor I’ve ever known, and I left his church for ours when I was twenty-eight because ours felt like something was happening, and it was, and I don’t regret it.” She held out the folder. “I called him Monday. He said he’d meet you. On conditions.”
“What conditions?”
“He’ll tell you.”
Eli took the folder. Inside was a single sheet of paper with a phone number and an address and, in Naomi’s neat print, Fri 9am. He’ll be in the garden.
“You called him Monday,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Before you asked me.”
“Yes,” Naomi said. “Because if I’d asked first, you’d have said let me think about it.”
Afterward, Lawrence logged off and Naomi drove home to Chris and Miles, and Micah stood in the driveway a while with his keys in his hand as if he was going to say something, and then he said, “Night, man,” and left.
Theo washed the dishes. He always washed the dishes after a board meeting, the four mugs and the one plate from the grapefruit Naomi had cut up and nobody had eaten. Eli dried. They didn’t talk. The kitchen window was black and the grapefruit tree was a darker black against it, and every so often a car went by on Fifteenth Street with its windows down, playing something with a lot of bass.
Theo handed him the last mug.
“I’d have voted to keep you,” Theo said. “Whatever you did. Anything short of killing somebody, I’d have voted to keep you.” He pulled the plug in the sink and watched the water go. “That’s the problem, isn’t it.”
Eli dried the mug. It was one of the old staff mugs from year one, black, with I CANNOT COME DOWN in small white letters over where your heart would be if a mug had one.
“Yeah,” Eli said. “I think it is.”
11David Shaw
Second Street Bible Church was not on Second Street, and hadn’t been since 1962.
“The first building burned,” David Shaw said. “Somebody’s space heater. They rebuilt over here on Tenth because the land was cheap and kept the name because the sign was already paid for.” He was standing in a raised bed of dirt in a pair of rubber garden clogs, holding a hose. “People used to show up at the wrong corner every Easter. They’d send a deacon over with a sandwich board. That was church growth in 1974. I heard about it for fifteen years.”
He was tall and a little stooped, with white hair cut close to his head, a hearing aid in his left ear, and forearms spotted brown from forty years of Arizona. He wore khakis and a short-sleeved plaid shirt tucked in and a wide canvas sunhat that looked like it had been rained on in several different decades. He didn’t turn the hose off when Eli and Naomi came around the side of the building. He just looked up, nodded once, and went back to watering what turned out to be tomatoes.
“You’re early,” David said.
“Five minutes,” Naomi said.
“Early.” He moved the hose to the next plant. “Hello, Naomi.”
“Hi, Pastor David.”
“Just David. I retired. They took the Pastor with them.” He finally turned the hose off at the nozzle and looked at Eli. His eyes were very pale blue and did not seem to be in a hurry to do anything. “You’re Eli.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you for meeting with me.”
“Don’t thank me yet.”
The garden ran along the east side of the building in the shade of the old sanctuary wall: four raised beds, a lemon tree, a Mexican bird of paradise going orange and red, a wooden bench with a brass plaque on it, and a rain barrel that had clearly not seen rain in a while. Through the propped-open side door of the fellowship hall came the smell of masa and chile and a lot of women talking fast in Spanish over the clatter of steel pots.
“Quinceañera tomorrow,” David said, nodding at the door. “The Olveras. Their daughter. They’ve been cooking since six.”
“This is—they meet here now?” Eli said.
“Iglesia Bíblica Monte de Sión. Pastor Rubén Ortega. They were renting the fellowship hall on Sunday afternoons in 2011. By 2020 they had more people on a Sunday afternoon than we had in the morning. When I retired, we gave them the building.” He said it plainly, as if he were describing the plumbing. “They pay the utilities and let Ruth and me keep the garden. Ruth’s in the car, by the way. She says hello and that you’re too thin. She watched the video of the young man in the tank.”
“Jonah.”
“Jonah.” David nodded. “She cried. She also said you should have a better towel.”
They sat on the bench. Naomi took a folding chair from against the wall and set it at an angle, not quite part of the conversation and not quite out of it, and took out her legal pad.
“Naomi says you’re good,” David said. “I believe her. She was a good judge of people when she was nine. She told me my sermons were too long.”
“They were,” Naomi said.
“They were.” He looked at Eli. “I watched the woman’s videos. Both of them. I read your statement. Twice. I read the newspaper this morning.”
“Okay.”
“Your statement was a sermon.”
Eli had been braced for a lot of things. He had not been braced for that to be the first thing. He opened his mouth, and David held up one spotted hand.
“I’m not going to say much more about it,” David said. “It was a good sermon. That was the problem with it. I’m telling you so you know I read it, and so you don’t spend the next hour wondering if I’m going to bring it up. I brought it up. It’s done.”
“Okay,” Eli said.
“I’m told you want to know if I’ll help you.”
“Naomi thinks you should.”
“Do you think I should?”
Eli hesitated. The honest answer was I don’t know you. The honest answer under that was I’m not sure a man whose church shrank to seventy people is who I need right now. He could feel David Shaw waiting for him to decide which answer he was going to give, and he had the uncomfortable sense that the old man could already see both.
“I think I need help,” Eli said. “I don’t know yet if it’s you. I’m sorry. That’s the truth.”
David smiled for the first time. It changed his whole face, took ten years off it.
“Good,” he said. “That’s the first thing you’ve said that I believe.”
He had conditions. He’d written them down, on a legal pad of his own, yellow, in a tidy slanted hand that looked like it had been taught by nuns, although he told them later it was the Navy.
“One. I don’t work for you. I’m not on your staff. I don’t take a salary or an honorarium or a gift card to the steakhouse. If I help, I report to your board and to Naomi, and to whatever outside people we bring in—not to you alone. Anything I tell you, I’m allowed to tell them.”
“Okay.”
“Two. You commission an independent review of what happened to that young woman and how your church got to the place where it could happen. Real one. People none of us know. You pay for it and you don’t get to edit it. You publish what they find.”
“Naomi already said—“
“Then Naomi and I agree, which is how she knows I’m right.” He didn’t look up. “Three. You don’t quote me. Not in a sermon, not on your podcasts, not in a nice post about the wise old pastor who’s walking with you through a hard season. If you do, I’m done.”
Eli laughed despite himself. “That’s specific.”
“I’ve been watching you people for three years,” David said. “I know what you do.” He moved his finger down the pad. “Four. You meet with me every week. Same time. It’ll be boring. You’ll hate it. You’ll do it anyway.”
“What do we do in the meetings?”
“I ask questions. You answer them. Mostly you’ll find out you don’t know the answers.” He turned the page. “Five.”
He stopped. He sat with the pad on his knee for a moment, looking out at the lemon tree, which had a few hard green lemons on it and a mockingbird in the top branches doing an impression of a car alarm.
“Five,” David said. “You don’t contact that young woman unless she asks you to, and when she does, you don’t ask her for anything.”
“I wasn’t going to—“
“You were,” David said, not unkindly. “You’ve already thought about calling her. Twice at least. Naomi didn’t tell me that; I just know. I was twenty-nine once too, and I had a church, and I did something to a man that I’ll tell you about sometime when you’re ready to hear it, and the first thing I wanted afterward was for him to tell me it was all right.” He looked at Eli. “It’s not her job to make you feel all right. It never will be. If that’s what you want from her, you’ll hurt her twice.”
The mockingbird switched from car alarm to something that sounded like a cell phone ringtone. Inside the fellowship hall, somebody dropped a pot lid and three women screamed with laughter.
“Okay,” Eli said. “Yes. All five.”
“Don’t say yes that fast.”
“I’m saying it.”
“You say everything fast,” David said. “That’s in the newspaper too. Between the lines.”
Before they left, David walked them around the front of the building. He wanted, he said, to show Eli something.
The sanctuary was small and plain: white walls, oak pews worn pale at the ends where hands had held them, a wooden pulpit, a cross on the wall that looked handmade. Hanging banners in Spanish now—Jesucristo es el Señor—and a drum kit in the corner behind a plexiglass shield, and a projector screen that retracted into a box in the ceiling. Everything else was David’s church. The same stained-glass window over the door, a lamb and a flag, a little faded. The same smell of old hymnals and floor wax.
In the floor at the front, under a hinged wooden panel, was the baptistry. David lifted the panel with a grunt. A tiled rectangle, dry, maybe four feet deep, with three steps down at one end.
“Four hundred and eighteen,” David said. “In thirty-five years. I kept a book. Ruth has it.”
Eli looked down into the dry tiled hole. It was smaller than the stock tank.
“How many have you done?” David said. “Since October.”
Eli told him. Two hundred and ninety-seven.
David didn’t say anything. He looked at the tiles for a while. Then he bent and brushed a dead moth off the top step with the side of his hand, carefully, and then a second one, and a little grit that wasn’t hurting anything, and it took him longer than it needed to.
“Naomi,” he said, still bent over. “Two thousand—what was it?”
“Four,” Naomi said. “November.”
“Two thousand four. November. Water heater worked that day, thank the Lord. She came up and asked if she could do it again.”
Naomi laughed. Eli had not heard her laugh like that all week, or maybe all year.
David let the panel down gently and straightened, one hand on the small of his back.
“I’m going to ask you one question now,” he said to Eli, “and then I’ll let you go. You don’t have to answer it today. Most people can’t. Think about it tonight and tell me tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow morning. Saturday. Eight o’clock. Your warehouse. Everybody who has a key to your building and anybody who runs anything. Bring coffee. I’ll bring questions. They’re going to be boring.”
“Okay. What’s the one question?”
David looked at him with those pale, unhurried eyes.
“Who can tell you no?” he said.
Eli opened his mouth to say Naomi, and heard it before he said it, and closed his mouth.
“That’s what I thought,” David said. “You’re not a bad man, Eli. I want you to hear me say that, because you’re going to need to remember it in a few weeks. You’re not a bad man. But you’ve built a house where nobody can tell you no, and you’re living in it with two thousand people, and you just found out there’s a gas leak.” He took off the sunhat and looked into it, as if there might be something in there. “Also, your name.”
“My name?”
“Eli. First Samuel. You know him?”
“The priest. Samuel’s teacher.”
“The priest whose sons were robbing the people at the altar. His sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not.” David put the hat back on. “He was a decent old man. He loved God. He taught a boy to listen for the Lord’s voice. He just couldn’t tell his own household no.”
“My parents named me after my grandpa,” Eli said.
“Even better,” David said. “Then you come by it honest.”
In the car, Naomi drove, and Eli sat in the passenger seat with the air on his face and Miles’s car seat empty in the back and didn’t talk until they were on McDowell.
“He’s kind of a jerk,” Eli said.
“He is,” Naomi said. “A little.”
“I liked him.”
“I know,” Naomi said. “I saw.”
At the light on Seventh Street, a Brandt Comfort Air van pulled up beside them, the cartoon penguin on the side grinning in a tiny scarf and sunglasses, and on its back door a bumper sticker for the conference, SOMETHING IS HAPPENING, the letters already a little sun-faded.
“Who can tell me no,” Eli said to the windshield.
“Tomorrow,” Naomi said. “Eight o’clock. Bring coffee.”
12Boring Questions
David Shaw pulled into the dirt lot behind the warehouse at 7:41 on Saturday morning, parked his Camry in the shade of Gil Arvizu’s mesquite with the slow precision of a man docking a boat, and then sat in the car with the engine off for twenty minutes, reading.
Eli watched him through the blinds of his office. He had been at the warehouse since a little after five. He’d given up on sleep around four, made coffee in the dark bungalow kitchen so as not to wake Theo, and driven over with the question riding in the passenger seat like a hitchhiker who wouldn’t say where he was headed.
Who can tell you no?
He had come up with an answer at about three in the morning. It was God. It was true, and he was already ashamed of it, because he could picture exactly what David would do with it.
Naomi came at 7:45 with two cardboard boxes of coffee from the place on Grand with the neon cactus in the window. June came right behind her carrying her laptop and the green notebook and a bakery box of conchas from her grandmother. Theo came in Saturday shorts and a Diamondbacks cap. Tamsin Greer came carrying a three-ring binder so thick it had its own weather. Micah came at 7:59, looking like he’d slept in his car, which Eli found out later he had, for about an hour, in the driveway of the rental in Encanto, because he’d gotten home from a friend’s studio at two and Hannah had been asleep and he hadn’t wanted to wake her with the garage door.
Grant was there too. It was his first day back from what he’d called taking a couple of days. He had a new haircut and a hoodie with the hood up and he said “Hey, man” to Eli without looking at him and sat at the far end of the mesquite table, next to Kenzie, who had her laptop open and a pen in her mouth. Brynn Okafor had unlocked the building at seven so the media team could pull gear for Sunday, and she hung back by the coffee, holding a paper cup she didn’t drink from.
Everybody who has a key, David had said, and anybody who runs anything. Eli counted nine people. For three years, nine people had pretty much run everything.
David came in last. He wore the same sunhat and a short-sleeved dress shirt buttoned to the collar, and he carried the yellow legal pad and a Bible so old the cover had gone soft as a glove. He did not take the chair at the head of the table. He took one on the side, next to June, and put the pad down, and uncapped a blue ballpoint pen.
“Did you think about my question?” he said to Eli.
“God,” Eli said.
“Mm.” David wrote something. “Everybody says that. It’s not wrong. Then the next question is who God’s been using lately, and whether you listened to them.” He looked up at the room. “Good morning. I’m David. Some of you know me from Naomi. I pastored a small church on Tenth Street for thirty-five years and I’m retired now and my wife says I’m underfoot. Your pastor has asked me to help. I’m not on your staff and you’re not paying me, so I don’t need anybody to like me. I’m going to ask a lot of boring questions. If you know the answer, tell me. If you don’t know the answer, please don’t make one up. That’s most of what’s wrong with young people. It’s also most of what’s wrong with old people.”
Theo laughed. Nobody else did.
“First question,” David said. “How many members does Anchor City have?”
“We don’t really do membership,” Eli said. “We do family.”
David wrote that down. It took him a while. He wrote slowly and in full sentences.
“How many people are in the family?”
“About two thousand. More on a big Sunday.”
“Can a person leave the family?”
“Sure. Anytime.”
“How would you know they’d left?”
Eli opened his mouth. June, next to David, looked down at her notebook.
“Can the family vote on anything?” David said.
“Like what?”
“Anything. A budget. A building. A pastor.”
“No,” Eli said. “We’re not that kind of church. The board handles—“
“We’ll get to the board.” David wrote. “I’m not saying you have to be a Baptist. I’m just trying to find out whether you’ve got a family or an audience.”
He went on like that for two hours.
Who supervised Grant? Eli did. Who supervised Kenzie? Grant. Who supervised Dex and Brynn? Kenzie, sort of, and Grant, sort of; there had been an org chart at some point, in a slide deck. Who supervised Micah? Eli. Who supervised Eli?
“The board.”
“Who’s the board?”
“You know who the board is.”
“Say it for the room,” David said, not unkindly.
“Me. Micah. Theo.”
“Micah, who do you report to?”
“Eli,” Micah said to the table.
“Theo, where do you live?”
Theo took his cap off and rubbed his head and put it back on. “With Eli.”
David wrote it down.
Then consent. When a person agreed to share their story on camera, where was that written? Kenzie answered this one fast and well: there was a release, e-signed through a form on the website, stored in a shared drive under the person’s name and the date. David asked to see one and she turned the laptop around and he read the whole thing, moving his lips slightly at the word irrevocable, and turned it back.
“Now,” he said. “When a person takes permission back. Where’s that written?”
Kenzie opened her mouth and closed it.
“It’d come to the media inbox,” Grant said from under his hood.
“Then what?”
“Then whoever sees it.”
“Then what does whoever do?”
“Tells me. Or Kenzie. I don’t know, man.”
“Is that written anywhere?”
“No.”
“Has anyone ever taken permission back before? Before this young woman?”
Kenzie was quiet for a second. “Three people,” she said. “That I know of. Since the Monroe.”
“What happened to their videos?”
Kenzie started scrolling. The room waited while she scrolled. Brynn, over by the coffee, put her cup down on the counter and picked it up again.
“Two came down,” Kenzie said finally. “I’d have to check on the third one.”
“Would you check on it today, please?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t call me sir. I was a chief petty officer. I worked for a living.” David made a note. “Next. If one of your staff saw something wrong, and the thing that was wrong was Eli—who would they tell?”
The silence went on long enough that the AC compressor kicked on outside with a shudder that everyone in the room could feel through the floor.
“Me, I guess,” Naomi said. “And I’d take it to Eli.”
“And if you were the one who saw it?”
Naomi looked at David with an expression Eli couldn’t read. “Then I’d write a memo,” she said. “And he’d reply to it with an emoji.”
Nobody laughed at that either. Over by the counter, Brynn went very still, then went out the side door with her cup, and Eli heard the door to the gear cage open and close.
David didn’t look up. “When was the last time a pastor from this church visited somebody in the hospital?”
Eli tried to remember. There’d been a guy from the Night service with a broken pelvis, last fall. Or the fall before.
“Four,” June said. “Four people, in March and April. Two at the hospital downtown, one at the county, and Mrs. Ybarra’s husband in hospice in Glendale. I did those. I went to Mr. Ybarra three times.” She turned her notebook so the page faced her. “I’m not a pastor.”
“You are as far as I’m concerned,” David said. “How many funerals last year?”
“Two,” Eli said. He had done both. A twenty-four-year-old named Christian Toledo who’d laid down his motorcycle on the I-17, and the mother of a girl in the band. He had preached both funerals well. He’d been told so. He could not have told you the name of the girl’s mother.
Small groups. How were leaders trained?
“There’s a video,” Micah said. “It’s about an hour. I did the intro.”
“Have you watched the rest of it?”
Micah looked at him for a long second. “I did the intro,” he said again.
Counseling referrals. When someone came to the church in real trouble—suicidal, or addicted, or being hit—where did the church send them? Naomi said she’d made a list, two years ago, of Christian counselors in the Valley. She’d called three numbers from it on Thursday. One practice had closed. One wasn’t taking new clients. The third number now belonged to a nail salon in Tolleson.
“The lady was very nice about it,” Naomi said.
Discipline. David put it simply. “If Eli committed adultery tomorrow, what would happen?”
“We’d deal with it,” Theo said.
“Who’s we?”
“The board. We’d talk to him.”
“And if he said he was sorry and wanted to keep preaching?”
Theo looked at the table for a long time. Then he looked at Eli, and it was the look from the kitchen on Wednesday, over the four mugs, when he had said I’d have voted to keep you.
“Then he’d keep preaching,” Theo said.
David wrote that down too.
Tamsin had been waiting with the binder in her lap for an hour and a half. When David finally said, “Children,” she slid it across the mesquite so fast it nearly went off the other side.
David opened it and began to read.
He did not skim. The room watched him read. He read the background-check policy and the volunteer application and the two-adult rule. He read the check-in procedure with its matching tags and the bathroom policy and the page on what to do if a child disclosed abuse, which had the state hotline number printed at the top in bold, and the steps in order, and a line at the bottom that said You do not investigate. You do not wait. You report. He turned the pages with a licked finger. Micah checked his phone and put it face down. Grant pushed his hood back. Kenzie got up for coffee and sat back down. The compressor cycled off and on again. It was almost six minutes before David closed the binder and put his hand flat on the cover.
“Who wrote this?”
“I did,” Tamsin said.
“Who reviewed it?”
“Nobody. I sent it to Eli in September.”
Eli remembered. He had forwarded it to Naomi with amazing!! and two flexed-arm emojis and never opened the attachment.
“This is the best thing in this building,” David said.
Tamsin laughed, a surprised bark, and then her face crumpled and she put a hand over her eyes, and June reached over and rubbed her back without looking away from David. When Tamsin could talk again she said that she needed eighteen more background-checked adults by the end of the month or she was going to have to cap the kids’ rooms and turn families away at the door, because she was not going to break her own policy, and she was sorry, she knew nobody wanted to hear that right now.
“I want to hear it,” David said. “Write it down for me. The number and the date.”
Finances. David had asked Lawrence Tate about the money, he said, and Lawrence had said the books were clean. “Is that true?”
“Yes,” Theo said.
“Who checks you?”
“A CPA does a review every year. Not a full audit. She’s outside. She doesn’t go here.”
“Two signatures on checks?”
“Over five hundred dollars. And we reconcile every month. Naomi and I.”
David nodded slowly. For the first time that morning he looked something close to pleased. “Well,” he said. “Somebody built a room.”
At ten fifteen he turned to a fresh page and read them what he’d written there, in the same unhurried voice.
Commission an independent review of what happened to Tessa Rowan and why. Hire people nobody at the table knew. Pay for it, don’t edit it, publish what it found.
Bring in outside advisors now, two or three, and start a real process toward a plurality of elders, some of whom should be older than forty and none of whom should live with the pastor.
Stop publishing personal testimony videos until there was a consent system that could survive a bad week, and a way to withdraw that actually worked.
No contact with Tessa Rowan except on her terms.
A plan for every name on June’s list, with people and money attached.
No more baptism pushes until the follow-up could hold the weight.
Change the bylaws so the board could remove the pastor by a majority vote, and so the pastor could not appoint or remove the people who were supposed to supervise him.
“That’s all,” David said. “For now.”
“Okay,” Eli said. He felt everyone look at him. “The review, yes. Naomi’s already making calls. Stories—the testimony series—we’ll pause that. Today. Kenzie?”
Kenzie nodded and typed.
“The baptism clips are different,” Eli said. “People ask for those. They want their families to see.”
“Jonah didn’t ask,” June said.
“Jonah signed the baptism card. It has the filming line on it.”
“In six-point font,” June said. “Under the part about wearing a dark T-shirt.”
Eli let that sit a second too long. “We’ll look at it,” he said. “Gilbert is on hold. Not dead. On hold. Elders—I want that conversation. I do. Let’s talk about how. June, I want your plan for the list.”
“You have my plan,” June said. “You’ve had it since Friday.”
“Then do it.”
“It needs three people who can make phone calls four hours a day in two languages. It needs money.”
Eli looked at Theo. Theo looked at the ceiling, did something in his head, and said, “We can do two. Starting the fifteenth.”
“Two,” June said. It wasn’t a question and it wasn’t a thank-you. She wrote it in the notebook.
David was watching Eli. He hadn’t written anything since Eli started talking.
“Write down what you said yes to,” David said. “All of you. Take a picture of it if you want. We’ll see next week which ones you kept.” He capped the pen and stood, one hand on the small of his back, and picked up his Bible and his pad and his hat. “Thank you for the coffee. Tell your grandmother the bread was very good, June. Naomi, walk me out.”
After the Camry pulled out of the lot, the room broke apart slowly, as it always did after a long meeting—people finding their keys, throwing away cups, starting side conversations in the doorway. Tamsin hugged June. Micah left without saying goodbye to anyone and Eli watched him through the blinds sitting in his car for a while before he started it. Grant went to find Brynn in the gear cage. Theo took the leftover conchas.
Kenzie stayed at the table. She waited until the room was nearly empty, and then she turned the laptop toward Eli.
“I wasn’t going to bring this up in front of him,” she said.
It was the dashboard for the Plan Your Visit form on the website—the one that asked first-timers which service they were coming to, so the greeters could look for them. On a normal week it got sixty or seventy submissions. Easter it had gotten three hundred.
The number for tomorrow was 412.
“And it’s still going,” Kenzie said. “Every time I refresh. People are coming to see.” She said it carefully, watching his face. “I don’t know if that’s good. I just think we need to be ready.”
Eli looked at the number. He felt the old lift under his ribs, the one he’d felt when the Marcus clip crossed a million, the one he’d felt Monday morning when Naomi said two thousand forty-one. He knew what David would write on the legal pad about it. He could almost see the blue ink.
“Do you want me to set up the third overflow room?” Kenzie said. “The one upstairs? We’d need to run a feed.”
“Yeah,” Eli said, before he had thought about it at all. “Do it.”
13The Sunday Crowd
The shirts were already on the loading dock when June got to the Monroe at 7:10.
Six boxes, stacked on a pallet by the stage door on Second Street, shrink-wrapped, with a packing slip in a plastic sleeve and a card taped to the top box in silver Sharpie: For your people!! Stay strong, Anchor fam. We got you. —the Kingdom Supply crew. June slit the wrap on the top box with her car key and pulled one out. Heather gray, the good soft cotton. Across the chest in a heavy white serif: WE STAND WITH ANCHOR. On the back, smaller, a little cartoon anchor with a heart for the loop, and under it, SOMETHING IS HAPPENING.
She stood on the dock holding it up by the shoulders. The sun wasn’t over the buildings yet and the air still had a little of the night’s cool in it, maybe seventy-five. Down the block a man was hosing off the sidewalk in front of a bar, and the water ran past her in the gutter toward the light rail.
“Did we order these?” said Priscilla, coming up the ramp with two coffee carafes and her lanyard around her neck.
“No.”
“Are we giving them out?”
“No,” June said. She put the shirt back in the box and folded the flaps down over it. “Help me get these into the storage room behind the ticket window. And if anybody asks, they’re not ours.”
“They kind of are ours,” Priscilla said. “They say Anchor on them.”
“They’re not ours,” June said again.
By eight the line for the nine o’clock service went down the block past the bar and around the corner onto First Street.
It had never done that at nine. Nine was the quiet service—families, the older couples who’d found them after the magazine cover, people who liked to be home before the heat. June stood at the connections table in the lobby under the old chandelier with a stack of fresh cards and the laminated sign that said NEW? START HERE and watched the doors open, and watched the people come in, and started, from habit, to sort them.
There were the regulars. She knew a lot of them by name and more of them by face: the Hernandez family with the four boys in matching polos, Big Ernie Salcido and his wife, the nursing students who sat together in the balcony. They came in looking a little braced, like people walking back into a house after somebody in it has had a public fight, and then they saw each other and hugged harder than usual.
There were the new ones who were really new. They came in slowly and looked up at the ceiling—everybody looked up at the Monroe’s ceiling, with its painted panels and gold trim—and then looked for somewhere to stand that wasn’t in the way. A boy of maybe nineteen in a gas-station uniform. A woman with a stroller. Two older men who seemed to be together and who kept reading the bulletin as if it might explain something.
And there were the others. June didn’t have a word for them yet. There were a lot of them. They came in with their phones already up. A couple in matching sunglasses filmed the lobby in a slow pan, and the woman narrated in a low bright voice—okay, so we’re here, this is the actual church—and the man said something that made her laugh. Two guys in their twenties had a phone on a short stick and a little clip-on microphone, and one of them was talking straight into it as they came through the doors: “—live inside the content church, chat, let’s see if we can find the crying section, somebody said there’s a whole row—“
A group of six from Mesa came in wearing the shirts. The same heather gray, the same heavy white letters. June stared at them.
“They’re selling them,” Kenzie said at her elbow. She’d come down from the booth with her laptop hugged to her chest. “On the Kingdom Supply site. Twenty-eight dollars. They put it up Friday night. Fifteen percent goes to us, it says. I didn’t—nobody asked me.”
“Can you get them to take it down?”
“I emailed them at like one in the morning.” Kenzie looked at the six shirts with the expression of someone watching her own car get towed. “They said the response has been overwhelming.”
Naomi had told the ushers, in a text at six that morning, to let everyone in. It’s a church. Everybody comes in. No filming in kids’ check-in or the nursery—be polite, be firm. Tamsin has final word downstairs. Nobody argues with anyone in the lobby. The ushers were doing their best. They were mostly college students and retirees in black ANCHOR CITY lanyards, and June watched them smile at the phones and hand out bulletins to the phones and say welcome, glad you’re here to the phones, and she watched a sixty-eight-year-old usher named Mr. Dwight, who had come to the warehouse the first summer because his granddaughter sang on the worship team, stand between the stick-camera guys and the door to the kids’ wing with his arms folded and his hearing aid whistling, not saying anything at all, until they went the other way.
At 8:52, one of the stick-camera guys sat down in an aisle seat on the main floor, found the little QR sticker on the seat back in front of him—the one that said Decided to follow Jesus today? Scan here!—and scanned it on camera, and read the form out loud to his chat in a flat, delighted voice. First name. Last name. Best number to reach you. Would you like someone to contact you? Yes, please. Yes, please! He tapped yes and laughed.
June had asked for those stickers to come off on the twenty-fourth. There were eleven hundred of them. She stood in the aisle and looked at the one nearest her, on the back of row K, and thought about the form landing in the system with yes, please checked, and about the automated text it would get in five minutes, and the one three days later, and the one a week after that, and nobody calling.
She heard the nine o’clock sermon from the lobby, through the speakers over the doors.
Eli was in Nehemiah 4. It was the next chapter in the series; it had been on the calendar since February. Sanballat and Tobiah on the walls of Jerusalem, laughing at the builders. He read it in the King James, which he did sometimes when he wanted a text to sound old and hard, and through the lobby speakers it echoed a little off the tile.
“What do these feeble Jews? will they fortify themselves? will they sacrifice? will they make an end in a day?” Eli let it hang. “You hear that? That’s the voice of every person who’s never built anything. That’s the voice from the cheap seats. And listen to Tobiah—he’s standing right there next to him—Even that which they build, if a fox go up, he shall even break down their stone wall.”
The room laughed. June could hear it through the doors, a big warm sound. Eli was good at this. He was always good at this.
“Here’s what I know,” Eli said. “When you build, the foxes come. That’s how you know you’re building.”
The room went up. It wasn’t laughter this time. It was the sound a room makes when it has been waiting to be told it’s all right—applause and whistles and somebody shouting come on from the balcony. In the lobby, Priscilla looked at June. Two of the new people at the table, a young couple holding hands, looked at each other.
June looked down at the stack of cards in front of her and straightened it, although it was already straight.
By 10:15 the clip was up. Not on Anchor City’s account—Kenzie had been told on Saturday not to post anything from this Sunday except the service times—but on three or four fan pages and a dozen personal ones, filmed from the seats, vertical, shaky, captioned in big white letters: WHEN YOU BUILD THE FOXES COME 🦊🔥. One of them had nine thousand views before the nine o’clock crowd had cleared the lobby.
The woman with the sign was standing under the marquee when June went out at 10:25 to check the line for eleven.
She was in her fifties, maybe, white, with a sunburned nose and a wide straw hat and a canvas tote bag over one shoulder. She was alone. She wasn’t chanting. She was just standing on the sidewalk, a little to the side of the doors so she wasn’t blocking anyone, holding a piece of white poster board in both hands. It said, in black marker, very neatly, CONSENT IS NOT CONTENT.
People in the line were looking at her and then looking away. One of the guys from Mesa in the WE STAND WITH ANCHOR shirt said something to his friend and they both laughed.
It was already eighty-eight degrees. The shade under the marquee was moving off the sidewalk as the sun came over the building across the street.
June went back inside, got two bottles of water from the cooler behind the connections table, and came back out.
“Here,” she said.
The woman looked at the water and then at June’s lanyard. “You work here.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Are they sending you out to ask me to move?”
“No. It’s hot.” June held the bottle out. After a second the woman shifted the sign to one hand and took it. “I’m June.”
“Gloria.”
June took the green notebook out of her back pocket and the pen out of the spiral and wrote Gloria — marquee — May 3 on a fresh page. Gloria watched her do it.
“What’s that for?”
“I pray for people,” June said. “I write the names down or I forget them.”
Gloria drank some of the water. She looked at the line, and at the gold letters on the marquee, and at June. “My daughter did one of these,” she said. “At a church in Mesa. Not this one. Five years ago. She was eight months sober and she got up and told everybody about the worst night of her life and they filmed it, and it was beautiful, it really was. It’s still on their YouTube. She’s asked them four times to take it down. She’s a dental hygienist now. Her patients find it.” She screwed the cap back on the bottle. “Nobody here did anything to me. I just saw that girl’s video and I thought, well, somebody ought to stand here.”
“What’s your daughter’s name?”
Gloria looked at her for a long moment. “Allison,” she said.
June wrote it under Gloria’s. Allison. Mesa. The video.
“You can come in,” June said. “If you want. It’s cooler.”
“No,” Gloria said. “Thank you. I’ll stand here.”
Jonah texted her at 10:31. im here. is that ok
He was standing inside the doors when she came back in, in a black T-shirt and work boots, with his hands in his pockets. He looked like he’d come straight from the fulfillment center, which he had—he’d gotten off at six and gone home and not been able to sleep, he said, and he’d thought maybe he wanted to see it in the daytime. He’d never come to eleven before. He was looking past her into the auditorium.
“Is that them?” he said. “The streaming dudes?”
The stick-camera guys had moved up to the front for the eleven o’clock, to the second row, where they had a view of the stage and of the stock tank, which sat drained and dry at stage left under a black cloth. One of them was pointing the phone at the tank.
“Yeah,” June said.
“They did a whole thing on me,” Jonah said. “The It’s cold part. They stitched it with a laugh track.” He said it flatly, like reading off a label. “My dad sent it to me again yesterday. Different one.”
“I know.”
“Should I be here?”
June looked at him. He was twenty-two and six-one and could lift a pallet jack, and he was asking her permission.
“You want to know what I remember?” she said. “About your baptism? I was on the side of the stage with the towels. You went down and you came up and the first thing you said wasn’t Hallelujah or anything. It was It’s cold.” She watched his face. “Pastor Eli said, It’s ninety degrees, bro. And you said, That’s it? Like you’d expected something else to happen. And he said You’re his.” She shrugged. “Nobody writes It’s cold. Nobody practices that. It was the realest thing anybody said all night.”
Jonah looked at the floor. The corner of his mouth moved.
“Want me to sit with you?” June said.
She went backstage first, to drop the morning’s cards in the lockbox, and passed the green room on the way. The door was half open. Eli was inside with Kenzie and Naomi, and Kenzie was holding the laptop up for him to see.
“Main room’s full,” Kenzie was saying. “Both overflows downstairs are full. We’re opening upstairs now. If it holds for Night, it’s—“ She did the math out loud. “It’s twenty-six fifty for the day. Maybe twenty-seven.”
“Twenty-seven hundred,” Eli said.
He was standing by the mirror in his black T-shirt, with the headset mic already taped along his jaw, and June saw his face change. It lifted. Not a smile, exactly. It was the look he’d had in the warehouse the first night there were more than a hundred people, standing on the plywood riser and looking out at them all in the folding chairs with his hands on his head. She had loved that look. She had been one of the hundred.
“God’s not done,” Eli said. He said it softly, to himself, or to Naomi. “Right? After all of that. God’s not done with us.”
Naomi didn’t say anything.
June stood in the hall with the lockbox and the stack of cards against her chest. There were two hundred and eighty of them from nine o’clock. She had flipped through them at the table. Sixty-one said I decided to follow Jesus today. Nineteen said please call me. One, in pencil, in handwriting that sloped down the card like it was falling, said I don’t know why I’m here I just saw the thing online and I haven’t been in a church since I was 12.
She put the cards in the lockbox and turned the key.
The band was starting when she came back out. The house lights were going down to blue. She found Jonah where she’d known she would find him, on the end of row Q, and she sat down next to him, and he moved his knee over an inch to give her room.
14The Sermon That Fails
From the stage, with the house lights down and the wash in his eyes, Eli could see about eight rows before the Monroe dissolved into dark. He had learned to preach to the eight rows and let his voice carry the rest.
At eleven o’clock the eight rows were wrong.
The two guys with the phone on a stick were in row B, dead center, where the Hernandez boys usually sat. The phone was up and pointed at him, a small black rectangle with a red dot, and the one holding it had his other hand cupped around the little microphone. Row C was the couple in matching sunglasses, who had taken the sunglasses off. There were shirts he didn’t recognize—a gray one in row F, two in row G, the words across the chest too far to read, but he knew the font. Somebody in row D was filming the stock tank under its black cloth.
Farther back, at the edge of what he could see, in row Q, June Alvarez was sitting on the aisle next to Jonah Price. Jonah had his arms crossed and his eyes on the floor.
Eli put his hand on the music stand where the iPad sat with his notes. He’d preached this at nine. It had gone better than anything had gone in two weeks. When he’d come off the stage the first time, Kenzie had met him in the wings holding up her phone to show him a fan page’s clip of the fox line already climbing, and Grant had clapped him on the back for the first time since he’d come back, and Eli had stood in the green room with a bottle of water feeling the sermon still humming in his arms like a rope he’d just let go of. He had been afraid for eleven days. For forty minutes at nine o’clock he had not been afraid.
“Nehemiah four,” he said. “Let’s stand and read it.”
He read the King James again. It had worked at nine. The room stood and he read Sanballat’s sneer—What do these feeble Jews?—and he heard his own voice come back off the plaster, strong and dry, the old words landing like thrown stones. He read Tobiah’s fox. He said the line about the cheap seats and got the laugh, a little smaller than at nine but warm. He said When you build, the foxes come, and the room went up again, and in row B the guy with the phone grinned into it and said something to his chat.
He moved through the outline. The iPad scrolled under his thumb. Point one: Mockery is a weapon. Point two: The goal of mockery is to get you to put down the trowel. He told the story he’d told at nine, about a guy on the warehouse roof the first summer with a nail gun, and a neighbor across Grand Avenue yelling at him that nobody was coming to a church in a furniture shop. The room liked it. He could feel them liking it.
Point three was the application. At nine he’d said it and the room had nearly come off its hinges. He had it written on the iPad in his own shorthand:
THIS WEEK — ppl who’ve never built anything — deciding who we are from one video — fox on the wall — WE DO NOT COME DOWN.
“Some of you have seen what’s been said about us this week,” Eli said.
The room went very still. It was the stillness he’d been waiting for; it was exactly right. He took a breath to go on.
“There are people,” he said, “who have never built anything—“
And then he saw her.
Not Tessa. She wasn’t there; she would never be there. He saw the sentence from her video, the one he had watched on his couch with the sound low: I’ve been sober for a little over three years. He had never seen the rooms where she’d kept those three years, and he saw one anyway—folding chairs, a coffee urn, a clock on a cinder-block wall. Every single day of it, one after another, for eleven hundred and some days. He had heard her say it and he had not really heard it, because he’d been listening for the part that could hurt him.
She had built something. She’d built it on a wall a lot more exposed than his. And he had put it on the internet with his best friend’s song under it, and when it started to come down he’d asked whether they were exposed, and now he was standing on a stage in a restored vaudeville theater with his name on a banner in the lobby about to tell a full house and a livestream that she was a fox.
Even that which they build.
He stopped.
He didn’t stop the way preachers stop, for effect, with a look. He stopped like a car with a dead engine. The room waited. He was aware of the phone in row B, the red dot. He was aware of the iPad under his hand and the next line on it and his mouth still slightly open. He was aware of Micah at the keys behind him and to his right, and of the monitor wedge at his feet hissing faintly with room tone, and of his own heartbeat in the headset mic, or he imagined he was.
Ten seconds. Fifteen. Somebody coughed in the balcony.
“I’m going to stop,” Eli said.
His voice sounded strange in the room. Small.
“I was about to say something,” he said, “about someone who told the truth about us. And I was going to make her the bad guy in a story about me.” He swallowed. “I’m not going to do that. I’m not—I’m sorry. I can’t finish this one.”
The room didn’t move.
“Micah,” Eli said, without turning around. “Can you come up?”
He didn’t remember walking off. He remembered the black cloth over the stock tank, very close to his shin as he passed it, and the smell of the wings—dust and gaffer tape and hot lights—and Rae, the stage manager, with her headset on and her mouth open, stepping back to let him by. He remembered Micah’s first chord behind him, not “Morning Comes,” something older, and the room beginning to sing it raggedly, not sure yet if it was supposed to: Come, thou fount of every blessing, tune my heart to sing thy grace.
Then he was pushing through the stage door onto the loading dock, into the white noon, and the heat hit him like opening an oven.
He made it down the dock steps and around the corner of the dumpster enclosure before his stomach turned over. There was nothing in it but the green-room water, and he bent over the gutter with one hand on the hot cinder-block wall and heaved anyway, again and again, his eyes streaming, the headset mic still taped to his cheek and bobbing in front of his mouth like a bug. When it stopped he straightened up and tried to peel the tape off and it took a strip of skin with it and he said ow out loud, to no one, and then sat down on the curb in the thin wedge of shade the dumpster made and put his head between his knees.
His hands were shaking. He watched them do it. He’d seen people shake like this in the tank, sometimes, coming up—not from cold, from something else—and he’d put his hand on their backs and said You’re good, you’re good.
He heard the stage door open and close. Naomi’s flats on the dock, then on the steps.
She didn’t say anything. She sat down on the curb next to him, in her Sunday blazer, in the dirt, and handed him a bottle of water with the cap already off. He drank half of it and poured the rest over his head.
“Is he still singing?” Eli said.
“Third verse.”
“Prone to wander,” Eli said. It came out in a croak.
“Yeah.”
“Is it on their phone? Row B?”
“Everything’s on somebody’s phone, Eli.”
He put his forearms across his knees and his forehead on his forearms. Down at Washington a light-rail train crossed Second Street with its bell ringing. The heat came up off the asphalt in waves he could feel through his joggers.
The stage door opened again. He didn’t lift his head. He heard slow steps on the dock, a hand on the rail, one step at a time down the stairs, and a small grunt at the bottom, and then a shadow fell across him that was shaped like a man in a wide hat.
“You came,” Eli said into his arms.
“Back row of the balcony,” David said. “Ruth made me. She said somebody should be in the room who wasn’t going to film it or clap.”
“Did you see—“
“I saw.”
Eli waited. He found he wanted something from David very badly—that was good or that was right or even that was a start—and he could feel himself wanting it, and could feel David not giving it to him, as surely as you can feel a door that won’t open before you’ve finished turning the knob.
“You have a six o’clock,” David said instead.
“I can’t preach tonight.”
“Then don’t.”
“I have to do something. It’s Night. It’s the biggest service. There’ll be even more of them.”
“There will,” David said. He lowered himself onto an upturned milk crate by the dumpster, carefully, one hand on his knee. “Where’d your series start?”
“What?”
“Your Nehemiah. You’ve been at it since February, Naomi says. Where’d you start?”
“Chapter one.”
“What’s the man doing in chapter one?”
Eli lifted his head. His eyes were stinging from the sweat and the water. “Praying,” he said.
“What’s he praying?”
He knew it. He’d preached it the second week of February, to a full room, with a slide. He’d titled it Burdened to Build. He’d skipped straight from Nehemiah’s weeping to his big ask of the king in chapter two, because that was where the energy was.
“He’s confessing,” Eli said. “Both I and my father’s house have sinned.”
David nodded. He didn’t say anything else. After a minute he took his hat off and fanned himself with it, slowly, and put it back on.
At 2:40 that afternoon, on the couch in the bungalow with the blinds shut, Eli let Kenzie show him the numbers because she asked if she could, and because he’d told her all spring that he wanted to know everything.
The guys in row B had posted it at 12:15. They’d cut it tight: the fox line and the big applause, then a hard jump to Eli frozen on stage, then I’m going to stop, then the walk off past the black cloth. Somebody had put a sad trombone under the walk-off in one version and violins in another. The captions ranged from PASTOR HAS BREAKDOWN LIVE ON STAGE to this is what accountability looks like??? to he’s faking it, this is a pivot, watch. Four hundred and ten thousand views across the versions Kenzie could find. The fan pages that had posted the fox line at ten were now posting the stop, some with prayer hands and some with nothing.
“Do you want to see the comments?” Kenzie said.
“No.”
“There are some good ones.”
“No,” Eli said. “Thank you.”
At six o’clock he walked out onto the stage of the Monroe with no iPad and no outline and his Bible, the one with the cracked spine he’d had since Sonoran Christian, and he stood at the music stand and looked out at the eight rows. More phones than at eleven. More gray shirts. A girl in row A with a poster-board sign on her lap that said WE LOVE YOU PASTOR ELI in glitter, face down, as if she wasn’t sure yet whether to hold it up.
“Nehemiah one,” he said. “I’m going to read it. Then I’m going to sit down.”
He read it. He read from verse four, where Nehemiah hears that the wall of Jerusalem is broken down and sits down and weeps, and mourns certain days, and fasts. He read the prayer. He read it slowly, all of it, and when he got to the sixth verse his voice did something he didn’t let it do, and he stopped and waited for it to come back.
“Let thine ear now be attentive,” he read, “and thine eyes open, that thou mayest hear the prayer of thy servant, which I pray before thee now, day and night, for the children of Israel thy servants, and confess the sins of the children of Israel, which we have sinned against thee: both I and my father’s house have sinned.”
He closed the Bible.
“That’s what I’ve got tonight,” he said.
He came down the stage steps on the side, past the tank, and walked up the center aisle through the whole length of the room while Micah began to play. He felt the phones turn to follow him. He did not look at them. At the back of the house, by the sound booth, there was an empty seat on the end of the last row, where Omar sometimes sat during the sermon when he didn’t have a cue. Eli sat down in it. The man in the next seat, a stranger in a work shirt with a name patch that said RAUL, glanced at him and then glanced back at the stage, and after a while, during the second song, he held out a piece of spearmint gum without saying anything, and Eli took it.
15Micah Confronts Him
Hannah was the one who told him to go.
He called her from the parking garage on Jefferson after the Night service, with the car running for the air and the phone on speaker on the dash, and he told her about Eli walking up the aisle and sitting in the back row next to a stranger, and how the room hadn’t known what to do, and how Micah had played for twenty minutes because nobody gave him a signal to stop, until Naomi came up and said the benediction herself. He told her that at eleven he’d picked “Come Thou Fount” because it was the first thing his hands found that wasn’t his own song. He told her he’d watched a guy in row B film Eli’s back as he went out.
“Micah,” Hannah said.
“Yeah.”
“Go tell him.”
He sat with his hands on the wheel.
“You’ve been carrying it since that Wednesday in April,” Hannah said. “You told me the next morning. You’ve told me every night since. You’re going to keep telling me until it’s the only thing we talk about.” She shifted; he heard the couch creak. “Go tell him. Then come home. I’ll wait up.”
“You have a seven a.m.”
“I’ve had a seven a.m. for four years. Go.”
The bungalow’s porch light was off. Theo’s car was in the driveway and there was a light on in the kitchen and the TV going low in the front room, a ballgame replay nobody was watching. Micah didn’t knock. He hadn’t knocked at this house since he’d helped them move in. He went down the side yard past the trash cans and let himself in through the gate, and there was Eli on the back step, where he’d known he would be, in the dark, with his elbows on his knees and a grapefruit in his hand he wasn’t eating.
The yard smelled like the tree. Every spring the blossoms came first and made the whole block smell like a candle shop, and then they dropped and the fruit came on, more than anybody could eat, and in May the dead ones lay in the dry grass and went soft and sweet and brown. Micah stepped around them.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
He sat down on the step next to Eli. The concrete was still warm from the day. For a while neither of them said anything. Through the screen door behind them the TV announcer said something about a pitching change.
“That was the right thing,” Micah said finally. “This morning. Stopping.”
“Was it?” Eli turned the grapefruit over in his hand. “It’s at four hundred thousand. People think it’s a stunt.”
“People think everything’s a stunt.”
“Because we taught them to,” Eli said.
Micah didn’t have an answer to that. He looked at the dark shapes of the fallen fruit in the grass and tried to find the beginning of the thing he’d come to say.
“I have to tell you something,” he said.
Eli looked at him.
“That Wednesday,” Micah said. “In the room. With Lawrence. I said I didn’t read it close. Grant’s message. The one I put the hands on.” He made himself keep looking at Eli. “I read it. I read Brynn’s first. She doesn’t want her Stories testimony posted anymore. I was at the gate in Nashville and I read that, and I felt it, like in my stomach, I knew exactly what it meant. And then I read Grant saying everybody gets cold feet and it was his call, and I let it be his call. And I put the hands on it. And that Wednesday I lied about it in front of everybody. It just came out.”
Eli didn’t say anything.
“There’s more,” Micah said. “That Friday night. After it posted. I was at home. I checked my streams.” He heard his own voice go flat and even, as it did when he was trying to get through a hard verse without his throat closing. “Not like, by accident. I have the dashboard on my phone. I watched it. It was the biggest day the song ever had. It was bigger than when it charted. I watched the line go up, and I knew it was her clip doing it, and I—“ He stopped. “I felt good. For about an hour. Then I felt sick, and I checked it again.”
The screen door creaked. Theo stood behind it in the kitchen light, holding a dish towel. He looked at the two of them on the step and then went away again without saying anything, and a second later the TV went off.
“Colby called me that Thursday,” Micah said. “He said the dashboard was telling him people were going to the song because it was under her video. He said the story now was resilience. That’s what he wants the live album to be about. And I told him the clip was hers, and I felt so righteous about it, and then I went and turned the jib off for the response, and I felt like a hero for about an hour after that too.” He laughed, and it wasn’t a laugh. “I’m really good at feeling like a hero for about an hour.”
“Why are you telling me now?” Eli said.
His voice was quiet and very even. Micah had known him since he was eighteen and Eli was his RA, since the dorm at Sonoran Christian with the broken AC unit in Eli’s room that dripped on his bed, and he knew that voice. It was the voice Eli used when he was angrier than he wanted anyone to see.
“Because you stood up there this morning and stopped,” Micah said. “In front of everybody. And I was standing behind you playing a hymn, and I’d told a lie in that room and I’d let you take the whole thing, the statement, the newspaper, all of it. And I was relieved you were taking it.”
“You let me stand there,” Eli said. “For two weeks.”
“Yes.”
“Naomi looked at you in front of Lawrence, and you shrugged, and you let me be the guy who asked if we were exposed—“
“You did ask if we were exposed.”
Eli stood up. The grapefruit rolled off his lap and down the step into the grass. He walked three steps out into the yard, toward the tree, and stood there with his back to Micah and his hands on his head, as he used to stand on the plywood riser in the warehouse.
Micah waited. Somewhere down the block a dog was going at something.
“I got a memo,” Eli said to the tree. “Fourteen months ago. From Naomi. She told me all of this. Not the consent thing exactly. But all of it. Who can tell you no. Who you’d report to. What happens when somebody gets hurt. Eleven things. I wrote back love this and an emoji.” He didn’t turn around. “So I don’t actually know what I’m mad at you for.”
“You can be mad.”
“I’m mad,” Eli said. “I’m mad that you lied. I’m mad I’m not the only one. I’m mad I wanted to be the only one, because then at least I’d be—“ He stopped. “I don’t know. The main character.”
He came back and sat down again. The step was too narrow for two grown men and their shoulders touched.
“I never called her,” Eli said. “Did you know that? Naomi said don’t, and she had reasons, and I let her reasons be mine. And I told myself I was waiting to do it right. I wasn’t waiting to do it right. I was scared she’d say exactly what she said in her video.” He looked down at his hands. “I asked if we were exposed because I was already thinking about the next thing. The conference. Gilbert. Hal. I was at dinner with Hal. I was at dinner with a donor when they told me, Micah.”
“I know.”
“She was in a drugstore.”
“I know. I read the article.”
“Everybody read the article.”
They sat.
“We were exposed,” Micah said after a while. “You were right about that. Just not legally.”
Eli made a sound that might have been a laugh.
“I’m going to tell Naomi and David,” Micah said. “Tomorrow. That I lied in April. I’ll send it tonight so I can’t back out. And I’m going to tell Colby they can’t use any of it. The spike. He had a whole thing planned, the song that moved millions. I’m going to tell him if he runs anything like that, I’ll pull the song from AWAKE myself.”
“Can you do that?”
“I don’t know,” Micah said. “I didn’t read the contract close.”
That one did make Eli laugh, a short cracked sound, and he put his face in his hands and laughed into them and it turned partway into something else and then back again. Micah put his hand on the back of Eli’s neck, as he had in the dorm when Eli’s grandpa died and he’d found him on the floor of the shower stall with the water running.
“What is it?” Eli said into his hands. “What are we afraid of? You and me. Tell me what it is, because I can’t see it anymore.”
Micah thought about it. He thought about the warehouse the night there were more than a hundred people, and Eli with his hands on his head on the riser, and how Micah had played the first chords of “Morning Comes” for the very first time that night because he’d finished it the week before in his car, and how the room had caught it by the second chorus and sung it back to him louder than he’d played it. He thought about how he’d felt—like something had come through the roof.
“Disappointing it,” he said. “The thing. The room. All the people who showed up because something was happening. I think we got so scared of being the guys who made it stop happening that we’d have done anything. We did do anything.” He took his hand off Eli’s neck. “I don’t think I’ve been afraid of disappointing God in a year. I haven’t thought about it. I’ve been afraid of disappointing the room.”
Eli wiped his face with the heel of his hand.
“Naomi got an email,” he said. “This afternoon. From the sponsor. Margie.”
Micah turned.
“She says Tessa will meet,” Eli said. “Once. With Margie. At a library downtown. There’s a list of rules. I’m not allowed to talk first. I’m not allowed to pray unless she asks. I’m not allowed to bring anybody but David and Naomi.” He looked at the fallen grapefruit in the grass. “I’m not allowed to bring you.”
“Good,” Micah said. It came out before he’d decided to say it, and he found that he meant it. “Good. She shouldn’t have to look at both of us.”
“I’ll tell her you want to apologize. If she ever wants that.”
“Only if she asks,” Micah said. “Don’t carry it in for me.”
He got home at twenty to one. The house was dark except for the blue of the TV, muted, some cooking show. Hannah was asleep on the couch on her side with a pillow between her knees and one hand spread on the curve of her belly, which at twenty-four weeks had just in the last month started to look like something from across a room. Her work badge was on the coffee table next to a bowl of cereal she hadn’t finished.
He didn’t wake her. He sat down on the floor with his back against the couch, close enough that he could feel her breathing, and opened his laptop on his knees.
Naomi, David—
He wrote it plainly. What he’d read at the gate. What he’d said in the room that Wednesday, and that it was a lie. What he’d done with the dashboard on the thirteenth. What he was going to tell Colby. He didn’t write I’m so sorry more than once. He didn’t write I just. When he was done he read it over and deleted a sentence at the end that said I hope this helps, because he’d noticed that it was the same thing Grant had written to Tessa, more or less, and because it wasn’t his to hope.
He hit send at 12:52.
Behind him Hannah shifted and her hand came down off the couch and landed on his shoulder, heavy and warm, and stayed there. He didn’t know if she was awake. He sat very still so it wouldn’t move.
16The Apology Meeting
David told him about Walt Ferris on the Monday before, in the garden behind Monte de Sión, at seven in the morning, while he watered the tomatoes.
It was the second of their weekly meetings. The first had gone the way David promised: boring. They’d sat on the wooden bench under the lemon tree for an hour and David had asked what Eli had done on each day of the previous week, in order, and written it down, and asked how many hours each thing took. Eli had not known the answer to most of them. He had not realized before that he did not know what he did all day.
This time David didn’t sit. He dragged the hose from bed to bed, a green hose patched in two places with electrical tape, and talked with his back to Eli.
“Nineteen ninety-one,” he said. “I was twenty-eight. I’d had Second Street two years. We were running a hundred and sixty on a Sunday and I thought we’d be three hundred by the time I was forty. I had a deacon named Walt Ferris. Good man. Sold insurance. Had a boy in junior high who played trombone in our Christmas program every year, badly.” He moved the hose to the peppers. “Walt came to see me in my office one Wednesday night and closed the door and told me he’d been going out to the dog track on Washington Street. For about a year. He’d lost most of what they had in savings. His wife didn’t know. He sat in the chair across my desk and cried like I’ve seen maybe four men cry in my life, and he asked me to pray with him, and I did. And I told him I’d help him tell her. And I did that too.”
He let the water run into the dirt around a pepper plant until it pooled.
“And then three weeks later I preached a sermon on stewardship,” David said. “It was a good sermon. I was proud of it. And in the middle of it I told a story about a man in our church—I didn’t say his name, you understand, I’m not a monster—a man who’d come to me in tears after losing his family’s savings at the track. I told it well. I told the part about him crying. I said, And that man is sitting in this room today, and he’s forgiven, and he’s free. And I could see people turning around. Everybody knew. It was a hundred and sixty people. His boy was in the third row with the youth group.”
The hose ran. A mockingbird in the lemon tree was working through its car alarm.
“He left the church that month. Took his family to a Nazarene church in Mesa. I told myself he was being proud. That’s what I told Ruth. He’s being proud, he can’t take being known.” David shut off the nozzle. “Took me six years to go see him. I went to his house. He answered the door and I said I needed to ask his forgiveness, and he stood there looking at me through the screen for a long time, and then he said, You’re asking me for something again, Pastor.”
He started coiling the hose on the rack. It took him a while; his shoulder was bad.
“Did he forgive you?” Eli said.
“Eventually. I think so. He came to Ruth’s mother’s funeral and shook my hand.” David hung the last loop. “He never came back to Second Street. I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t have.” He turned around and looked at Eli for the first time. “I’m telling you because Thursday you’re going to want her to make you feel better. And she’s going to be sitting right there, close enough to ask. So when you feel it coming, I want you to hear Walt at the screen door.”
The library was the big one on Central, the one that looked like a copper-clad ship somebody had run aground downtown. The meeting room was on the second floor at the end of a hallway past a row of study carrels. It had a long laminate table and eight rolling chairs and a whiteboard with the ghost of a previous meeting still on it—Q3 PRIORITIES and a lopsided circle and the word synergy half-erased. Naomi had reserved it under her own name. It was ten o’clock on Thursday, the fourteenth of May, and Tessa Rowan had taken the morning off work.
Margie Ellison’s email had been specific. One hour. Tessa speaks first and nobody interrupts her. No prayer unless Tessa asks for one. No recording of any kind. No photographs. No one from your media team, and no one from your church besides the three of you. Nothing about this meeting is to be discussed publicly by anyone at Anchor City, in any form. If any of these conditions is broken, the meeting is over. Please confirm in writing. Naomi had confirmed in writing within an hour. Eli had read the email eleven times.
He and David and Naomi arrived at 9:40 and sat on one side of the table. At 9:58 the door opened and a woman in her sixties with a gray bob and a turquoise ring on every finger but her thumbs came in first, looked at the three of them, and held the door. Tessa came in behind her.
She was smaller than on video. That was the first thing he thought and he was ashamed of it. She was in scrubs, navy blue, with a long-sleeved T-shirt under them and a lanyard with a clinic badge turned backward, and her hair was up, and she was wearing the little gold cross he’d seen in every frame of the clip. She did not look at him right away. She looked at the room—the whiteboard, the table, the door—like somebody finding the exits. Then she sat down across from him, and Margie sat next to her with a spiral notebook and a pen, and then she looked at him.
“Thank you for coming,” Naomi said. “We’re—“
“I’m going to go first,” Tessa said. “That was the deal.”
“Yes,” Naomi said. “I’m sorry.”
Tessa took a folded piece of paper out of her scrub pocket and unfolded it and flattened it on the table with both hands. Eli could see it was a list, handwritten. She didn’t read from it. She looked at it once and put her hand over it and talked.
She talked for thirty-one minutes. Eli knew because there was a clock on the wall above the whiteboard, the plain round kind they have in schools, and he found he could look at it when he couldn’t look at her, and he made himself look at her.
She told him about her mother. How her mother hadn’t known that Tessa knew about the Folgers can. How her mother found out from a pastor’s wife at Grace Fellowship in Chandler named Sherry, who had sent her the clip with a prayer-hands emoji. How her mother had called that same night and said But you said it and hung up, and hadn’t answered since. How Tessa had driven to Chandler on a Thursday in April and sat in her car in front of the house with the brick-red door and seen the blinds in the front window part and close and not open again. “My sister’s at NAU,” Tessa said. “She won’t take sides. She says she loves us both. That’s the nicest thing anybody in my family has said to me since March.”
She told him about the messages. She’d brought some; she didn’t read them. She said the word Jezebel and then said it again, as though testing whether it still meant anything. She told him about the man from Queen Creek in the golf shirt at the clinic, and Luz at the front desk being brave, and Dr. Kim moving her to surgery prep, and how she loved exam rooms, she’d always loved exam rooms, the owners and their faces when you tell them it’s nothing, and she hadn’t been in one in two weeks.
She told him about the night of the thirteenth, but not much. She said she’d been in a CVS at twenty after nine with a bottle in her hand, and that she’d put it back, and that she wasn’t going to tell him the rest because the rest was hers and Margie’s. She said it like a door closing, not hard. Eli found he wanted the rest. He didn’t ask.
“I put it back,” Tessa said. “Margie came. At 10:41 I watched it disappear off your account from the parking lot.” She looked at him. “The next morning your guy texted me So so sorry for the mixup with two exclamation points. Praying for you.”
She told him about his statement. She said she’d read it forty times. She said it said she’d signed a release as if the conversation stopped there. She said it said we reached out personally to apologize. “Nobody had reached out to me when you wrote that,” she said. “Grant texted me a mixup. That’s it. Naomi’s email came five days after your statement said you’d already done it. You didn’t call. You never called. I kept my phone on the counter at night with the ringer on for six weeks. I thought—I really thought—he’s a pastor, he’s going to call.”
Eli didn’t move.
“And the thing that got me,” Tessa said. “The one I can’t get past.” She turned her list over, although he didn’t think there was anything on the back. “The screenshots. The part where they told you. You didn’t ask how I was. You asked if you were exposed.” She said the word carefully, as if handling something sharp. “I was the one who was exposed. I was the one standing in a CVS with my whole life on a million phones. You were at a steakhouse.”
She stopped. The clock said 10:31. Margie, beside her, had not written anything in the notebook the whole time. She had her hand flat on the table near Tessa’s, not touching.
“Okay,” Tessa said. “That’s mine.”
Eli had written something. He’d written it Tuesday night at the kitchen table and rewritten it Wednesday and David had read it on the bench Wednesday afternoon and handed it back and said, “Don’t read this to her. You’ll read it well.” He had it folded in his pocket. He left it there.
“Everything you said is true,” he said.
His voice shook on true and he let it.
“When Naomi told me, I was at dinner with a donor. The first thing I thought about was whether you’d signed the release. The second thing I thought about was whether you could sue us. The third thing I thought about was what we’d say if you posted. I didn’t think about you in that CVS. I didn’t think about you at all until much later. And when I did, I didn’t call, because I was told to wait, and because I told myself I was waiting to do it right, and neither of those is the real reason. The real reason is I was scared you’d say what you just said.” He made himself keep his hands still on the table. “The statement was wrong. It said things that weren’t true. Reached out personally wasn’t true. It made it sound like the release settled it. It didn’t. You withdrew. We had your email. We ignored it because the video was doing well.”
Tessa’s face didn’t change.
“Where’s Micah?” Tessa said.
Eli hadn’t expected it. “Your list said the three of us.”
“I know what my list said. He put the hands on it.” She looked at him. “Does he want to say something to me?”
“Yes,” Eli said. “He asked me not to bring it in here unless you asked.”
Tessa thought about that. “Not today,” she said. “He can write it down. Give it to Margie. I’ll read it when I read it.”
“Okay.”
Margie turned her notebook around and slid it across the table. On the page, in neat round print, was a numbered list.
1. A public correction of the April 22 statement, stating specifically what was not true in it.
2. Anchor City pays for Tessa’s counseling from March 13 forward, for as long as she needs it, with no conditions of any kind attached.
3. Continued effort to get the reposts taken down (11—list attached).
4. Anchor City never again uses Tessa’s name, voice, face, story, or likeness in any form, including to apologize.
5. All raw footage of her testimony deleted, and written confirmation that it has been.
Eli read it. Naomi read it beside him and took a pen out and began, very quietly, to copy it.
“Yes,” Eli said. “All five.”
“Read number four out loud,” Margie said.
David, beside Eli, made a small noise in his throat that could have been a cough. Eli read it out loud. His voice went wrong on including to apologize, and he stopped, and started the sentence over, and finished it.
“Including from the stage,” Tessa said. “I don’t want you to say my name up there. Not to say you’re sorry. Not ever.”
“Okay,” Eli said. “Yes. All five.”
“Seven of the reposts are down,” Naomi said. “Lawrence has letters out on the other four. The footage—I’ll get you the confirmation in writing by Monday. I’ll do it myself. Grant won’t touch it.”
Tessa nodded. She folded her list and put it back in her scrub pocket. The clock said 10:44. There were sixteen minutes left and Eli had the feeling, strong and physical, like standing at the top of the stage stairs, that there was one more thing he was supposed to say, the thing that would close it. He knew what it was. He could feel the shape of the words in his mouth. Can you forgive me.
He heard, instead, an old man at a screen door.
He kept his mouth shut.
Tessa watched him. Something in her face shifted—he couldn’t have said what. She tilted her head a little, like she did in the video when she was working out how to say the next part.
“You didn’t ask me to forgive you,” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
He thought about it. He tried to find the true answer and not the good one. “Because it would be for me,” he said.
Tessa looked at him for a long moment.
“Okay,” she said.
She stood up. Margie stood with her. At the door Tessa stopped with her hand on the frame and didn’t turn around, and he thought she was going to say something else, and then she didn’t, and she went out, and Margie followed her, and the door swung slowly closed on its hydraulic arm.
In the parking garage under the library, in the passenger seat of Naomi’s car, Eli started shaking again. Not as bad as Sunday. Just his hands and his knees, a low constant tremor, like the car was idling rough. Naomi turned the air on high and didn’t pull out.
David was in the back seat with his hat on his knee.
“You did it right,” he said after a while.
Eli closed his eyes.
“Don’t tell anybody how it went,” David said. “Not even the good version. Especially not the good version.”
The correction took Eli one evening to write and three months to post.
He wrote it Thursday night at the kitchen table, and it was short, because every sentence in it was a thing they had said that wasn’t true and then a sentence saying so. He read it to Naomi on the phone Friday morning. She said, “Send it to Lawrence.” At seven on Monday Lawrence was at the mesquite table in person, for the first time since the Ledger interview, in the same gray suit, with a printout of the draft and a printout of something else.
The something else was a letter from the church’s insurance carrier. Eli had not known the church had an insurance carrier that wrote letters. Theo had; Theo had bought the policy.
“After the Ledger story I notified them, because the policy requires it,” Lawrence said. “They opened a file. That’s routine.” He put his finger on a paragraph. “This isn’t. Every liability policy you’ll ever sign says the insured won’t admit liability or make voluntary payments without the carrier’s consent. They’ve written to remind us. They’d like the church to make no public admissions of fact until the independent review is complete, so that”—he read it—“the findings of the review may speak for themselves.”
“She asked for it Thursday,” Eli said. “It’s the first thing on her list.”
“I read the list.” Lawrence took his glasses off. “I’m not telling you not to. I’m telling you what it costs. You publish this Friday, and next spring she sues, or somebody in one of those sixty-some videos sues, and the carrier can decline to defend you. Then it’s the reserve.”
“She’s not going to sue.”
“Probably not. And the counseling I can get them to sign off on; carriers approve that kind of thing. It’s the admissions they won’t touch. I’ve heard probably not maybe two hundred times in this job. I was right to worry about eleven of them.”
Theo had the reserve on a sheet in front of him. He didn’t make a speech. He said it was a little over a million dollars, and that the AWAKE deposits were in it, and four months of payroll, and that a suit that went the distance in Maricopa County cost two or three hundred thousand to defend whether you won or not. Then he stopped and looked at the sheet.
Naomi said, “If we post it, I need the carrier’s answer in writing by Thursday so we know what we’re giving up. If we don’t, somebody needs to write Margie today, because she’ll know by Friday either way.” She had written Thursday and Margie—today on her legal pad and underlined both. That was all she said.
David was in the corner. Nobody had asked him. When Eli looked over he said, “I’d post it,” and then, after a moment, “I don’t make anybody’s payroll anymore,” and looked out the window.
Eli read the draft again. It was the truest thing he’d written in a year. He thought about Tessa’s hand flat over her list. He thought about the twenty-four people on staff, and the part-timers, and the band, and that eleven of them had kids. He thought about the carrier’s lawyer, whoever that was, who was not wrong.
“We wait for the review,” he said. “I’ll write Margie myself.”
Nobody told him he was right. Lawrence put the letter back in his folder. David kept looking out the window.
He wrote it that afternoon and didn’t let Naomi soften it.
Margie—Tessa asked for a public correction and she should have it. Our insurer has asked us to make no public statements of fact until the independent review is finished, and our lawyer has advised us to agree. I’ve decided to wait. That’s my decision, not theirs and not Naomi’s. It means the statement that isn’t true will stay the only thing we’ve said about her for months. I’m sorry. The counseling doesn’t wait. Her counselor can send us invoices starting now, whenever Tessa is willing, and nothing about that is conditioned on anything.—Eli
Margie wrote back in four minutes.
Noted.
17The Leak Widens
Luz showed her at lunch, on the last Tuesday in May.
They were in the break room at Desert Willow, which was also the room where they kept the donated towels and the extra kennel pads and a mini fridge with a handwritten sign on it that said NO SPECIMENS IN HERE!!! THIS MEANS YOU, DR. PATEL. Tessa had a turkey sandwich and a sleeve of saltines. Luz had her phone out under the table, as she did when she wasn’t sure she should be showing you something.
“You’re going to see it anyway,” Luz said. “I’d rather you see it with me.”
It was a post from Steeple Receipts, the watchdog account with the gold-foil receipt for a logo, the one that had reposted Tessa’s first video in April and then written to her four times asking for an interview. The post was a carousel. The first slide was black with white type: THE ANCHOR CITY FILES. Forty-three documents from a former Anchor City media volunteer. Swipe. Read. Decide for yourself.
Tessa swiped.
A cue sheet for a Sunday last November, the kind stage managers use, a grid of times and names and camera positions. Somebody had drawn a red box around one line. RESPONSE (Micah keys) — Jib: slow push front rows. Handheld: HOLD on any tears. Crier in row C (blue top) — GET HER.
A slide from a planning deck. EASTER BAPTISM GOAL: 50 (stretch: 75!!) with a clip-art firework.
A message from Grant to the volunteer camera crew. Reminder team!! Hook in the first 3 sec or it’s DEAD. Faces > wide shots. Emotion > everything.
A volunteer group chat where somebody had posted a baptism clip and three people had rated it. 7/10 good cry, bad angle. 8 the gasp at the end tho. Dex would give it a 5 lol he hates slow ones.
And then, near the end, a PDF. Governance & Care Gaps — DRAFT for discussion. Eleven numbered items. Tessa read down to the sixth before she realized what it was. 1. Elder plurality. 2. Membership. 3. Staff supervision. 4. A grievance process. 5. A written care plan for hospital visits and deaths. 6. Media consent procedures. Under it, a screenshot of a reply, dated fifteen months ago.
Love this. So grateful for you. Let’s build structure when the dust settles 🙏
Tessa put the phone face down on the table.
“You okay?” Luz said.
“That’s the one that gets me,” Tessa said. “Not the crier in row C. The prayer hands.”
By Tuesday night the files were everywhere.
She’d kept the phone rules—thirty minutes at lunch, thirty at night, then the junk drawer—but it didn’t matter; Luz and Marisol and Dr. Kim’s husband and her sister and a girl she’d been in rehab with in Wickenburg all sent her things, and she didn’t have the heart to tell them not to. The hashtag from April had come back. Somebody had cut the cue sheet into a meme template. A comedian did a bit where he held an imaginary gimbal and whispered get the crier, get the crier into a pillow. A pastor in Dallas made a thread about how this was what happened when you let millennials run churches, and a pastor in Seattle made a thread about the pastor in Dallas, and both threads had Tessa’s face in them somewhere.
That was the thing. Her face was in everything.
It wasn’t the Anchor City clip anymore—that was down, mostly; the church’s letters had worked on eight of the eleven reposts by now. It was her own video. The one she’d made at her kitchen table in April, with Biscuit getting down off the other chair and walking out of frame. People had taken it and cut it up and put it next to the cue sheet and under the prayer hands and over sad piano music. A man with two million followers who called himself a church-abuse educator had made a twelve-minute video titled THE ANCHOR CITY FILES: A Breakdown, and the thumbnail was Tessa’s face on the left and Eli’s face on the right with a jagged red line between them, and it had been up for nineteen hours and had one point four million views.
She hadn’t agreed to any of it.
She had also watched the clip of Eli walking off his stage. Luz had sent it the day it happened, with no comment. Tessa watched it once and felt nothing she could name. She watched it again and felt something small and mean and warm, like getting into a car that had been sitting in the sun, and she watched it a third time for that. Then she deleted Luz’s message so she couldn’t do it a fourth time, and felt worse about the third time than the first two put together.
She wrote to him Wednesday night, a short polite message: she was the woman in the video, she hadn’t consented to her face being used in his thumbnail or his video, and she’d appreciate it if he’d take it down or at least blur her.
He wrote back in eleven minutes. Hi Tessa!! First, I’m so sorry for everything you’ve been through, truly. I hear you. Unfortunately this is a matter of significant public interest and your video was posted publicly, so it falls under fair use for commentary purposes. We have not used your full name. We believe amplifying your story is the best way to protect other survivors. Praying for you! 🙏
She read it in the break room with the timer running and laughed out loud, one sharp bark that made Luz look up from the microwave.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Tessa said. “I just got prayed for again.”
Beck Solano’s email came the next morning. He’d written twice before, in April, from the address for Cracked Pulpit, the podcast. This time he wrote from his personal account and the tone was different, closer, like he was leaning across a table.
Tessa—I know you’ve said no, and I’ve respected that. But I want to be honest with you: this isn’t just your story anymore. With the Files out, this is about a whole system. Hundreds of people are going to see themselves in this. You have a voice nobody else has. I’d give you complete control—you can approve the edit, you can pull it anytime, you can say as much or as little as you want. I think this is the moment. I think you’d regret not taking it.
She read the part about approving the edit and pulling it anytime twice. She thought about a form on a website with the word irrevocable in it, and about a man who’d said everybody gets cold feet.
No thank you, she wrote back. Please don’t contact me again.
She meant it kindly. She didn’t know if he’d take it that way. She found she didn’t need him to.
Brynn texted her Wednesday afternoon, the first text since the night in April when she’d sent the screenshots.
that wasnt me. the files. i swear to god. i would never
Tessa was on her break, sitting in her car in the shade of the clinic’s one palo verde with the engine on and the windows up. She looked at the message for a long time.
I know, she wrote back. I believe you.
theyre asking everybody in media who did it. i feel like im going to throw up every day. i cant tell anyone. i cant tell anyone about you either
Tessa thought about Margie in the passenger seat of the Civic in the CVS parking lot. Margie hadn’t said one wise thing that whole night. She’d said Where are you. She’d said Can you put it back on the shelf. She’d said Okay, okay, I’m getting off at Southern, like a woman reading exits off a sign. It had been enough.
You need to tell somebody, Tessa typed. Not me. Somebody who can actually help you. Somebody at that church who’s decent. There has to be one.
The dots came and went three times.
there’s june, Brynn wrote.
Then tell June.
Her mother called Thursday night at 9:14.
Tessa was on the couch with Biscuit on her chest, both of them half asleep in front of a nature show about octopuses, and the phone was in the junk drawer in the kitchen where it was supposed to be at night, and she almost didn’t hear it. She heard it on the fourth ring. She got up so fast Biscuit went off the couch like a thrown sock.
The screen said MOM.
She stood in the kitchen with the drawer open and the phone buzzing in her hand. Six rings. Seven. She answered.
“Hi,” she said.
There was a long silence on the line. Tessa could hear a TV in the background, the same one, the big one in the living room in Chandler. She could hear her mother breathe.
“Was it true,” Denise said.
Her voice was flat and small. It didn’t sound like a question. It sounded like somebody reading a line off a card.
“Which part,” Tessa said.
“What you said. On that thing. About the—“ Her mother stopped. “The can.”
Tessa put her free hand on the counter. It was cool and a little sticky where she’d spilled orange juice that morning.
“Yes,” she said.
The silence went on so long that Tessa checked the screen to see if the call had dropped. It hadn’t. The seconds were still going up.
“I didn’t know you knew,” her mother said.
“I was fifteen, Mom.”
“I know how old you were.”
“I was looking for the granola bars.”
Something happened on the other end of the line—a sound Tessa didn’t recognize, and then did. Her mother was crying. Not the way she cried at movies, or the way she’d cried at Tessa’s grandpa’s funeral with her hand over her mouth. It was a strangled, private sound, the sound of somebody trying very hard not to.
“Sherry keeps sending me things,” her mother said when she could talk. “From the church. Articles. That list thing, with the—the cue cards. She thinks she’s helping.”
“Tell her to stop.”
“I did,” Denise said. “Tuesday. I told her to stop sending me things about my own daughter.” A pause. “She was very hurt.”
Tessa laughed. She couldn’t help it. It came out wet. On the other end of the line, after a second, something that might have been a laugh came back.
“I have to go,” her mother said.
“Okay.”
“I’m not—I’m not ready to—“ Denise stopped. “I have to go.”
“Okay, Mom.”
The call ended. It didn’t slam. Tessa stood in the kitchen with the phone in her hand and the junk drawer still open, and Biscuit came in from the front room with his crooked ear and wound twice around her ankles, complaining, and she picked him up and held him until he struggled and then put him down and fed him even though he’d already been fed.
Priya Natarajan called Friday morning. Tessa let it go to voicemail and listened to it at lunch. Priya was writing about the Files, and about the church’s response, which so far had been a two-line post saying they’d engaged an outside firm to conduct an independent review and would publish its findings. Tessa knew why there wasn’t more. Margie had forwarded her Eli’s email the week after the library—I’ve decided to wait—and Tessa had read it twice in the surgery prep room and put her phone face down on the steel table and been angrier than she’d been since March. She had also found, to her disgust, that some part of her respected him for putting his own name on it instead of the lawyer’s. She hadn’t told Margie that part.
Priya would understand if Tessa didn’t want to comment. If she did, Priya would print it exactly as written.
Tessa called Margie first. Then she wrote it in her Notes app, sitting in the car under the palo verde, and read it over four times, and changed one word, and emailed it.
I didn’t leak those documents and I don’t know who did. I don’t want people sending me more of them. I don’t want Anchor City to burn down. There are people there who were kind to me, and a lot of people there who didn’t do anything wrong. I want it to become a place where what happened to me doesn’t happen to the next person. That’s all I’m going to say about it.
She changed all I’m going to say to all I’m going to say for now, and then changed it back.
On Sunday she went to church.
Not Anchor City. She’d found the other one on the internet on Thursday night, after the octopus show, after the call, looking for something small. It was off Rural Road south of the freeway, a tan stucco building next to a tire shop, with a sign out front with the removable letters: RURAL ROAD COMMUNITY CHURCH — ALL WELCOME — COFFEE IS FREE, SO IS GRACE. The website hadn’t been updated since 2019. The service times were listed as 10:30ish.
She sat in the back row. There were maybe seventy people in a room with folding chairs and a drop ceiling and a wooden cross on the wall and a pull-down projector screen with the lyrics on it in a font nobody had chosen on purpose. A woman in her sixties played the piano. The pastor was a tired-looking man with a gray mustache who read from Romans in a voice like a man reading instructions for assembling a bookshelf, and then preached for forty-four minutes, which was at least fifteen too long. Nobody filmed anything. There was nothing to film. At the end, when he invited people to come forward for prayer, two old women went up and held hands with him by the piano and the rest of the room just kept talking to each other.
On the way out an old man in a short-sleeved plaid shirt handed her a bulletin she’d already been given and said, “First time?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” he said. He seemed to think about what else to say. “The coffee’s not very good.”
“That’s okay.”
“I’m Frank.”
“Tessa,” she said, before she’d decided to.
Frank nodded as if that settled something. “Tessa,” he repeated, and then, to the woman behind her, “Barb, this is Tessa, it’s her first time, don’t scare her off,” and then he went to go find the coffee that wasn’t very good, and Tessa walked out into the noon heat to her car with the bulletin in her hand and sat there a while with the engine running before she drove home.
18The Conference
The penguin in the lobby of Brandt Comfort Air was twelve feet tall and inflatable and wore a scarf, and it bobbed gently in the draft from the air handlers every time the glass doors opened, as if nodding at whoever came in.
Micah had been to Hal Brandt’s headquarters once before, in the fall, for the lunch where AWAKE got its budget. He remembered the penguin. He remembered the framed photos in the hallway of Hal shaking hands with two governors and a Cardinals quarterback and a pastor from Houston who’d since been on a documentary. He remembered the conference room on the third floor with its view of the 101 and the long table made from a single slab of some kind of dark tropical wood, which Hal had told them was sustainably harvested, and which Eli had said, in the car afterward, made their mesquite table look like a cutting board.
It was the second of June. The room was cold enough that Micah wished he’d brought a jacket.
Hal sat at the head of the table in a white golf shirt with the penguin embroidered on the chest. Beside him was Trent, his communications guy, who had a tablet and a tan and wore loafers without socks. Down the table on one side: a sales director from Kingdom Supply named Jared, who’d driven over from their warehouse in Chandler with a box of the WE STAND WITH ANCHOR shirts in his trunk, just in case; a vice president for advancement from Mesa Pacific University in a navy suit; and on a screen at the far end, a woman from Verse, the Bible app, in a bright kitchen in Nashville with a bowl of lemons behind her. On the other side: Eli, Naomi, Kenzie, and Micah. Colby Stroud had flown in the night before and sat at the corner nearest Micah in a denim shirt, drinking a sparkling water, and every few minutes he caught Micah’s eye and nodded, as if to say it’s going to be fine, brother.
Kenzie had built the slides. She stood at the front of the room and clicked through them in a steady voice that only cracked twice.
Nine thousand four hundred and twelve tickets sold. Average price seventy-eight dollars. The arena deposit, a hundred and eighty-five thousand, already paid and nonrefundable after May first. Staging, LED, and audio, sixty-two thousand in deposits with cancellation fees on a sliding scale. A hotel block downtown with an attrition penalty. Nine speakers, three worship teams, flights booked. Four hundred and ten thousand dollars in sponsorships, from the people in this room, mostly already received. A run of show she’d been building since October, a hundred and forty rows long, color-coded, every minute of three nights accounted for.
“If we go forward,” Kenzie said, “we net somewhere around two hundred thousand, depending on merch. If we cancel, we refund every ticket, and we lose about three hundred and twenty thousand in deposits and fees, give or take.” She clicked to the last slide. It said QUESTIONS? in the conference font, with the little sunburst logo. She looked at it and then at the table and sat down.
“Well,” Hal said. “I think the numbers speak for themselves.”
They went around the table. Micah listened, and after a while he noticed he was listening as he listened to a band he was sitting in with for the first time—not to what they were playing, exactly, but for where they were all going to land.
Jared from Kingdom Supply said canceling would look like guilt. That was the whole thing, really. The response to the shirts had been overwhelming, he said, over three thousand sold in four weeks, and people wanted to stand with Anchor. You didn’t pull the rug out from under people who were standing with you. He had an idea for a merch table at the arena—reframe it, he said. Not a revival. A night of unity.
The woman from Verse said their users were very engaged with the Anchor City content and that she’d been asked to say, gently, that Verse’s partnership was structured around the conference and a cancellation might require them to revisit the terms.
The man from Mesa Pacific said the university remained committed to the young people of Anchor City and that he’d need to take any changes back to his board.
Trent said, reading from his tablet, that the data on reputational recovery was clear: the organizations that came back fastest were the ones that kept showing up. Silence read as weakness. Canceling a nine-thousand-seat event in the middle of a news cycle would become its own news cycle.
Colby said the label was still behind the live album. He said it to Micah, not to the table. “Look,” he said, “I know it’s been hard. I know you’ve got complicated feelings about the song right now. But hear me out—that’s the record. A church gets knocked down and gets back up and sings. Resilience. People need that. The live version of ‘Morning Comes’ from that night could be the biggest thing you ever do, brother.”
Micah looked at the slab of tropical wood.
Hal went last. He’d been leaning back in his chair with his hands folded on his stomach, and now he leaned forward.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “I’ll cover the arena. The whole thing, deposit and balance. If you go forward, that’s off your books. I’ll write the check tonight. Because I believe in what’s happening at this church, and I’m not going to let a bunch of people who’ve never built anything decide whether it keeps happening.” He looked at Eli. “I told you in April, son. Don’t apologize. You apologize, you’ve lost. You’ve been apologizing for six weeks and look where it’s got you. Fox on the wall. That’s you. That was a great sermon, by the way. The first half.”
Micah saw Eli’s jaw move.
“We’ll need a week,” Naomi said. “The board’s in transition. It isn’t a decision Eli can make alone anymore.”
“The board is three kids,” Hal said pleasantly, “and one of them is his roommate.” He smiled. “I read the paper too, Naomi.”
In the parking lot, in the white heat, with the penguin nodding at them through the tinted glass, nobody said anything for a while. Kenzie got into her car and sat there with the engine off and her forehead on the steering wheel. Naomi stood by her door looking at her phone. Eli stood by his.
“He’ll really cover it,” Eli said, to nobody.
“He’ll really cover it,” Naomi said.
“That’s—that changes the math.”
“It changes the math,” Naomi said, “and it means Hal Brandt owns AWAKE.” She got in her car.
Colby caught Micah before he got to his. He put a hand on Micah’s shoulder, friendly, the way he always did.
“Brother,” he said. “I know you. I know you’re going to go home and beat yourself up. Don’t. You didn’t do anything wrong. You wrote a great song. People love it. That’s not a sin.”
“I know it’s not a sin,” Micah said.
“Pray about it,” Colby said. “The album. That’s all I’m asking. And whatever you decide, I’m with you.” He squeezed the shoulder and let go. “Tell Hannah I said hey.”
Hannah got home at 8:20, forty minutes after her shift ended, because there’d been a baby in the unit whose repair hadn’t held and she’d stayed. She came in and dropped her bag by the door and went straight to the kitchen and filled the big plastic mixing bowl with cold water from the tap and a tray of ice and carried it to the couch and put her feet in it, one and then the other, and made a sound like a tire losing air.
She was twenty-eight weeks. Her ankles had started swelling by the end of a twelve.
Micah sat on the floor by the bowl. He told her about the penguin and the slab table and the woman from Verse in her kitchen with the lemons and Hal saying three kids. He told her about the numbers. He told her what Colby had said, all of it, even resilience, even the biggest thing you ever do, brother.
Hannah listened with her eyes closed and her head back on the couch.
“So what do you think?” he said.
She didn’t answer for a while.
“I think my feet hurt,” she said.
“Hannah.”
“I think you want me to say it’s fine.” She opened her eyes. “I’m not going to say it’s fine. I’m also not going to decide it for you. I’ve been deciding things about other people’s kids for thirteen hours.”
He didn’t say anything.
“We have a thing at work,” she said. “Photo consent. There’s a form. A parent signs it, we can take pictures for the hospital magazine, for teaching, whatever. A parent doesn’t sign it, or signs it and then tells the charge nurse at three in the morning they changed their mind, there’s a red dot on the chart, and nobody takes the picture. Doesn’t matter if it’s the best repair the surgeons have seen in ten years. Doesn’t matter if some fellow in Denver needs to see it. Nobody argues with the red dot.” She moved her feet in the bowl and the ice clinked. “I watched a surgeon want to argue with one once. He didn’t. He was in a mood for a week.”
Micah looked at the water.
“That’s it,” Hannah said. “That’s all I’ve got. I’m going to bed.” She lifted one foot out of the bowl and looked at it with distaste. “Don’t wake me up when you decide.”
He didn’t sleep. At 11:30 he gave up and went out to the garage where his keyboard was set up on a folding table next to the water heater and the boxes of baby things from Hannah’s sister, and he sat down on the stool in the dark and put his hands on the keys without turning it on.
He thought about the warehouse. About finishing “Morning Comes” in his car in the parking lot of a Sonic on Indian School because he’d had the bridge in his head for a week and couldn’t get it right, and then he got it right, sitting in the car with a cherry limeade sweating in the cupholder. Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning. He’d been twenty-four. He’d written it for the hundred people in folding chairs, for Eli on the riser with his hands on his head. He had not written it for anyone’s worst night. He’d written it for everybody’s.
He wondered when it had stopped being his and started being the church’s and then stopped being the church’s and started being the thing’s. He couldn’t find the day.
At 11:48 he picked up his phone and texted Eli.
Cancel it. Even the album. I’ll call Colby myself in the morning.
He watched the message go. Delivered. Then, after a minute, the dots.
The dots went on for a long time. They stopped. They started again.
ok, Eli wrote. And then, a minute later: I was sitting here with Hal’s number up.
Micah read that twice. He thought about writing something back and couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t a speech. He set the phone face down on the keyboard and sat in the dark garage with the water heater ticking, and after a while he turned the keyboard on, very low, with the volume almost all the way down, and played the first four chords of “Morning Comes” the way he’d written it, slow, in the car, before anybody had heard it, and then stopped, and turned it off, and went back inside to bed.
19Cancel It
The board of Anchor City Church voted to cancel AWAKE at 7:20 on Wednesday morning, the third of June, at the mesquite table in the warehouse, three to nothing, with the lawyer on a laptop and the operations director taking minutes and a retired pastor sitting in the corner with a legal pad, not voting, because he wasn’t on the board and had said so twice.
It was the last vote the three of them ever took alone. Eli didn’t know that yet. He knew it as you know a song is ending before the last chord—a feeling in the room.
Before the vote Theo walked them through the money. He’d been up since four doing it; he had a spreadsheet and a printout of the spreadsheet, because David had asked him to bring paper. The church had a reserve of about one point one million dollars, built up over three years of giving that had grown faster than the church could spend it. Canceling would cost three hundred and eighteen thousand in lost deposits and fees. The refunds would go back to the ticket holders through the ticketing company within ten business days. The sponsors would want their money back too, most of them, and that was another four hundred and ten thousand, though some of it had already been spent on the things that would now be forfeited, and Lawrence was still reading the contracts.
“We can absorb it,” Theo said. “It’s going to hurt. It’s a hiring freeze starting today. It’s probably cuts by the fall. Real ones. People.” He put the printout down. “But we don’t go under. We were never going to go under from this. We were going to go under from the thing it was part of.”
“Hal offered to cover the arena,” Eli said. He said it because it needed to be said out loud in this room, in front of David, so that he couldn’t pretend later that he hadn’t considered it.
“Hal offered to buy it,” Naomi said.
Lawrence, on the laptop, cleared his throat. “For the record, as your counsel, there’s nothing legally improper about accepting a donor’s offer to cover an expense. But I’d note that the offer came with a sermon about not apologizing.”
“Noted,” Theo said. He looked at Micah and Eli. “Okay. I’ll make it a motion so it’s clean. I move that the board cancel the AWAKE conference and refund all tickets and begin negotiations to return sponsorship funds.”
“Second,” Micah said.
“All in favor.”
Three hands. Eli looked at them—Theo’s, square and freckled, with the ink stain on the middle finger he’d had since college; Micah’s, long, with the calluses on the fingertips; his own. He’d seen these three hands go up together maybe fifty times in three years. The Monroe lease. The Keystone deal. Gilbert. His own salary had been the one exception—two hands, and him out in the backyard throwing a tennis ball against the fence, which had felt like leaving the room and hadn’t been. Otherwise he’d never once seen them not go up together.
“Motion carries,” Theo said. He wrote it down on the printout in pencil. “I’d like that to be one of the last votes I take as your roommate.”
Nobody laughed. David, in the corner, wrote something on his legal pad.
Eli drove to Paradise Valley alone that afternoon, because he thought he owed Hal that.
The house was at the end of a long private drive that curved up the side of Camelback, past saguaros that had been professionally lit for nighttime, to a gate with a keypad. Hal met him on the back patio in a golf shirt, with a view of the whole Valley laid out below them in the haze, the downtown towers small and gray and the airport planes drifting down into it one after another like ash.
Hal didn’t offer him anything to drink. He stood with his hands on his hips and listened, and when Eli finished he looked out over the city for a while.
“You’re handing them the win,” he said.
“Who’s them?”
Hal turned. “You know who. The internet. That podcast. The newspaper girl. The ones who’ve been calling you a fraud for six weeks. You cancel, you’re telling them they’re right.”
“They’re partly right,” Eli said.
Hal stared at him.
“There’s no them, Hal,” Eli said. “There’s a woman in Tempe who asked us not to do something, and we did it anyway, and then we made it about us. That’s the whole thing. We didn’t get attacked. We did something.”
“Son,” Hal said, very quietly, “there is always a them. That’s the first thing I learned in business, and it’ll be the first thing you learn in ministry, if you last.” He put his sunglasses on. “I’ve been in church my whole life. I’ve watched a dozen young guys like you get a little heat and fold. It’s heartbreaking every time. God gave you something, and you’re giving it back because some girl’s feelings got hurt.”
Eli felt it come up in him—the heat, the old quick answer. He heard himself think of three good comebacks. He said none of them.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done for us,” he said instead. “I mean that.”
Hal nodded slowly behind his sunglasses. “I’m going to need to pray about the Gilbert pledge,” he said.
“I understand.”
“I don’t think you do,” Hal said. “But you will.”
On Thursday, Maureen Doyle came to the warehouse for the first time.
Naomi had found her in May through a chain of three phone calls—a friend of a friend at a denominational office in Atlanta, a pastor in Colorado whose church had been through something worse, a retired judge. Crosswell Review Group was four people. Maureen had spent twenty-two years as an investigator for the state child-welfare agency in Ohio before she’d started doing reviews for churches and schools and nonprofits that had hurt people and wanted, or said they wanted, to know how. She was sixty, with short silver hair and reading glasses on a beaded chain and a rolling briefcase, and she shook Eli’s hand like she was checking it for weapons.
“I want to be clear about something before we start,” she said, in his office, with the door closed and the Bisbee bank door behind her with its brass mail slot. “You’ve signed an engagement letter that says you’ll pay us and you won’t edit us and you’ll publish what we find. I’ve done forty-one of these. About half the time, when the organization reads the draft, somebody calls me and asks if we can soften a paragraph. Usually the lead pastor. Sometimes his wife.” She took her glasses off. “The answer is always no. I’m telling you now so you don’t have to find out later.”
“Okay,” Eli said.
“I’ll need everything. Emails, texts, the group chat, the shared drive, the release forms, the board minutes, if there are any.”
“Naomi has them. On legal pads. They say what we voted on and who seconded it.” He heard himself. “I don’t think they say anybody ever asked a question.”
“Then I’ll need those,” Maureen said.
He told the staff on Friday night, at prayer, in the warehouse.
Friday prayer was the oldest thing Anchor City did. It had started the first week in the warehouse, before there was a band, fifteen people on folding chairs in a circle under the work lights with Gil’s table saws pushed against the wall. It was forty or fifty people now, on a normal Friday. Tonight it was more like eighty, and almost everybody on staff, and they sat in the old circle, three rows deep, with the big rolling door up to let in whatever air there was.
He told them plainly. He’d written it down, but he didn’t read it. He said that AWAKE was canceled. He said why. He said it would cost the church a lot of money and it would cost some of them a lot of work they’d already done, and he was sorry about that. He said there was a hiring freeze and there would probably be harder news later in the year, and he’d tell them the truth about it as soon as he knew it. He said he’d been wrong about a lot of things in the last two months and that this wasn’t him being brave; it was him being late.
Nobody said anything for a while. Somebody’s phone buzzed and stopped.
Then Mr. Dwight, the old usher, who sat in the same folding chair every Friday by the door because of his knees, said “Amen” in a loud, flat voice, like a man closing a gate. And a couple of people laughed. And they prayed.
He found Kenzie afterward in the gear cage, sitting on a road case with her laptop closed on her knees.
She’d built AWAKE. Since October. The run of show, the vendor contracts, the ticketing, the sponsor decks, the hotel block, the volunteer schedule, the sunburst logo. She’d done it on top of her real job, at night, at her kitchen table in a studio in Roosevelt Row, with a candle she bought specifically because it was called Revival and she’d thought that was funny.
“I’m not mad,” she said, before he could say anything. “I know it’s right. I read the Files. I know it’s right.” Her voice wobbled. “I just really wanted one thing to go right. You know? One thing. I wanted to stand at the back of that arena on the first night and watch it work.”
Eli sat down on the other road case. He thought of three things to say that would make her feel better and knew all of them were the kind of thing he said, and he didn’t say them. He sat in the gear cage with her under the one bulb while the Friday people went out to their cars, and the rolling door came down with its long iron roar, and she cried for a while, and he stayed.
On Sunday the seventh he told the church.
He did it himself, in person, at all three services, before the sermon, standing at the front of the stage without the music stand. Naomi had asked if he wanted to do a video. He’d said no.
He said that AWAKE was canceled and that everyone who’d bought a ticket would be refunded in full within ten business days. He said the church had also stopped posting personal testimony videos and would not start again until it had a way to ask for consent and honor a no that actually worked. He said that an outside firm was reviewing what had happened, and that the church would publish what they found, whatever it was.
He didn’t say enemy. He didn’t say attack. He didn’t say season. He didn’t say foxes. He’d gone over it Saturday night with a pen and crossed out every word that made the church the one it happened to.
“We’re canceling,” he said, “because a young woman was hurt by the way we do things. We need to change the way we do things before we invite ten thousand people to come and watch us do them.”
At nine o’clock a family near the front got up and walked out during that sentence, the father first, the kids trailing. At eleven there was applause, scattered and then more, and he held up his hand and it stopped, and he said, “Please don’t,” and meant it. At six, a man in row J in one of the gray shirts stood up and shouted, “Don’t let them win, Pastor!” and a few people clapped.
Eli looked at him. He was maybe forty, sunburned, with his wife pulling at his sleeve.
“There isn’t a them,” Eli said. “I’m sorry. There’s just us.”
The man sat down.
The phones were still up, but fewer. The guys from row B hadn’t come back; there was nothing on the stage this week that anyone was going to put a trombone under. Kenzie’s count for the day, which she gave him Monday morning only because he asked for it, was 2,180.
Theo drove them home Sunday night the long way, on the I-10, because Eli’s car was in the shop with a dead alternator and Theo liked the freeway at night. They came up out of the Deck Park tunnel with the city lit on both sides, and there it was, lit from below, fifty feet wide: the blue billboard with the black letters, the sunburst, the dates in July. SOMETHING IS HAPPENING.
“The contract runs through the end of July,” Theo said. “Kenzie asked. They can put a blank vinyl over it for four grand.”
Eli watched it come closer and pass overhead and slide away in the side mirror.
“Don’t,” he said. “Put the four grand toward June’s callers.”
Theo glanced at him and then back at the road. He put his blinker on for the Seventh Street exit.
“Already did,” Theo said. “Friday.”
20Twelve Weeks
Dr. Helen Park had a laminated card in her purse with the names of the eleven pastors she’d sat across from in the last fifteen years who had not stepped away when she told them to. She didn’t show it to Eli. She told him it existed, on the Wednesday after the conference was canceled, at the mesquite table, with David beside her and Naomi at the end taking notes.
“I keep it to remind myself I’m not always persuasive,” she said. “Four of them are still in ministry. Two of those are doing fine.”
She was a clinical psychologist with a practice in Scottsdale that saw mostly clergy and their families, and an elder at a Presbyterian church in Tempe, and she was fifty-six, and she had driven over in a Subaru with a kayak rack on the roof and a bumper sticker for the public radio station. David had known her husband in the Navy Reserve. She wore running shoes with a linen dress and had very steady eyes.
She and David had talked to him separately and then together. They’d talked to Naomi. They’d read Maureen Doyle’s intake notes and the bylaws and the Files and the Ledger story and his sermon notes back to February. They’d spent two hours with him on Monday and asked him things nobody had asked him in years: when he’d last taken a day off, how many hours he slept, when he’d last prayed about something that wasn’t the church, whether he had a friend who wasn’t on his payroll or his board or his lease. He had not liked any of his answers.
“Twelve weeks,” Dr. Park said. “Starting this Sunday. You come back the first Sunday in September, if the people you’re accountable to agree it’s time. Not before.”
“Twelve weeks off,” Eli said.
“Off preaching. Off the stage. Off decisions. Not off the church.” She had a single sheet of paper and slid it across the table. “You meet with David every week. You see a counselor every week—not me; I’m too close to this now. I’ve got a name for you. You don’t post anything on any account, and you don’t do the podcast. Naomi is acting executive director with the transition team and she answers to them, not to you. You come to church on Sundays and sit in a seat like anybody else. And you serve somewhere every week where there isn’t a microphone.”
Eli read the sheet. It said all of that, in numbered points, in a plain font. It had a line at the bottom for his signature and a line for hers and a line for David’s.
“Is this a punishment?” he said.
“No,” Dr. Park said. “It’s also not a sabbatical. A sabbatical is a reward. This is triage.”
“Who decides when I come back?”
“Not you.”
He looked at David. David was drawing a small careful box in the margin of his legal pad and filling it in with the pen.
“We’ll lose people,” Eli said.
“Say how many,” Dr. Park said.
“Hundreds. Maybe a lot of hundreds. They come to hear—“ He stopped.
“Say it.”
“They come to hear me,” Eli said, and heard it in the room, and hated it.
“Some of them do,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons.”
He read the sheet again. He asked if he could keep doing a short devotional video once a week, just for the church, two minutes, no production. She said no. He asked if he could preach one Night service a month. She said no. He asked if he could at least lead the baptism in August, because there were people who’d asked for him specifically. She looked at him for a moment and said no, gently, and he heard himself and laughed—an ugly, surprised sound—and put his forehead down on the mesquite for a second.
“I’m negotiating,” he said into the table.
“You are,” said Dr. Park.
“Is that one of the signs?”
“It’s one of the signs.”
He sat up. He signed it. David signed it. Dr. Park signed it and folded it and gave the copy to Naomi.
He called his parents that night from the back step.
His mother answered, and he could hear the TV behind her, and his father saying who is it, and his mother saying it’s mijo, turn that down. He told them. He told them as he was learning to tell things, which was all at once and without a speech. Twelve weeks. Not preaching. A counselor. He didn’t know if he’d be coming back to the same church.
His mother cried. She cried easily; she cried at the Rose Parade. But this was different—he could hear her trying to stop and not being able to, and his father taking the phone from her.
“You there?” Rick said.
“I’m here, Dad.”
“She’s okay. She’s just—“ His father’s voice was gruff; he had never been easy on the phone. “She watched that one. Where you walked off. The ladies at church sent it to her. She’s watched it about fifty times.”
Eli closed his eyes.
“She says she’s proud of you,” his dad said. “For stopping. She wants you to know that. She’s saying it right now, but she can’t talk.” A pause. “Come home this weekend. Before it starts. You can sleep in your room. Your mom’ll cook.”
Yuma in June was a hundred and eleven by noon. The air came off the Colorado and the lettuce fields gone to stubble and the Marine air station with its jets screaming over the city twice an hour, and it smelled the way it had always smelled to him, like hot dirt and irrigation water and diesel. His parents’ house was a three-bedroom ranch on a street off 16th with a carport and a lemon tree his mother had planted the year he was born, and his room still had a Suns poster on the wall and a shelf of youth-group trophies with the gold paint rubbing off.
His mother made caldo de res even though it was a hundred and eleven, because it was what she made when somebody needed feeding, and he ate two bowls at the kitchen table with the swamp cooler roaring and his father reading the Yuma Sun in his recliner in the next room pretending not to listen. Afterward his mother sat across from him and held his hand on the table and didn’t say much. She said, “Mijo, you look tired.” She said, “Your hair’s too long.” She said, “Do you eat breakfast?” He said sometimes. She said, “Eat breakfast.”
Saturday morning his father said, “Come on. Take a drive with me.”
They took the truck. His father drove the way he always had, one wrist on the wheel, the window down even with the air on, the radio on a classic country station turned low. He didn’t say where they were going. He didn’t need to. Eli knew the turn before they made it, onto 8th Street, past the Circle K and the tire place and the tortilleria, and then the empty lot on the corner that used to be a Pizza Hut, and then—
It was a Dollar General.
He’d known that. His mother had told him years ago, on the phone, in the voice she used for people from high school getting married. They’re putting a Dollar General where the church was. He had said huh and changed the subject. He hadn’t come to see it.
His father pulled into the parking lot and put the truck in park and left it running.
The building was new, or newer—tan block and a yellow sign and a black stripe along the top, the same as every other Dollar General in the Southwest. The old sanctuary was gone completely; they’d torn it down to the slab. Nothing was left of Yuma Bible Fellowship except the palm tree that used to stand by the sign on the corner, a tall scruffy Mexican fan palm with a skirt of dead fronds, and the curb cut where the church van used to pull in.
Eli sat in the passenger seat and looked at it.
He’d been baptized in that church when he was nine, in a fiberglass baptistry behind the pulpit with a painting of the Jordan River on the wall behind it. He’d learned to play drums on the church’s kit, badly, in the youth room. He’d sat in the fourth pew on the left every Sunday for sixteen years. And he’d watched it die.
He remembered the hymn board. It had been on the wall at the front, to the right of the pulpit, a wooden board with slots and white plastic numbers that somebody slid in by hand every week. The top three rows were the hymn numbers. The bottom two said ATTENDANCE LAST WEEK and OFFERING LAST WEEK. When he was small the attendance number had been three digits. One-twelve. One-oh-eight. Then it was two digits, and it stayed two digits for a long time. Seventy-something. Sixty-something. By the time he was fourteen it was in the forties. He used to look at it every Sunday during the first hymn. He didn’t know why. Nobody told him to. It just seemed like the most important thing on the wall.
Pastor Dale Hutchins had stood at the back door after every service and shaken every hand. He’d been a big man with a comb-over and a short-sleeved dress shirt and a clip-on tie, and he preached long and a little loud, and his jokes were terrible. Every week he’d said something about the number. Never in a sermon. At the door. We were thirty-eight last week, but I think we’re going to beat that today. Or: Lot of folks traveling this summer. Or, near the end: Well, the Lord knows who’s here.
The last Sunday there had been nineteen. Eli was sixteen. He’d counted them. Dale had preached on Psalm 23 and cried at the end, standing at the pulpit in his clip-on tie, not loudly, just stopping and putting his hand over his eyes. And then there was a potluck, and people took home the casserole dishes, and some men from a church in Somerton came with a trailer for the pews.
“You remember when I came off that pole,” his father said.
Eli turned.
“Oh-eight. You were eleven.” Rick was looking at the Dollar General, not at him. “Storm took a line down out past Gadsden and I went up and the pole went. Broke my pelvis and my wrist. They helicoptered me to the hospital. Your mom got the call at three in the morning.”
“I remember.”
“Dale was there by four,” his father said. “At the hospital. Four in the morning. Your mom called him from the car and he just came. He had a thermos of coffee and a pack of those orange peanut-butter crackers and he sat with her in that waiting room for six hours. Didn’t preach at her. Didn’t pray out loud much. Just sat there. When they let her see me he waited outside. Then he drove home and took you to school.” Rick shifted the truck’s air vent toward his face. “That church was down to maybe fifty then. He was already working part-time at the Ace Hardware on Fourth to make the bills. He came anyway.”
Eli didn’t say anything.
“He went to work at the Ace full-time after it closed,” Rick said. “He was there till he died. You’d go in for a hose fitting and he’d be in the plumbing aisle in the red vest and he’d ask about you. Every time. How’s Eli. Is he still preaching. Tell him I’m praying for him.” His father paused. “I told him you were planting a church up in Phoenix. He was real happy about that.”
“I didn’t go to his funeral,” Eli said.
“No.”
“I was at a conference.”
“I know. Your mom went. There were a lot of people there. More than nineteen.” Rick put the truck in reverse and then didn’t back out. He sat with his hand on the gearshift. “I’m not telling you this to make you feel bad.”
“I know.”
“I don’t know what I’m telling you for,” his father said. “I just thought you ought to see it.”
Before they left, Eli went in.
He didn’t know why. He told his father he wanted a drink, and his father said okay and turned the radio up a notch and waited in the truck. The automatic doors hissed open and the air conditioning hit him, and the fluorescent light, and the smell of every Dollar General—cardboard and cheap detergent and floor cleaner. There was a woman with a toddler in the cart at the one open register and a teenage boy restocking chips.
He tried to work out where the pulpit had been. Toward the back, he thought, and to the right. He walked down the main aisle past the cleaning supplies and the phone chargers and the party goods, and ended up in the back corner in front of a cooler of energy drinks and sports drinks, with a rack of greeting cards on one side. The fiberglass baptistry would have been about here. The hymn board would have been on that wall, where there was now a sign that said SEASONAL with an arrow.
He stood there long enough that the teenage boy looked over.
He opened the cooler and took out a blue Gatorade and walked back up front and waited behind the woman with the toddler. The toddler stared at him over the edge of the cart with serious eyes and a pacifier.
“You find everything okay?” the cashier asked when it was his turn. She was maybe sixty, with a sun visor pushed up on her head and a name tag that said DOLORES.
“Yes,” Eli said. “Thank you. Thanks, Dolores.”
She looked up at him, a little surprised, and then smiled and handed him his change.
21The Church Without Eli
On the first Sunday of the twelve weeks, Eli sat in row M.
Micah could see him from the keys. Row M was just inside the edge of the light, a dozen rows back, a little left of center, and Eli was on the aisle in a gray T-shirt and jeans with his hands between his knees, looking at the floor during the first song, like somebody at church for the first time who isn’t sure whether he’s supposed to sing. Theo came in during the second song and sat next to him. By the third, Eli was singing. Micah could tell from the way his shoulders moved.
Naomi read the statement before the sermon, at all three services, standing at the front without notes because she’d memorized it. She said Pastor Eli had agreed, at the recommendation of outside advisors, to step away from preaching and from leading the church for twelve weeks, beginning today. She said this was not a reward and it was not a punishment. She said he was in the room. She said an outside review was underway and the church would publish what it found. She said that for the rest of the summer there would be guest preachers, and the church would be reading through the Gospel of Mark together, and that every Tuesday night there would be something new at the warehouse on Grand, and June Alvarez would tell them about it. And then she asked them to pray, and she prayed, briefly, in the plain, unadorned voice of a woman who’d grown up in a church where the prayers didn’t rhyme.
A few people turned around in their seats to look at row M. Eli didn’t look up.
There was one camera now. A single fixed wide shot from the balcony rail, for the livestream, as it had been in the warehouse the first year when they’d set a phone on a music stand and hoped. The jib contract had ended on the first of June and nobody had renewed it. The handhelds were in their cases in the gear cage. Omar ran the lights from a preset he’d built on Friday that he called Tuesday Night at Grandma’s, which was mostly warm white and didn’t move.
Micah had thought it would feel naked. It felt, mostly, like he could see people’s faces.
Kenzie counted two thousand and fifty that Sunday.
The next week it was eighteen hundred and twenty. David preached. He preached from Second Corinthians four in the King James, We have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us, for forty-one minutes, in the same voice he’d used for thirty-five years on Tenth Street, which was the voice of a man explaining how to change a tire. He didn’t walk around. He didn’t use slides. He told one story, about Ruth dropping a casserole dish in the church kitchen in 1990 and the pieces going everywhere and how she’d picked them all up and put them in a box and kept them in the garage ever since, for reasons she’d never explained. People checked their phones. A man in the fourth row fell asleep with his mouth open. Afterward, a nineteen-year-old girl who worked at a smoothie place came up to Micah at the side of the stage and said, “Who was that old guy?” and Micah said, “He’s helping us,” and she said, “He was so boring,” and then, after a second, “I’m going to think about that pot thing for like a year, though.”
At the end of June, Pastor Rubén Ortega came from Monte de Sión and preached in English with Spanish thrown in when English wasn’t doing the job, and he was funny and warm and loud and cried twice, and he told the story of how an old gringo named David Shaw had handed his congregation the keys to a building on Tenth Street and then refused to let anyone put his name on anything. The room loved him. It still counted sixteen hundred and ten.
The Fourth of July fell on a Saturday and the next day was fourteen eighty. Kenzie texted the number to the transition team, which now included Micah, and added: holiday weekend, probably not real. The week after that it was fifteen-forty. The week after that, fourteen-ninety.
Micah found he’d stopped checking.
On the second Sunday in July, a woman named Lorraine Pitts preached.
David had found her. She was fifty-seven, Black, from Tucson originally, with close-cropped gray hair and a voice with a crack in it, and she’d been a hospice chaplain for nineteen years before retiring in the spring. She’d sat with, she estimated, around four thousand people in the last weeks of their lives. She didn’t preach, exactly. She stood at the front of the stage with a Bible she didn’t open and talked for twenty-six minutes about what people said when they were dying.
“Nobody has ever asked me how many people came to their church,” she said. “Not once. Not in four thousand beds.” She let that sit. “They ask if their daughter’s coming. They ask if God’s mad at them. They ask me to find their husband’s watch. They ask me to read them the Twenty-third Psalm, and they don’t want me to read it pretty. They want it slow. They want to hear every word.”
The room was very still. Micah was at the keys with his hands in his lap. Across the stage Luis had put his bass on its stand and was sitting on his amp with his elbows on his knees.
“Some of you are going to be in a bed like that,” Lorraine said. “Most of you, if you’re blessed with years. And somebody’s going to come sit with you. Maybe me, if I’m still around, though I’m getting on.” A few people laughed. “What I want to know is, who’s going to come? Who are you going to know well enough that they’ll drive out at four in the morning? Because that’s the church. I’m sorry, I know this is a beautiful building. But that’s the church. The people who’ll come.”
In row M, Eli was bent over with his forearms on his knees, very still.
The cuts came in the middle of July. Theo and Naomi presented them to the staff on a Thursday at the warehouse with a spreadsheet and a box of tissues on the table that nobody touched until the end.
The Night service would go to every other Sunday through the fall. Two media positions were gone: Dex’s, and a part-time graphic designer’s. Dex got three months’ severance and a letter of reference from Naomi that ran two pages; he took the news sitting very still, then asked if he could keep the old warehouse-era B-roll drives because some of it was his favorite stuff he’d ever shot, and Naomi said yes. Kenzie moved from social media to events and communications. Grant’s title changed to production manager; he’d report to Naomi now, not Eli. The worship team’s stipends were cut in half. Micah volunteered to take a pay cut himself, and Theo, looking at him over the spreadsheet, said, “You have a baby coming in five weeks. Absolutely not,” and then, after a moment, “I’ll put it in the minutes that you offered.”
Dex found him afterward in the gear cage, where Micah had gone to get a cable he didn’t need.
“Can I say something,” Dex said, “and you not do the thing where you agree with me?”
Micah put the cable down.
“I’m the guy who texted you in April that I hated the tears cue,” Dex said. “I was home sick the day Brynn put her email in the channel. I scheduled it because it was on the calendar and nobody told me. And I’m the one who’s gone.” He wasn’t crying. He had his hands jammed in the pocket of his hoodie and he was looking at a road case. “Grant read it at the airport and said cold feet. Grant gets a new title. I get two pages from Naomi about my great attitude.”
“It’s not—“
“Don’t tell me what it’s not.”
Micah didn’t.
“I know why,” Dex said. “I’m not stupid. They stopped the videos. My job was the videos. Grant’s job is making sure the mics work on Sunday, and you can’t not have Sunday.” He laughed once. “It makes sense on the spreadsheet. It’s a good spreadsheet.”
Micah took it to Naomi’s office anyway, after Dex left. He said it looked like the church was cutting the kid who’d hated the machine and keeping the man who’d built it. Naomi listened. Then she turned her laptop toward him and walked him through it line by line: what production cost, what it would cost to keep Dex through December with nothing to edit, where that money would come from, which caller it would be. She said Grant’s position was under review until Maureen finished. She said Dex’s severance was the most the reserve could carry without touching the callers. She said it all evenly and correctly, and Micah understood she had been up until two doing it, and that she was not going to say the thing he wanted her to say.
“Is it fair?” he said finally.
Naomi opened a new tab. “If you want to cut Grant’s position instead and keep Dex, bring it to the transition team Thursday with where the money comes from,” she said, “and I’ll put it first on the agenda.”
He brought it. It lost four to one. Tamsin, who voted against him, stopped him in the hallway afterward and said she’d have voted with him if he’d found the money anywhere but Priscilla, and he said he knew, and that he hadn’t.
Dex’s last day was a Friday. He packed his desk into a Kingdom Supply box because it was the only box in the building. He didn’t come to Friday prayer. He didn’t come the Sunday after, or the one after that, and when Micah texted him in August he answered about every third time.
Colby called the Monday after the cuts.
“I’m not calling about the album,” he said. “I know where you are on the album. I respect it.” He sounded tired. It was three in the afternoon in Franklin. “I’m just calling so you hear it from me. Streams are down about forty percent from the peak. That’s normal, the spike was never going to last. But the label’s asking about your follow-up, and I need to tell them something.”
“Tell them I’m writing,” Micah said.
“Are you?”
“Not really.”
Colby laughed, a short real laugh, the first one Micah had heard from him since April. “That’s honest, anyway.”
“Colby,” Micah said. “Can I ask you something? The contract. The branding. Anchor City Worship featuring. Is that on everything I write, or just what’s already out?”
There was a pause on the line.
“That’s a bigger conversation,” Colby said.
“Okay.”
“But no,” Colby said. “Not on everything. Not forever. Let me find the clause.”
On the last Sunday in July the monsoon came in during the eleven o’clock.
It had been building for three days—the dew point creeping up, the afternoons thick and gray and a hundred and eight, the sky over the Estrellas going bruise-colored every evening and then doing nothing. At 11:20 the sky did something. Micah heard it before he saw it: a sound like a freight train rolling up Monroe Street, and then the lobby doors banging, and an usher’s voice, and then a brown wall of dust went past the tall windows in the lobby and the light in the whole building changed to the color of weak tea.
Then the rain. Then the lights.
The power went out at 11:24, in the middle of the second chorus of a song he’d picked because it was easy for the band. The stage went black. The keys died under his fingers with a pop in the monitors and then nothing. The emergency lights came on over the exits, small and red and far away, and in the dark a thousand people made the sound a thousand people make when the lights go out: a gasp and then a kind of rustling laugh.
For a second Micah sat there with his hands on the dead keys.
Then Luis, in the dark beside him, pushed something into his chest. It was the old Yamaha acoustic from the green room, the one with the cracked pickguard that they used for sound checks. Micah didn’t know how Luis had gotten to it that fast. He took it. He found the edge of the stage with his foot and walked out to it, all the way to the lip, where there were no monitors and no mic and nothing between him and the front row, and he sat down on the edge with his legs hanging over, and started playing the song again from the top of the chorus. No amplification. Just the guitar, which in the Monroe’s old plaster sounded surprisingly big.
He sang. He could barely hear himself. But the front rows heard him, and they sang, and the rows behind them heard the front rows, and then it was going back through the dark, row by row, as songs used to go through the warehouse the first year before they had a sound system worth anything, when it was a hundred people and a guitar.
And then the phones came up.
Micah saw them start, a few at first, then dozens, then hundreds—the little white flashlights, clicking on across the dark. For one bad second he thought here we go. Then he saw where they were pointed. They weren’t pointed at the stage. They were pointed at the ceiling. People held them up over their heads, straight up, flashlight side out, and the old painted ceiling of the Monroe, the gold trim and the cloud panels and the chipped cherubs nobody had looked at in years, lit up soft and white and moving above them like something underwater.
Near the front, on the aisle, a guy in a gray T-shirt had his phone up, camera side forward, and Micah saw the red dot of it for just a second. Then an older woman in the row in front of him stood up to go somewhere, the restroom maybe, holding the back of the seat in the dark, and the guy turned his phone around, flashlight out, and pointed it down at the floor of the aisle so she could see where to put her feet, and walked her to the end of the row.
They sang for eleven minutes in the dark. Then they sang the doxology because it was the only thing everybody knew all the words to without a screen. Then the power came back with a thunk and a hum, and the house lights came up way too bright, and everybody blinked and laughed and looked around at each other like people waking up in a room they hadn’t known they’d fallen asleep in.
Afterward he stood on the loading dock in the steam. The rain had stopped as fast as it started. The asphalt of the alley was smoking, and the whole city smelled like wet creosote, which Micah had loved since he was a kid in Glendale standing in the driveway sniffing the air like a dog.
By Monday somebody’s video of the ceiling had three million views. It was shot from the balcony, forty seconds long—the flashlights swaying, the cherubs lit, a thousand people singing badly in the dark, the Yamaha thin and bright underneath—and it was the most beautiful thing Micah had ever seen come out of that building. The comments said this is what church is supposed to be and where is this and I haven’t cried in church since I was nine. Kenzie brought it to the Monday meeting on her phone and set it in the middle of the table. Nobody said anything for a while. Then Naomi said, “It isn’t ours,” and Kenzie said, “I know,” and put the phone away.
At one in the morning Micah shared it from his own account with no caption. He deleted it at 1:04 and didn’t tell Hannah.
22June Leads Tuesday
The tables came from three places, and June knew which ones came from where by the undersides.
The round ones with the steel legs and the stenciled PROPERTY OF IGLESIA BÍBLICA MONTE DE SIÓN — PLEASE RETURN came from Pastor Rubén’s fellowship hall, eight of them, carried over in the back of Chris Wells’s pickup the first week by Chris and two firefighters from his station who’d been told there’d be tamales. The rectangular ones with the fake-wood tops and the sticky hinges came from a caterer in Glendale who was going out of business and sold them to Theo for forty dollars apiece. And the four heavy ones with the mesquite slab tops were Gil Arvizu’s. He’d built them himself in the eighties for a restaurant on Camelback that never paid him, and they’d sat in the back of the warehouse under tarps for thirty years, and when June called him in Tucson in May and asked if Anchor City could use them on Tuesdays, he’d driven up the next Saturday and pulled the tarps off and run his hand along the grain of the first one and said, “It’s about time somebody ate on these.”
By the last Tuesday in July there were twenty-four tables. Eight chairs at each. A host at every one.
June stood by the rolling door at 5:15 with a clipboard and watched them go up.
The idea had been hers, but she hadn’t built it alone, and she would have said so to anyone who asked. She’d built it with David in the garden behind Monte de Sión over four Saturday mornings in May, with Ruth bringing out iced tea and David’s legal pad filling with her ideas in his slow handwriting. She’d built it with Tamsin, who’d read the first draft and handed it back with thirty-one comments in green pen, most of which began What happens when. She’d built it with the aunties, who’d told her flatly that if there was going to be food it was going to be real food, and had organized themselves into a rotation without asking anyone’s permission.
Tuesday Table was simple on purpose. Doors at six. Dinner at six-fifteen. Everybody sat at a table with a host they’d see every week, so the table became theirs. Nobody sat alone. At seven the host read the week’s passage from Mark out loud, slowly, the whole thing—the church had been reading Mark all summer—and then asked three questions that were printed on a card in the middle of every table in English and Spanish: What does it say? What does it show us about God? What does it show us about us? Then they talked. Then they prayed for each other, by name, out loud or silently, and the host wrote the names down in a notebook that stayed at the table. Then they cleaned up. It was over by eight-thirty.
No stage. No band. No cameras. No livestream. No QR codes. When a man from a church-growth podcast had emailed in July asking if he could come film what you guys are doing on Tuesdays, Naomi had written back No thank you and nothing else.
The hosts had been trained. Not with a video—June had made that the first rule. Three Saturday mornings in June, in this room, at these tables, with June and David and Tamsin and a woman from Lorraine Pitts’s old hospice team who taught them how to sit with somebody who was crying without trying to make them stop. What to say when somebody at your table told you they were thinking about hurting themselves, and who to call, right then, that night, with the numbers on a laminated card clipped to the notebook. What not to promise. How to keep what people said at the table at the table. How to tell somebody I don’t know without sounding like you’d lost.
Fifty-eight people had started the training. Forty-four had finished it. June had written down every name.
Eli was on chairs.
He’d been on chairs since the first Tuesday. June had given him the job because it was the least visible thing she could think of that still needed a strong back, and because Dr. Park had told her he needed to serve somewhere without a microphone and June had taken that as literally as she could. He came at 4:30 in work gloves. He unstacked a hundred and ninety-two chairs from the carts and set eight at every table, and at 8:30 he stacked them again. Some weeks Jonah worked with him. Tonight Jonah was on the other side of the warehouse doing it faster, and the two of them had a thing going where they didn’t talk, just raced, and Jonah had been winning since the second week.
At six, when the doors opened, Eli did one more job. He stood at the table by the rolling door with a roll of blank name tags and a Sharpie and wrote everybody’s name.
June had watched him do it the first night and nearly taken the Sharpie away. He’d written CHRIS for a Kris and MIKE for a Miguel and hadn’t noticed either time. The second week she’d told him, not kindly, “Ask them to spell it.” And he’d started asking. Now she stood a few feet away with her clipboard and listened to him do it, over and over. What’s your name? How do you spell that? Is it with a K? Great. He wrote it in careful capitals and handed it over and said the name back. Kris. Good to meet you, Kris. Half the people who came to Tuesday didn’t recognize him. The other half did and didn’t know what to do with it, and he just asked them to spell their names.
By seven the warehouse was full. A hundred and ninety-one people, June’s clipboard said. On the first Tuesday, the twenty-third of June, it had been ninety-six. She’d counted every week because she couldn’t help it, and she knew the number was a thing that could go wrong in her the same way it had in everyone else, and so she’d made a rule for herself. Every week, after she wrote the number on the clipboard, she took out the green notebook and wrote the names of the new ones. Not the number. The names.
Tonight there were fourteen.
The callers had been working since the fifteenth of May. There were two of them now, full-time: Priscilla, who’d gone from part-time to full-time on Theo’s somewhat terrifying budget, and a retired Phoenix Union counselor named Rafael Gallegos who spoke Spanish with the Mexican grandmothers and English with their grandkids and something in between with everybody else. Between them they’d reached four hundred and thirty-one of the six hundred and eleven. Some didn’t want anything. Some were angry. Some cried on the phone. Eighty-eight of them had come to a Tuesday Table at least once. June had all eighty-eight in the notebook, with the date.
Kiana Ruiz was one.
June had called her once in April, the day before the spreadsheet meeting, and Kiana had been nice about it—Oh, it’s okay, I figured it was a big church thing—and June had said she’d call back on Sunday to see if she’d made it. Then that Sunday had been the Sunday after Tessa’s video, and the weeks after it had been the newspaper and the old pastor and the library, and June had written Kiana — call Sun in the green notebook and not done it. After that Kiana stopped picking up. June got her again in the middle of May, on the fourth try, on a Monday afternoon when Kiana was on a break at the nail salon in Avondale.
This time Kiana didn’t say it was okay. She said, “You’re the lady who was going to call back.”
“Yes.”
“On Sunday.”
“Yes,” June said. “I didn’t. I’m sorry.”
Kiana didn’t say anything. June could hear a dryer running somewhere behind her and somebody laughing, and she could not stand the silence one more second, and she heard herself say, “I’ll call you every Monday. Every single Monday. I promise.”
“Okay,” Kiana said, in the voice of somebody who had heard every single before. And then, “What do you want?”
She’d come to the second Tuesday. She’d sat at June’s table and not said anything for two hours. The next week she’d said one thing. June called her every Monday in June. In the second week of July she missed one—a hospital, a funeral, a Monday that ate itself—and at 9:40 that night her phone buzzed with a text from Kiana: its monday. June called her back from the hospital garage and apologized, and Kiana said, “I’m just saying. You said every.” After that June stopped saying every. She said next Monday, and then she called next Monday.
By the middle of July Kiana was talking the most at the table, and tonight she’d brought her cousin, a skinny seventeen-year-old named Dani with a nose ring and a skateboard she wouldn’t let go of, and Kiana was explaining to Dani, loudly, how it worked. “You just sit. You eat. They read something. You can say stuff or not say stuff. Nobody’s going to make you go up front. There isn’t a front.”
Jonah’s table was hosted by Tom Pruett, who’d been a part-timer on June’s team since the warehouse. He was sixty-four and had carried mail in Maryvale for thirty-one years and knew, by his own estimate, eleven thousand dogs by name. He wasn’t an elegant host. He read slowly and lost his place. But he was the one June had put Jonah with, on purpose, because Tom had never once in his life pretended to know something he didn’t.
David sat at Tom’s table. He’d sat at a different table every week, just as a guest, with his hat on the chair back and his legal pad nowhere in sight.
June heard it from across the room because Jonah’s voice carried. They were on Mark 6, the feeding of the five thousand. Tom had read it and asked the first question, and somebody had answered, and then Jonah said, loud, “Can I ask something? It’s not about the bread.”
Tom said sure.
“If they lied about her,” Jonah said. “The church. If they said stuff in that statement that wasn’t true. And they filmed her when she said don’t. And they filmed me and put me on the internet and people think I’m fake.” He was looking at the table. “How do I know they didn’t lie about God? How do I know that part’s real? Like, the whole thing. How do I know it’s not just a bigger version of the same show?”
The table went quiet. June watched Tom look at David. David didn’t move.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” Tom said finally. “I’m sorry. I don’t. I know what I know, but that’s mine.”
Jonah nodded, as if he’d expected that.
“It’s the right question,” David said. He said it plainly, like a weather report. “Don’t let anybody rush you off it. Including me.”
“So what am I supposed to do with it?”
David thought about it. “Read the whole thing,” he said. “Mark. Not a chapter a week with us. All sixteen chapters, in one sitting, like it’s a story, because it is. It’ll take you about two hours. Watch what Jesus does when the crowds come. Watch how he treats the people he gets alone. Then come back and tell Tom what you think.” He paused. “Tell Tom, not me.”
The next Tuesday, Jonah told June he’d read it on his break at the fulfillment center, sitting on an upturned tote in the break room, over two nights. He said Jesus kept trying to get away from the crowds and the crowds kept finding him. He said Jesus kept telling people not to tell anyone. He said he didn’t know what that meant yet. He said, “It’s weird, right? For a guy who’s supposed to want everybody to know about him?”
“Keep reading,” June said.
Brynn found her in the dirt lot at 8:50, after the chairs were stacked and the tables were wiped and the aunties had gone home with their empty pots, when June was standing by her car under Gil’s mesquite with her keys in her hand.
Brynn had been coming to Tuesday since the second week. June had put her at Lorraine’s table without asking her—Lorraine had been hosting since before anyone had officially offered her a job. Brynn had been quiet there, but she’d come every week. The cuts had spared her position, barely, because she was the cheapest person in media and the only one who knew where every cable was.
“Can I tell you something,” Brynn said.
June looked at her face in the parking lot light and knew what it was going to be. She didn’t know how she knew. She’d known since the Saturday in May when Brynn had walked out of David’s meeting during the question about who you’d tell.
“Yes,” June said.
Brynn told her. She told her fast, like something rehearsed in a car, with her eyes on her own shoes. She’d taken the screenshots. The chat, the thread, Eli’s message at 8:02. She’d sent them to Tessa on a Friday night in April from her personal phone. She hadn’t known what else to do. She didn’t do the Files—she swore she didn’t; she didn’t know who did—but she’d done that. She’d sat in the room with Maureen Doyle for her interview in June and not said anything about it and she’d thrown up afterward in the bathroom of a Chipotle. She’d been sick about it every day since April. Tessa had told her to tell someone decent.
“She said decent,” Brynn said. “I said you.”
June stood by her car. A plane was coming down into Sky Harbor, low, lights blinking. Somewhere on Grand Avenue a car went by with the bass turned all the way up and faded.
“Are you going to tell Eli?” Brynn said.
“No,” June said.
Brynn looked up.
“It’s yours,” June said. “If you ever want to tell him, you can. If you don’t, you don’t. But I’m not carrying it to him for you.” She thought about it. “Maureen has a confidential line. For the review. She told us in the staff meeting—you don’t have to give your name, and she won’t put it in the report. I think you should call her. Not because you did something wrong. Because you did something somebody should have made it possible to do the right way. She needs to know that nobody could.”
Brynn’s face did something complicated.
“I’ll sit with you when you call,” June said. “If you want.”
“I thought you’d be mad.”
“I’m not mad,” June said. She was surprised to find it was true. “I’m sad we made you do it in the dark.”
Brynn started crying then, and June put her keys in her pocket and held her, in the dirt lot under the mesquite with the cicadas going, for a long time, and didn’t say anything else.
At home on West Monterey Way her grandmother was in the recliner with the rosary and the TV on mute. The San Judas candle on the shelf was lit. June didn’t know how many weeks it had been lit; she’d stopped keeping track in June.
“How was it?” Rosa said without opening her eyes.
“A hundred and ninety-one,” June said, and then, because she’d made herself a rule, “Fourteen new.”
“Qué bueno.” The rosary beads clicked. “Who you praying for tonight?”
June sat down on the arm of the couch with the green notebook on her knee. She opened it to the page from tonight, the fourteen names, and below them she wrote one more, small, and didn’t write anything next to it.
“A friend,” she said.
23Independent Review
Maureen Doyle printed eleven copies of the report and numbered them by hand in the top right corner, and at the end of the meeting she collected ten of them back.
“You’ll get it electronically Thursday, when it’s published,” she said. “Same as everybody. Until then these don’t leave the room.”
It was Monday, the tenth of August, in the warehouse, at the mesquite table, at nine in the morning. The transition team was there—Naomi, Theo, Tamsin, June, Micah—and the outside advisors, David and Dr. Park, and Pastor Rubén Ortega, who’d agreed in July to be the third. Lawrence was on the laptop. Eli was there too, in a folding chair against the wall rather than at the table. The team had voted the week before on whether he should come. It had been three to two. He didn’t know who the two were, and he’d decided not to find out.
The report was thirty-eight pages, with a cover that said Anchor City Church: Independent Review of Testimony Practices, Consent, and Governance and, under it, Crosswell Review Group. It had an executive summary and nine sections and an appendix with a timeline that ran from the women’s night in October to the day Tessa’s video went up in April, broken down by the minute on the thirteenth of March. Maureen had interviewed forty-seven people. She’d read nineteen thousand messages in the staff chat. She’d watched every testimony video Anchor City had ever posted.
She didn’t read the report to them. She’d told them she wouldn’t. She walked them through the findings, section by section, and let them turn the pages themselves, and when they asked questions she answered them in the same level voice she’d used to tell Eli in June that nobody would be softening anything.
Consent had been received and not honored. A written withdrawal had been sent to a shared inbox on March 9, acknowledged in writing within the hour by a staff member, reported to the media team the same afternoon, and overridden by the media director on March 12 on the grounds that, quote, everybody gets cold feet. The video had been published on the thirteenth. The decision to leave it up that evening, after a staff member had flagged the withdrawal a second time, was, in the report’s words, driven primarily by its performance. The release form was, in Maureen’s professional opinion, an overbroad instrument that the church relied on in bad faith after it had been withdrawn.
The church’s first public statement had been inaccurate in three specific respects, which the report listed. Under the list was a paragraph noting that the church had deferred correcting them, on the advice of counsel and at its insurer’s request, until the report was published. We understand the reasons, Maureen had written. We note that the church knew by the end of April that its statement was inaccurate, and that for nearly four months it remained the only public account the church had given of her.
Eli read that one twice. It had been his call. It would be on the website Thursday, and his name would be on the correction under the team’s note.
Eli turned to page eleven and found his own message. It was reproduced exactly, with the timestamp. Wait did she sign a release? Are we exposed legally? What do we say publicly if she posts? Under it Maureen had written one paragraph. The lead pastor’s first written response, upon learning that a video had been published against a participant’s withdrawn consent, concerned the church’s legal exposure and public messaging. It did not inquire about the participant. In interviews, the lead pastor confirmed that this reflected his priorities at the time.
He’d told her that. In June, in his office, with the Bisbee door behind him. She’d asked him what he was thinking when he typed it and he’d told her the truth. He had not expected to see his answer made into a sentence that someone could read.
Section four was governance, and he knew all of it. Three directors: the lead pastor, a staff member who reported to him, and a volunteer who lived with him. Bylaws that let the lead pastor appoint and remove directors. No elders, no plurality, no process for anyone to raise a concern about the pastor. A memo from the operations director, a year and a half old, identifying all of this, answered with an emoji.
Section six was staff culture, and that one he hadn’t known.
“Eleven staff members,” Maureen said, “independently told us, without being asked in those words, that they did not feel they could bring the lead pastor bad news in the days before a Sunday. Four of them used the phrase protect Sunday. One said”—she found the page—“Eli is the kindest person in the building and the hardest one to tell anything to.”
Nobody at the table looked at him. He was grateful for that and ashamed of being grateful.
Then there were the things the report didn’t find.
It found no evidence that any testimony had been fabricated or staged. Maureen’s team had reviewed sixty-four testimony videos. They had reached fifty-eight of the people in them. Every one had said their story was true. Nine had said they’d felt pressured about the timing of their video or about edits they hadn’t liked. Three had asked to have their videos taken down at some point before April; two had been taken down promptly, and the third had been removed only in May, after a staff member checked on it. Maureen’s team had also contacted Jonah Price, who’d agreed to be interviewed on the condition that they not use his name, and whose baptism was, in the report’s words, a genuine religious act which the church subsequently allowed to be used as content without meaningful consent.
It found no financial misconduct. The books had been examined by an outside forensic accountant and found to be in good order. The report credited the volunteer treasurer by title. Theo stared at the page for a long time, and Tamsin reached over and squeezed his arm.
It found the Kids’ Ministry policies exemplary, and consistently followed. Tamsin put her hand over her mouth.
And it addressed the leak.
“Section eight,” Maureen said. “Internal communications were disclosed to the participant in April by a person inside the organization. We have not identified that person and we are not going to. It is our assessment that the disclosure was an understandable act by someone who had no other available channel to raise a serious concern. Had a functioning grievance process existed, it would likely not have been necessary.” She looked over her glasses at the table. “The documents published in May by the watchdog account were provided by a former volunteer. We know who that is, and we’re not going to publish that either. The documents were authentic. Their publication caused some harm that was not necessary. Their content was accurate.”
At the end of the table, June was looking at her own hands.
The recommendations took two pages and there were fourteen of them. David had written most of them on his legal pad in May, and Naomi had written most of the rest in her memo more than a year before that. Maureen read them without inflection. An elder board with a majority of members from outside the founding group. A consent registry with withdrawal honored at any time and within twenty-four hours. A grievance and whistleblower policy with an outside party. A pastoral-care leader with real experience. Real training for anyone leading people. Pause the testimony content. Reduce production. Don’t expand. Pay for the harm, without strings.
“That’s it,” Maureen said. “I’m happy to take questions. I’m not going to change anything.”
Nobody asked her to change anything.
It went up on the church’s website on Thursday at noon, unedited, as a PDF, with a two-paragraph note from the transition team at the top that said the church accepted the findings and would report publicly on its progress, and under the note, three months late, the correction. Priya Natarajan’s story was up in the Ledger by 12:40. The headline was Review finds Anchor City published video after woman withdrew consent, faults church governance. The subhead was No financial misconduct or fabricated testimonies found, report says.
He read the report again that night at the kitchen table in the bungalow, all thirty-eight pages, with a pencil, as he used to read Scripture in college before he had a church. Theo read it at the other end of the table with his own pencil. Around eleven, Theo got up and made two grilled cheese sandwiches and set one in front of Eli without saying anything, and Eli ate it without saying anything, and they both kept reading.
Grant resigned on Friday.
He did it by email, at 7:02 in the morning, to Naomi, copying the transition team. It was four sentences. He’d read the report. It was accurate. He’d made the decision to publish and he’d made it for the reasons Maureen said. He thought the church would be better off without him and he thought he’d be better off without the church, at least for a while, and he was sorry.
Naomi forwarded it to Eli with no comment. Eli was not allowed to accept or reject a resignation; he wasn’t allowed to make any decisions at all. He read it standing in the kitchen. He thought about it all day—at his session with the counselor Dr. Park had found him, a soft-spoken retired Army chaplain named Dr. Glen Hadley who kept a bowl of butterscotch candies on his desk and let long silences go by without filling them; at Friday prayer that evening, where June asked him twice if he was okay; on the back step. At 9:15 that night he called.
Grant picked up on the fifth ring. “Hey.”
“Hey. It’s Eli.”
“I know who it is, man. It says your name.”
Eli could hear traffic, and a radio, and the ticking of a turn signal. “Where are you?”
“In my car. Outside my mom’s. In Glendale.” A pause. “I’ve been sitting here for like an hour. She thinks I’m coming in for dinner. I told her I was on a work call.”
“I’m not calling about work.”
“I figured.”
Neither of them said anything for a bit. Eli heard the turn signal stop.
“I read it,” Grant said. “The whole thing. They quoted me. Everybody gets cold feet. It’s right there on page six, in a box.” He laughed, not really. “My mom’s going to read it. She reads everything about you guys. She’s got a Google alert.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what? They’re right.” Grant’s voice was flat. “That’s the thing. I’d have done it again. In March. I’d have done it a hundred times. I thought I was helping. I shot Marcus. You remember? The first one. The I’m new one. I was the one who said we should post it. I was the one who figured out the whole—the hook, the faces, the push-in on the water. I built that. I built that, Eli, like, the whole machine, that was me, I thought that was my calling, like my actual calling from God, and it turns out—“ He stopped. “It turns out I was really good at a thing that hurt people.”
Eli sat on the back step with the phone against his ear. The grapefruit tree was dark over him.
“I made the thing that made you think that was your job,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“I’m serious. I stood in the tank and turned people toward your lens. I told you a man’s face at the moment he’s born again deserves to be seen. I said that to you. You nodded like it was theology.”
“I know you did. I remember.”
“So some of that’s mine.”
“Some of it,” Grant said. “Fine. Some of it’s yours.” His voice sharpened. “But don’t take all of it, man. Let me have some. It’s mine. I did it. I read Brynn’s message and I made the call. If you take it all, then I’m just a guy who got used, and I’m not. I’m a guy who did something.” He breathed. “Let me have it.”
Eli didn’t say anything for a while.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Weddings again, maybe.” Grant laughed, more like himself. “At least at a wedding everybody knows there’s a camera. Everybody signs up for it. There’s a whole form.”
“Is there a withdrawal process?”
“Yeah,” Grant said. “It’s called divorce.”
Eli laughed, and then Grant did, and then they stopped.
“Hey,” Grant said. “Can you do something for me? Can you pray for me? Like, right now. On the phone.” A beat. “Not on camera.”
Eli put his free hand over his eyes. He found he didn’t have any words ready, which had not happened to him in a prayer since he was maybe fifteen, and so he just said Grant’s name to God, and his mom’s name, which he had to ask for—“Linda,” Grant said—and asked for mercy on both of them and on himself, and said amen, and it was about thirty seconds long.
“Thanks,” Grant said.
“Go eat dinner.”
“Yeah,” Grant said. Eli heard the car door open, and the ding of the keys still in the ignition, and then the call ended.
24Tessa’s Decision
The envelope came to Margie’s house, because that was the address Tessa had given them, and Margie drove it over on Monday night after dinner and set it on Tessa’s kitchen counter next to the fruit bowl and didn’t sit down.
“I’ll go if you want,” Margie said. “Or I’ll stay. Whichever.”
“Stay.”
Margie sat down at the little table by the window, the one with two chairs, and folded her hands with the turquoise rings on the tabletop and looked out at the parking lot while Tessa opened it.
There were three things inside.
The first was a printout of the correction that had gone up on the church’s website on Thursday, under the note at the top of the review, three months after she’d asked for it. Three months. She would have liked to be bigger about that than she was. Tessa had already read it on her phone. She’d read it standing in the surgery prep room at Desert Willow with her gloves still on, holding the phone in the crook of her wrist, while Luz stood lookout at the door. She read it again now on paper.
On April 22, Anchor City Church published a statement about a video we had posted of a woman describing her recovery. That statement was not true in several ways, and we are correcting it.
Our statement said she had “signed a release.” She had. She then withdrew her consent in writing on March 9. We acknowledged her withdrawal the same day. We published the video anyway on March 13 and left it up for more than seven hours.
Our statement said we had “reached out personally to apologize.” We had not. Before that statement, the only word she had from us was a text message that apologized for “the mixup.” Our first apology for what we had actually done was sent on April 27, after she had spoken publicly.
Our statement suggested that her account lacked context. Her account was accurate. The independent review we commissioned has confirmed it.
We should have published this correction months ago. We delayed it on legal advice. That was our decision.
The harm was ours. We will not use her name, her image, or her story again, including in this correction.
It was signed by the transition team, by name, and under the names, by itself, Eli Mercer.
The second thing was a check. It was made out to Tessa Rowan for two thousand eight hundred and sixty dollars, which Tessa knew without doing the math was every session with Jen since March. Jen’s office had asked in May for permission to send the invoices to the church, and Tessa had said no. She hadn’t wanted their money. She’d wanted them to have to think about her not taking it. At the beginning of August Margie had asked her, not unkindly, whose feelings that was protecting, and Tessa had thought about it for two days and called Jen’s office and said yes.
The third thing was a letter, one page, on the church’s letterhead, signed by Naomi Wells as acting executive director.
Enclosed is payment for your counseling costs from March 13 through August 14. Anchor City will continue to pay for your counseling, with the provider of your choosing, for as long as you want it. Your counselor may invoice us directly or you may send us receipts, whichever you prefer.
This payment is not conditioned on your silence. It is not conditioned on your agreement with anything we have said, on any future contact with us, or on anything else. You are free to say whatever you wish about Anchor City Church, now or at any time.
If there is anything else we owe you, please tell Margie, and she will tell us.
Tessa read the second paragraph three times. Then she put the letter down on the counter and turned around and looked at Margie.
“They put that in writing,” she said.
“They did.”
“You are free to say whatever you wish.” Tessa laughed, and it wobbled. “Who writes that?”
“Beats me,” Margie said. “Read it again anyway. People slip things in.”
She’d talked to Maureen Doyle once, in June. Two hours in Margie’s living room with the blinds down, with Margie in the kitchen doing a crossword and not listening, or pretending not to. Maureen had asked her questions for the first hour and then, for the second hour, had asked her whether there was anything she wanted the review to say that nobody had asked her about. Tessa had talked about the prayer hands. About the thing that got her most not being the crier in row C but the emoji under the memo.
The review had quoted her twice, without her name. The participant described the church’s April 22 statement as “the second time they told my story without me.”
She’d read it on Thursday at her kitchen counter with the timer running and then turned the timer off and read it again. She read the part about the person who’d sent her the screenshots—an understandable act by someone who had no other available channel—and put her phone down and put her face in her hands and sat like that for a while. Then she texted Brynn. Did you read page 31. Brynn wrote back a single word: yes. And then, a minute later: i called her. the lady. june sat with me.
She asked Margie to set up one more meeting.
She wasn’t sure why. She’d thought about it since Thursday. She’d thought about it on Sunday, in the back row at Rural Road Community Church, where the tired pastor with the gray mustache was working his way through Ephesians at a rate of about four verses a week, and Frank in the plaid shirt had saved her a seat three Sundays in a row now without ever mentioning that he was doing it. She’d thought about it at home group on Tuesday and on her lunch breaks and on the couch with Biscuit asleep on her feet.
Some of it was that the church had done the list. All five things. The footage confirmation in May, the reposts in June, the correction, late, and the check, and her name nowhere, from anybody, from any stage. Nobody had told her they were doing it right. They’d just done it, and sent it to Margie, and not asked her for anything.
Some of it was that she was tired of carrying him around.
“You don’t owe him a meeting,” Margie said.
“I know.”
Margie looked at her for a while. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll call the tall one.”
It was the same room, on the Saturday. The ghost of synergy had finally been erased from the whiteboard. Somebody had drawn a small cat in the corner of it in blue marker and nobody had erased that.
Eli was on the same side of the table, with Naomi and David. He looked different. He’d cut his hair. He was wearing a plain gray T-shirt instead of the black ones from the videos. He’d lost weight, or maybe he just wasn’t holding himself the same way. When she and Margie came in he stood up, and then seemed not to know what to do with having stood up, and sat back down.
This time there was no list in her pocket. She didn’t need one.
“I read everything,” she said. “The review. The correction. The letter. Thank you for the letter.”
“You don’t have to—“ Eli started, and David, without looking at him, put one finger on the table, and Eli stopped.
“I asked for this meeting,” Tessa said, “because I wanted to say a couple of things to your face. Not because you did the list. You did. It matters. But that’s not why.”
She looked at him.
“I accept your apology,” she said. “The one from May. I’ve thought about it a lot and I believe you meant it. I accept it.”
Eli’s face did something. He didn’t speak.
“And I forgive you,” Tessa said.
She’d practiced saying it in her car. It had sounded strange every time. It sounded strange now, but it sounded like hers.
“I want to be clear about what that—“ She stopped. She’d had it in the car. “Hang on.” She looked at the whiteboard with the cat on it. “It doesn’t mean it was okay. Or that I trust you. Or that I think your church is—I don’t know what your church is. That’s not the part. Forgiving you is mostly between me and God, and I’m doing it because I’m a Christian and I’m supposed to, and because I’ve been carrying you around since March and I’m tired.” She let out a breath. “You’re heavy. That’s what I was trying to say. It came out better in the car.”
Across the table, Naomi made a small sound that might have been a laugh.
“It also doesn’t mean I’m coming back,” Tessa said. “I’m not. I found a church. It’s small. It’s off Rural Road. The pastor preaches way too long and the coffee’s terrible. Nobody there has any idea who I am, or if they do, they haven’t said anything.” She paused. “An old man named Frank saves me a seat. I haven’t told him I noticed.”
“I’m glad,” Eli said. His voice was rough.
“I don’t need you to be glad.”
“Okay.”
“But thank you,” she said, and was surprised to find she meant it.
There was one more thing. She’d almost not said it. She’d talked it over with Margie in the Buick on the way downtown.
“The person who sent me those screenshots,” Tessa said. “In April. The review says they won’t say who it was.”
“We don’t know who it was,” Eli said.
“Good. Keep it that way.” She held his eyes. “If you ever do find out, don’t make it about you. Don’t punish them. Don’t forgive them, either, like they did something to you. Just thank them. They were the only one in that whole building who treated me like I was a person before it was on the news.”
Eli looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded, once.
“Micah wrote me a letter,” Tessa said, turning to Margie, who took an envelope out of her bag and set it on the table. It was the letter Micah had written in June, sent through Margie, that Tessa had kept on her counter for two months under the fruit bowl before she’d opened it. “Tell him I read it. That’s all. I read it.”
“I’ll tell him,” Eli said.
She stood. Margie stood with her.
At the door Tessa turned around. It was the same door; she’d stopped here in May and not said anything. She looked at the three of them at the table—the old man with his hat on his knee, the tall woman with the good shoes, the young pastor with the new haircut.
“My mom’s coming off the pills,” she said. She hadn’t planned to say it. “Slowly. With a doctor. She told me at lunch in July. At a Chili’s in Chandler. She said, I’m not saying you were right to put it on the internet, and I said, I didn’t put it on the internet, Mom, and she said, I know.” Tessa shrugged. “That’s where we are.” She didn’t know why she’d told them.
She went out. The door swung closed on its arm.
In the garage under the library, in the Buick, Margie started the engine and put the air on high and didn’t pull out.
“How do you feel?” she said.
Tessa thought about it honestly. She put her hand on the little gold cross at her throat, the one she’d bought at a pawnshop on Apache the week before her baptism and worn every day since, the one that had been in every frame of the video. It was warm from her skin.
“Hungry,” she said.
Margie laughed, the big rough smoker’s laugh she’d had even though she’d quit in 1994. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. There’s a place on Roosevelt with fried chicken.”
“Is it good?”
“It’s terrible,” Margie said, and put the car in reverse. “You’ll love it.”
25Older Voices
The transition team had asked the church for names in June, on cards.
June had designed the cards. They were the same size as the old connect cards, which was on purpose, and they sat in baskets on every table on Tuesdays and at the connections table on Sundays for six weeks, and they asked one question: Who at Anchor City would you trust to tell the pastor no? Under that, in smaller type, the qualifications from First Timothy and Titus, printed in full, so people could read them before they wrote anything—blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach—and under that a line that said Please write a real person’s name, not “Jesus.”
Three hundred and twelve cards came back. June and Naomi typed them into a spreadsheet. Thirty-one different names appeared more than once. The team, with Dr. Park and Pastor Rubén sitting in, interviewed twelve of them in July, in the warehouse, one evening each, for two hours. David sat in on the first three, until June read out how many cards had his own name on them; then he took his hat and his legal pad out to the Camry and didn’t come back to that table until it was over. Some of the twelve said no. One said yes too eagerly and the team said no to him. Five were left.
Eli wasn’t in any of those rooms. He’d been interviewed himself, once, at the end of July, on a Wednesday night at the mesquite table with all five candidates and the whole team watching, for two and a half hours. They’d asked him about the thirteenth of March and the 8:02 message and the memo and Hal and the statement, and whether he’d ever lied to his board, and what he did with money, and how much he slept, and who his friends were, and what he’d do if he found himself in the same place again. Most of the questions were from Curtis Bell, a middle-school principal from South Phoenix who had the calm, unhurried delivery of a man who spent his days talking to thirteen-year-olds who had just set something on fire.
“If you did this again,” Curtis had asked him, near the end. “Two years from now. Five. What would you want us to do?”
“Stop me,” Eli had said.
“How?”
Eli had thought about it for a while. “Take the microphone,” he’d said. “Literally. Walk up on the stage and take it out of my hand.”
Curtis had written that down.
Before they let him go that night, Tamsin asked for one more thing to be put in the minutes.
She had the spreadsheet printed and in her binder, and she read from it without looking up. Three hundred and twelve cards. Ray Ochoa’s name was on the most, forty-seven. The second was Lorraine Pitts, forty-one. Naomi Wells, thirty-eight. June Alvarez, twenty-two. “And me, nine, which is nine more than I expected,” Tamsin said. “The five people on this list are men. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be. I’m saying the church wrote down who it trusts to tell the pastor no, and a lot of it wrote down women, and women are doing most of the work in this building right now, and we’re about to hand the vote to men and call it maturity. I want that written down. I don’t want us to pretend the cards said something they didn’t.”
Naomi was taking the minutes. She wrote it down, all of it, in the same even hand she used for everything, and from his chair against the wall Eli could not read one thing in her face.
“It’s on the card,” Curtis Bell said finally. “Husband of one wife. It’s in our statement of faith. It’s what I’ve believed for twenty years in a church a lot older than this one.”
“I know what it says,” Tamsin said. “I printed it.”
David had sat through the whole interview in the candidates’ row without asking a question. Now Theo asked him what he thought. He sat with his hands folded on the legal pad for a long time before he answered, and when he did it didn’t come out smooth.
“I believe what I believe about the office,” he said. “I’ve believed it forty years. I also don’t think one thing she said is false.” He looked at Tamsin, not at the room. “I don’t know what to do with both of those tonight. I’d rather tell you that than act like I do.”
Lorraine hadn’t come. When June had called to tell her about the cards she’d said she would rather sit with dying people than sit on a board, and anyway they couldn’t afford her. Naomi said nothing until Theo asked whether she wanted to say anything about the count. Then she said, “Somebody has to keep the minutes,” and kept them.
The team voted four to one to send the five names to the church. Tamsin was the one. Then they voted, all five, to put the question of women and the office of elder on the reading list for the Year—the discipleship year June was building for the fall— and to report back to the church when the Year was done, with no promise about what the report would say. Tamsin said that was the least they could do, and voted for it anyway.
On Monday the twenty-fourth of August, at seven in the morning, the three directors of Anchor City Church met at the mesquite table for the last time.
Lawrence was there in person again, in a gray suit, with the amended bylaws in a folder. Naomi took minutes. David sat in the corner with his legal pad, as he had in June, not voting. The rest of the transition team sat at the table’s other end, and it occurred to Eli that there were more people watching this vote than had ever been in the room for any vote the three of them had taken.
Lawrence walked them through it. The church would be governed by a board of elders, with a minimum of five and a maximum of nine, affirmed by the congregation and serving three-year terms. The lead pastor would be one elder among them, with one vote, and could not chair the board. The elders could remove the lead pastor by a two-thirds vote of the other elders. The lead pastor could not appoint or remove any elder. A finance committee would report to the elders, and would include at least one certified public accountant who was not a member of the church. There would be a written conflict-of-interest policy, and a grievance policy with an outside party named in it, and, beginning in the fall, a real membership, for people who wanted one, with a covenant they could read before they signed it and a way out they could read too.
“Last thing,” Lawrence said. “The motion to adopt includes your resignations as directors, effective at the moment the elders are affirmed on Sunday. After that, you’re not the board. None of you.” He looked at Eli. “Including you. You’ll be on the new board as an elder. But you won’t be the board ever again.”
“Understood,” Eli said.
Theo read the motion. Micah seconded it. There was a pause.
“All in favor,” Theo said.
Dr. Park had written one exception into his terms in June, in pen, in the margin: this vote, the one that gave other people the power to overrule him, was the one decision he was allowed to make.
Three hands. Eli looked at them for the last time in this configuration: square and freckled with the ink stain; long, with the calluses; his own. He had thought, driving over, that this would feel like losing something, and it did.
“Motion carries,” Theo said, and wrote it down, and then put the pencil down on the table and looked at it. “Okay. That’s the last one.”
Nobody moved for a moment.
“I’m moving out,” Theo said.
Eli turned.
“October first. I found a place in Garfield. It’s a studio over a garage. It has a mini-split that sounds like a jet engine.” Theo didn’t look at him. “I’m staying treasurer. I’ll be on the finance committee with Patricia. But somebody told me in May that the treasurer of a church shouldn’t live with the pastor, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since, and he was right.” He picked the pencil back up. “Also, you never replace the toilet paper.”
Micah laughed first, and then Naomi, and then Eli, and David in the corner made the small sound in his throat.
The names had gone out to the church a week before, in an email and on a sheet at every table on Tuesday, with a paragraph about each one, written by the transition team, not by the candidates.
David Shaw, sixty-three, retired pastor of Second Street Bible Church, thirty-five years. Navy veteran. Married to Ruth for forty-one years. He will tell you he’s too old for this. He is not.
Ray Ochoa, fifty-six, a family doctor at a community clinic in Maryvale, who’d come to Anchor City a year and a half ago because his daughter, a nursing student, had dragged him to a Night service, and who’d been quietly leading a men’s group for fathers ever since. He’d been nominated on forty-seven cards, more than anyone else.
Curtis Bell, forty-eight, principal of a middle school in South Phoenix, deacon at a Black Baptist church in the Valley for twenty years before he’d moved his family to Anchor City when his sons wanted to go where their friends were. He has, by his own count, broken up four hundred fights. He is the calmest person any of us has ever met.
Ade Okonjo, forty-four, a civil engineer at the city water department, born in Lagos, raised in Houston, who’d found Anchor City through a coworker and started volunteering on the setup crew at the Monroe at six a.m. every Sunday because nobody else wanted the shift. He asked the transition team harder questions about the budget than Theo does.
Luis Sandoval, thirty-one, high-school chemistry teacher, bass player, one of the original thirty in the warehouse. He’s young. He’s also been here longer than almost anyone. He’s been telling Eli no, privately, for three years. Eli says he mostly didn’t listen.
And Eli Mercer, twenty-nine, lead pastor. The paragraph about him was the shortest. He has agreed to be one elder among several, with one vote, and to be removable by the others. He has asked us to say that he does not think he should be in charge of choosing the people who supervise him, and that he did not choose any of these names.
He’d read it on his phone on the back step and gone inside and read it again on the laptop, where it was bigger.
Hal came at two that afternoon.
He’d asked to see Eli and Naomi. David happened to be there, because Monday afternoons had become the second of their weekly meetings in August and Hal had asked for two o’clock without asking whether it was free. So the four of them sat in Eli’s office, with the Bisbee bank door and the brass mail slot, and the bare nail on the wall where the magazine cover used to hang, and the fifth chair empty.
Hal looked around the office as if seeing it for the first time.
He’d emailed Naomi in July asking to be considered for the elder board, given my level of investment in this church and my experience with organizational leadership. The transition team had written back that nominations came from the congregation, and that his name had not appeared on any card, and that they were grateful for his generosity and would be glad to have him at a Tuesday Table, where there was a seat for him any week. He had not come to a Tuesday Table. He had not come on a Sunday since the first week of June.
“I wanted to tell you in person,” Hal said. “We’re moving our membership. Summit Point. In Scottsdale. Pastor Wade’s been after me for years.” He folded his hands on his knee. “Lorna likes the kids’ program. And frankly I think it’s healthier for me to be somewhere with some grown-ups in charge.”
“I understand,” Eli said.
“I don’t say that to be ugly.” Hal looked at Naomi and then at David, as if he’d just placed him. “I’ve been in church sixty years. I’ve seen this movie. A young guy gets a big thing going. Everybody loves him. Then he gets a little heat and he folds and hands the keys to a committee, and three years later you’re a hundred people in a rented cafeteria wondering what happened.” He spread his hands. “The problem wasn’t the video. The problem was letting kids run it.”
Eli felt the old answer come up in him. He didn’t say it.
David did something with his legal pad—set it face down on his knee—and looked at Hal with his pale, unhurried eyes.
“I ran a church for thirty-five years,” David said. “I was twenty-six when I started. When I was twenty-eight I did something to a man in my congregation that I’m still ashamed of, and I did it in front of a hundred and sixty people, and most of my deacon board was past sixty. Not one of them told me no. Not before and not after. They thought that’s what a pastor was for, to be the one nobody tells no.” He paused. “It wasn’t that they were kids, Mr. Brandt. It was that nobody could tell them no. Gray hair doesn’t fix that. I had a room full of it.”
Hal looked at him for a long moment.
“Well,” Hal said, and stood up. “I wish you all the best. I mean that.”
“We know,” Naomi said.
At the door Hal stopped and looked at the empty nail on the wall.
“Where’s the magazine?” he said.
“In a drawer,” Eli said.
Hal nodded as if that confirmed something, and left. They heard his boots on the concrete and the front door and, a minute later, the big engine of his truck turning over in the lot. On the side of the truck, Eli knew, was the penguin in its little scarf.
David picked his legal pad back up and turned it over.
“How much was the Gilbert pledge?” he said.
“Two fifty,” Naomi said.
David wrote it down. Then he drew a line through it, neatly, with the blue pen, and wrote nothing next to it, and turned the page.
26Micah’s Song
Nora Grace Reed was born at 4:12 in the morning on Wednesday, the nineteenth of August, after nineteen hours of labor, weighing seven pounds two ounces, with a full head of black hair that stuck straight up like she’d been startled, and the first thing her mother asked for after she held her was an echocardiogram.
“She’s fine,” the OB said. “Her heart sounds perfect.”
“I know,” Hannah said, from the bed, with the baby on her chest and her hair plastered to her forehead. “I want the echo anyway. I’ve seen too many.”
So at eight that morning a tech Hannah had worked with for three years came down from the cardiac unit with a portable machine and a tiny probe and a tube of warm gel, and ran it over Nora’s chest while Nora screamed and Hannah watched the screen with her professional face on and Micah watched Hannah. After four minutes Hannah’s shoulders came down half an inch, and the tech said, “Four chambers, good flow, everything where it’s supposed to be, Hannah, she’s perfect, I’m going to go get breakfast,” and Hannah started crying for the first time all night.
“I know she’s fine,” she said, crying. “I know. I just needed to see it.”
Micah put his hand on the back of her head, and Nora, done with being examined, stopped screaming all at once and went to sleep.
The song came three nights later, at three in the morning, as songs used to come before he had a label and a dashboard and a person in Franklin, Tennessee, asking about his follow-up.
He was in the nursery in the glider Hannah’s sister had given them, with Nora asleep on his chest after a feeding that had gone on forever, and he was afraid to move. The only light was the nightlight shaped like a moon. On the wall above the changing table was a cross-stitch in a thin wooden frame that Hannah’s grandmother had made the year Hannah was born, blue thread on cream, a little faded, that they’d hung up in July and he had walked past a hundred times since without reading.
He read it now, because it was the only thing in the room he could see.
For who hath despised the day of small things? — Zechariah 4:10
He sat there with his daughter breathing against his neck, seven pounds and some ounces, and read it about twenty times. He knew the verse, sort of, the way you know verses you’ve heard used at church-plant conferences—usually by guys who were about to tell you how their small thing got very big. He’d never looked it up. He didn’t look it up now. He just sat there, and after a while he started humming very quietly, so as not to wake her, a line that went up at the end like a question and then came back down.
He got his phone out of his pocket one-handed, without moving his chest, and opened the voice memo app and hummed it into the microphone at a volume just above breathing. Then he hummed the next line. Then he stopped, because Nora stirred, and he held still until she settled, and then he hummed it again.
By Sunday he had a verse and most of a chorus. He wrote the words on the back of a hospital discharge sheet at the kitchen table while Hannah napped.
Nobody’s counting the stones tonight,
nobody’s keeping the score—
just a handful of bread and a borrowed room
and a light coming under the door.
Who despised the day of small things?
Not the hands that made the seed.
Not the One who knelt with the fishermen
and knew them each by name.
It wasn’t finished. The rhyme in the chorus was wrong and he knew it; seed wanted need or feed and he’d given it name, and he couldn’t make himself change it. He played it for Hannah on Sunday night on the old Yamaha acoustic with the cracked pickguard, which he had carried home from the Monroe after the monsoon and never taken back, sitting on the end of the couch with Nora asleep in the bassinet, and Hannah listened with her eyes closed.
“The rhyme’s wrong,” she said when he finished.
“I know.”
“Don’t fix it,” she said.
Colby called on Monday, after Micah texted him a picture of Nora.
“Brother,” he said. “She’s beautiful. She looks like she stuck her finger in a light socket.”
“She does.”
“Hannah good?”
“Hannah’s good.”
Colby was quiet for a second. “Listen. I found the clause. The one you asked about. The branding. It’s the Anchor City Worship featuring language, and it applies to anything recorded under the Anchor City Worship name or at an Anchor City event. Your own writing, recorded on your own, released under your own name—that’s not covered. You’d have first-look obligations to us on anything new, but you can pass.” He paused. “I’m not supposed to tell you that part so clearly.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you writing?”
“A little,” Micah said. “One song. I’m going to record it at Luis’s house. In his garage. I’m going to put it out myself, under my name. I’m not going to promote it.”
“You’re leaving money on the table, you know.”
“I know.”
“Like, real money. You have an audience right now. They’re cooling, but they’re there. One push—“
“I know, Colby.”
The line was quiet for a while.
“Send me the demo anyway,” Colby said finally. “Not for the label. Just for me. I’d like to hear it.”
Micah said he would. After he hung up, he sat on the back step of the rental in Encanto for a while with the phone in his hand.
Eli had texted him on Sunday morning, the day after the library. Three words, no emoji: She read it.
Micah had read that text maybe fifteen times since. He’d written the letter to Tessa in June, sitting in the garage by the water heater, after Eli told him she’d said he could write it down, and it had taken him four nights and five drafts, and he’d sent it to Margie and heard nothing and made himself stop waiting. He had thought, if anything came back, he’d want more than that. He’d want to know what she thought. Whether she forgave him. Whether she’d heard the part about the dashboard.
He read the three words again and put the phone in his pocket.
On Tuesday the twenty-fifth of August he played it at the warehouse.
June had never allowed music at Tuesday Table. That was one of her rules; she’d written it in the design, in May, underlined twice: No band. It becomes a service. It becomes a stage. But on Sunday, when Micah had asked her if he could play one song, just one, at the end, sitting down, she’d looked at him for a long time and then asked, “Is there a microphone?” and he’d said no, and she’d asked, “Where will you sit?” and he’d said at a table, the same as everybody, and she’d said, “Table nine. Tom’s. At eight-fifteen, after prayer. One song. Then you help stack chairs.”
Hannah came. It was Nora’s first time out of the house besides the pediatrician. She wore her in a gray wrap across her chest, and she sat at table nine next to Tom Pruett, who gazed at the baby with the expression of a man who had known eleven thousand dogs but never been so impressed by any of them. Jonah was at the table. Kiana’s cousin Dani was there with her skateboard under her chair. David was at a different table across the room, with his hat on the chair back, next to Eli, who had come in from setup still wearing his work gloves.
At 8:15, after the tables had prayed and the room had loosened into that end-of-evening sound of people stacking plates and finishing conversations, Micah took the Yamaha out of its case and sat back down in his folding chair at table nine and tuned it. Tom said, to nobody in particular, “Micah’s going to play a song,” and the tables nearest turned their chairs, and then the next ones did, and by the time he’d finished tuning, the whole warehouse had gone quiet in a ragged, patient way, a hundred and ninety people at twenty-four tables with the rolling door open behind them and the cicadas going outside in the dark.
He played it.
It wasn’t loud. It couldn’t be; it was one acoustic guitar in a warehouse with a concrete floor and a metal roof. The people at the far tables had to lean forward. He sang the first verse and the wrong-rhyming chorus and the second verse, which he’d finished on Monday, and a bridge that he’d finished that afternoon in the car in the parking lot of the Sprouts on Seventh Street and wasn’t sure about. His voice cracked on the high note in the bridge because he hadn’t slept more than three hours at a time in a week. He didn’t go back and fix it.
Halfway through the second verse he saw a phone go up.
It was a guy at table fourteen, maybe twenty-five, in a work polo with a company logo on it, somebody Micah didn’t know—one of June’s new ones from the list, probably. He had the phone up at chest height, camera out, and the little red dot was on.
Micah kept playing. He watched the guy.
The guy held it there for maybe ten seconds. Then he looked around. Micah saw him do it: look to his left, and his right, and across the table. There was a woman next to him with her chin on her hand. There was an old man with his eyes closed. At the next table was a girl holding a baby that wasn’t hers so the mother could eat.
The guy lowered it. He looked at the screen for a second, and Micah saw his thumb move—stop, probably, or delete—and then he set the phone face down on the table next to his paper plate and put his hand flat on top of it, as if to keep it from getting up again, and listened to the rest.
Micah finished the song. He let the last chord ring out until it was gone, into the concrete and the rafters and the open door.
Tom said “Amen” in his mail-carrier voice. Somebody at table six said “Whoa” softly. At table nine, Nora, who had slept through all of it against her mother’s chest, woke up and made a sound like a squeaky door, and the tables nearest laughed, and Hannah put her hand over the baby’s head and rocked her, and the room broke back into its ordinary noise, people standing, chairs scraping.
Micah put the Yamaha in its case.
Across the warehouse, Eli was standing by his table with his work gloves in one hand. He didn’t come over. He just lifted the gloves an inch, as if in a toast, and then turned and started folding up his chair, and after a second Micah got up and went to go help with the stacking.
27Eli and David
The gate at the Piestewa Peak trailhead opened at five, and at 4:58 on Thursday morning David Shaw was already standing in front of it in a sunhat, cargo shorts, and a pair of hiking poles with duct tape wrapped around the grips, holding a plastic whistle on a lanyard that Ruth had put around his neck in the kitchen.
“She says if I fall I should blow it,” David said. “I told her if I fall I’ll have other things on my mind.”
It was ninety-one degrees in the dark. The city had been under an extreme-heat warning for most of August; the trail would close at eight, and by afternoon it would be a hundred and twelve. The parking lot was already half full: runners in reflective vests, a group of college kids with headlamps, a man in his seventies in a Vietnam veterans cap walking a dachshund in a harness. Eli had suggested it on Monday, not knowing why, and David had said yes before he’d finished the sentence, which had surprised them both.
They went up slowly. The Summit Trail was a mile and a quarter of rock steps and switchbacks, straight up the side of the mountain, and David took it one step at a time, planting the poles, breathing through his nose. Runners came down past them in the dark, their headlamps bouncing. Eli walked behind him and carried both waters and didn’t offer to help, because David had told him in the parking lot that if he offered to help he would use the poles on him.
At the first saddle, about a third of the way up, there was a flat shelf of rock with a view east, and David stopped there and lowered himself onto it with a grunt and said, “That’s as far as I go,” and Eli sat down next to him.
Below them the city was still lit, an orange grid running out to the black line of the mountains. The sky over the McDowells was going from black to a dark bruised blue. Somewhere down in the neighborhoods a dog was barking, and farther off, a train.
For a while they didn’t talk. David drank water. Eli watched the sky.
“A week from Sunday,” David said.
“If they let me.”
“If they let you. You know what you’re going to preach?”
“Mark six,” Eli said. “Verses thirty to thirty-four.”
“Come ye yourselves apart,” David said.
“Yeah.”
David nodded slowly. “Where’d that come from?”
“Jonah,” Eli said. “He read the whole book. You told him to. On his break. And then in August we were stacking chairs and he said, out of nowhere, Jesus keeps trying to get away from the crowds and the crowds keep finding him. And he said it was weird for somebody who’s supposed to want everybody to know about him.” Eli looked at his hands. “I’ve been reading it every day since. I haven’t been able to get past chapter six.”
David didn’t say anything. He looked pleased, in the dim, but not for long.
“Can I tell you something,” Eli said. “It’s not about Sunday.”
“Go ahead.”
He’d thought about how to say it all the way up. He’d thought about it for two and a half months. He’d said pieces of it to Dr. Hadley in the office with the butterscotch candies, and Dr. Hadley had listened and said, Have you told David? and he’d said no.
“We’re at fourteen hundred,” Eli said. “About. Kenzie doesn’t send me the number anymore; I asked her not to. But I know. I can feel it. You walk in and you know.” He picked up a small rock and turned it over. “And I’m scared. Not about money. Theo says we’re okay. I’m scared because every Sunday that it’s smaller, something in me says God left. That’s the whole thing. That’s what I think when I walk into the Monroe and there are empty rows in the balcony. I think, He’s gone. I think, We had it and we lost it and he went somewhere else.”
David was quiet.
“I watched a church die,” Eli said. “In Yuma. I told you about the Dollar General. But I watched it happen, for years, every Sunday, on a board on the wall. Attendance last week. I’d look at it during the first hymn. It went down every year. And I think I decided—I was a kid, I didn’t decide it, it just went in—that a church getting smaller means God is leaving it. And a church getting bigger means he’s in it. I built the whole thing on that. Every clip. Every count. Every time Kenzie gave me a number I was asking, Is he still here?” He threw the rock off the edge. It clicked down somewhere below in the dark. “I preached against prosperity gospel. I said it from the stage. God doesn’t promise you money. And I had a prosperity gospel about attendance and I never even saw it.”
The sky over the McDowells was starting to go orange at the bottom. A runner came up the switchback below them, breathing hard, and passed without looking at them.
“Did Dale stop visiting people?” David said.
Eli turned.
“Your Dale. When it got small. When it was down to fifty, thirty, whatever. Did he stop going to the hospital? Stop going to funerals? Stop doing weddings for people he’d baptized?”
“No,” Eli said. “He came to my dad. When he fell off a pole. Four in the morning. The church was at like fifty then. My dad told me in June, in the parking lot of the Dollar General. He said Dale sat with my mom six hours with a thermos.”
“Then the Lord’s hand was on him,” David said. “All the way down. It was on him at the hospital at four in the morning. It was on him in the plumbing aisle.” He tapped his pole on the rock. “It was never on the hymn board. Nobody’s ever was. Mine wasn’t either.”
Eli didn’t say anything.
“My turn,” David said.
He didn’t start right away. He took the whistle off his neck and turned it over in his fingers.
“In nineteen ninety-eight,” he said, “a church opened up in north Phoenix. You wouldn’t know the name; it split in two about ten years later. Big building. Coffee bar. Rock band. The pastor was thirty-three and had been to some conference in California and came back with a whole system. In two years they were four thousand people. And thirty of mine went. Thirty people, out of a hundred and eighty. Some of them I’d baptized. One of them I’d married.”
He blew very softly into the whistle without making a sound.
“I preached a sermon,” he said. “About entertainment churches. I called it that. About how the gospel doesn’t need a light show. About how Jesus didn’t have a coffee bar. It was a good sermon. People said amen. Ruth came up to me afterward and said, David, that was about you.” He almost smiled. “She was right. It was all envy. Every word of it. I dressed it up in Scripture and preached it to the ones who stayed so they’d feel good about staying.”
He put the whistle back around his neck.
“I kept that baptism book for thirty-five years,” he said. “Ruth has it. Four hundred and eighteen names. And I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone but Ruth. Part of why I kept it was so I’d have a number. So when somebody bigger came along I could open it and say, well, these are real. It was a scoreboard, Eli. A holy one. But I kept score.”
The sun was about to come over the McDowells. The whole eastern sky had gone the color of a peach.
“And I’ve been jealous of you,” David said. “Since the first clip. The boy yelling I’m new. Ruth showed it to me on her phone and I watched it and I felt it in my stomach. Four hundred and eighteen in thirty-five years. You told me what you’d done since October.” He looked at Eli directly. “When she called me in April and told me what had happened, God forgive me, the very first thing I felt—before I felt sorry for that young woman, before I felt anything else—was glad. Just for a second. Good. Let’s see how he does now.”
Eli stared at him.
“I’ve repented of that,” David said. “More than once this summer. I’ll probably have to do it again by next Thursday. It comes back. It’s come back up this mountain with me this morning, looking at you, twenty-nine years old, knowing you’ve got fourteen hundred people waiting for you a week from Sunday and I preached my last sermon to seventy.” He shrugged. “I’m not telling you so you’ll feel sorry for me. I’m telling you because you’ve been sitting with me every week since May thinking I’m the one who has it figured out. I don’t. I’m just further down the road with the same thing. You asked me what you’re afraid of. Well, that’s what I’m afraid of. That it was all about me. All thirty-five years. And that God let me do it anyway and loved those people through me in spite of it.”
The sun came up. It came up all at once, the way it does in the desert, a white-gold edge over the McDowells and then the whole disk, and the light went across the valley floor in one sweep, over the neighborhoods and the freeways and the orange groves that used to be everywhere and were now in a few old yards, and lit the side of the mountain where they were sitting, and Eli felt it hot on his face immediately, like a hand.
David squinted into it.
“Well,” he said. “That’s that.”
On the way down a young man in a sleeveless shirt came up the trail past them at a jog, holding his phone out in front of him on a little stick, talking into it breathlessly. “—sunrise hike, day forty of the challenge, you guys, look at this view, this is why I—“ He passed them without seeing them and went on up, still talking.
David stopped on the step below and watched him go. Then he looked back up at Eli, and for the first time since Eli had known him, he laughed—really laughed, an old man’s wheezing laugh that bent him over his poles—and Eli started laughing too, standing on a rock step on the side of Piestewa Peak at 6:10 in the morning in ninety-four degrees, and neither of them could stop for a while, and the man in the Vietnam cap came down behind them with his dachshund and waited politely for them to finish so he could get by.
At the trailhead David got into the Camry and started it and turned the air all the way up and sat with the door open and his hat on his knee.
“If they let me,” Eli said, “do you want me to say anything about you?”
David looked at him.
“You know the rule,” David said.
“Don’t quote you.”
“Don’t quote me.” He pulled the door closed and rolled the window down an inch. “Seven o’clock Monday. The garden. Bring coffee.”
Eli watched the Camry back out, very slowly, and pull onto the frontage road, and go. Then he walked to the drinking fountain by the trailhead restrooms and filled both bottles and drank one standing there, all of it, and filled it again.
28Structural Repentance
June’s grandmother wore her good black dress and the gold earrings with the little crosses and carried her rosary in her purse, not in her hand, because she said she didn’t want the Protestants to think she was showing off.
“Nobody’s going to think that, Abuela.”
“You don’t know Protestants,” Rosa said. “I been watching them fifty years.”
It was the first time Rosa Alvarez had ever set foot in Anchor City Church. June had asked her to come a dozen times over three years—to the warehouse, to the Monroe, to a baptism, to Christmas—and Rosa had always said maybe next time, mija, in the tone that meant the eight o’clock at Saint Vincent de Paul had been good enough for her since 1968 and would be good enough until they carried her out of it. Then on Thursday night, while June was at the kitchen table with her laptop, going over the slides for Sunday for the fourth time, Rosa had come in from the recliner and read over her shoulder for a while and said, “Sunday, this is the meeting? The one where they say they’re sorry?”
“Sort of.”
“I’m coming,” Rosa said. “I want to see the tall one. And your boss.”
The congregational meeting started at one o’clock, after the eleven, in the main room of the Monroe. The aunties had set up lunch in the lobby—rice and beans in steam trays, a mountain of tortillas under towels, and, because Theo had insisted on something nobody had to be grateful for, forty pizzas from the place on Roosevelt. People took plates in with them. The house lights stayed all the way up. There was no band and no walk-in music and no countdown on the screen. There was one screen, with black text on a white background, and a table at the front of the stage with seven chairs behind it and a pitcher of water.
June counted eight hundred and twenty. It was the first time Anchor City had ever held a meeting where the church was asked to vote on anything. She’d been afraid nobody would stay.
Rosa sat in the last row of the orchestra, on the aisle, with her purse on her lap and her ankles crossed, looking up at the painted ceiling with open suspicion. June sat with her until one, then went down front, because Naomi had asked her to.
Naomi ran it. She stood at the side of the stage with no notes and a clicker and went through it as she’d gone through the cuts in July, plainly, one slide at a time, and every time she finished a slide she said, “Questions on this one?” and waited, really waited, looking out at the room, before she clicked to the next.
The review’s fourteen recommendations were on the first slide. Next to each one was a word: DONE, UNDERWAY, or NOT YET. Nine said DONE. Four said UNDERWAY. One said NOT YET, and that one was Reduce total weekly production hours by at least half, and next to it, in smaller type, it said We’re at 38%. We’ll get there.
Consent. Naomi put the new form on the screen, the whole thing, because it fit. It was one page. It was written, June knew, because she’d been in the room, by Tamsin and Maureen Doyle and a retired family-court judge named Alma Treviño, in plain English and plain Spanish. You can say no. You can say yes now and change your mind later. If you change your mind, even after your story is posted, even if it’s doing well, we will take it down within 24 hours. You don’t have to give a reason. Nobody will try to talk you out of it. The word irrevocable was gone from every form the church had. The registry of who had said yes and who had said no would be kept by the care team, not the media team. And in July, the church had written to all fifty-eight people who had testimony videos still online and asked them again. Twenty-one had asked for their videos to come down. All twenty-one were down.
“Testimony videos stay paused,” Naomi said, “at least through the spring. If we start again, we’ll tell you first, and we’ll tell you why.”
Grievances. There was now a person, not on staff and not a member, whom anyone could call if they believed someone at Anchor City—including the lead pastor, including any elder, including Naomi—had done something wrong. It was Judge Treviño. Her number and an email address were printed on the back of every bulletin, starting today. There was a written promise that nobody who raised a concern would be punished for it. Naomi read the promise out loud.
Production. The livestream would show the sermon and nothing else, from one fixed camera. Nothing would be filmed during prayer, or during the response, or during communion. Baptisms wouldn’t be filmed unless the person being baptized asked for it on a separate form, signed at least a week before, and could still say no in the water. The Night service would meet once a month. The QR codes had come off the seats in June; June had done it herself, with Priscilla and a putty knife and two afternoons, and Naomi said so from the stage, and a few people clapped, and June looked at the floor.
“No Gilbert,” Naomi said. “The letter of intent is terminated. We lost the deposit.” She clicked. The slide said: Two services. One building. When the Monroe is full, we’ll stop adding seats. “When we’re full, we won’t put up another screen in another room. We’ll talk about sending some of you somewhere. With a team. Not a livestream.”
Then people.
“Starting Tuesday,” Naomi said, “Lorraine Pitts is our pastor of care.”
Lorraine stood up from the third row. She was wearing a purple dress and reading glasses on top of her head, and the room, which knew her from July and from Tuesdays, gave her a long, warm round of applause, which she waved off with both hands like someone shooing chickens.
“She’s going to lead hospital visitation, funerals, crisis care, and counseling referrals,” Naomi said. “The counseling list is new. Every number on it works. I checked them myself.”
“She did,” Lorraine said, loudly, from her seat, and people laughed.
“And,” Naomi said, “starting Tuesday, June Alvarez is our director of formation and community care.”
June had known it was coming. She’d said yes on Wednesday, in Naomi’s office, after a long silence during which Naomi had waited, really waited, and June had thought about the shoebox of green notebooks under her bed and said, Can I keep doing the name tags on Tuesdays? and Naomi had said You can do whatever you want, you’re the director. She’d known it was coming and she still wasn’t ready for it: eight hundred people turning in their seats to look at her, and the applause, and in the middle of it, from the very back row of the orchestra, a single voice, loud and cracked and seventy-eight years old:
“¡Esa es mi nieta!”
The room turned around to look. Rosa Alvarez was standing in the last row with her purse clutched against her good black dress, pointing at the stage. The room laughed—not at her, with her—and then applauded again, harder, and Rosa, satisfied, sat down.
June put her hand over her face.
“June will oversee Tuesday Table,” Naomi went on, when she could, “and the callers, and every small-group leader. And starting in October, she’ll be leading what we’re calling the Year.” The slide changed. “It’s a year-long discipleship process for anyone who leads anything at Anchor City. Every host, every group leader, every elder, every staff member. Including Eli. Once a week, for a year, in the warehouse. We read. We pray. We learn how to care for people without hurting them. You don’t get to lead after this year unless you’ve done it. Sixty-one people have signed up so far.”
The elders were last.
Naomi read the six names and the paragraphs, and then the ushers passed out paper ballots—half sheets, printed with the six names and a box next to each one, Affirm or Do not affirm—and golf pencils from a box Ade Okonjo had brought from the water department. It took twenty minutes. Ushers collected them in the old offering buckets from the warehouse days, which Tamsin had found in a storage closet, and Theo and Patricia Lund, the new CPA on the finance committee, counted them at a table in the lobby while everyone else got more pizza. Judge Treviño watched them count.
Every name was affirmed. The lowest was ninety-one percent. It was Eli’s.
Pastor Rubén Ortega came up from the audience then, and Lorraine, and a gray-haired Black pastor from Curtis Bell’s old church in South Phoenix whom June had never met, and the six of them—David and Ray and Curtis and Ade and Luis and Eli—knelt at the front of the stage, on the bare boards, in a row, while the three laid hands on them and prayed. Rubén prayed in Spanish and then in English. Lorraine prayed briefly and plainly, the way she’d prayed at four thousand bedsides. The pastor from South Phoenix prayed long and loud and got to the end and said, And Lord, give them the courage to tell each other no, in Jesus’ name, and the room said amen like it meant it.
June watched from the side of the stage. She watched Eli on his knees in a gray T-shirt, at the end of the row, between Luis and the edge, with an old Mexican pastor’s hand on his head and his own hands flat on the boards. He didn’t look up at the room. She realized that she had never once, in three years, seen him on that stage without looking at the room.
Questions came after. There were a lot. How membership would work. Whether kids could come to Tuesday Table. Whether the Night service would ever come back weekly. What had happened to the woman in the video, and whether she was okay—Naomi said, She’s asked us not to talk about her, and we’re not going to, and the room accepted that.
A man in his fifties near the front, with his arms crossed, stood up and said, “Why should any of us trust any of you?”
Naomi didn’t answer. She looked at the elders’ table. After a second, Curtis Bell leaned toward his microphone.
“You shouldn’t yet,” he said, in his even principal’s voice. “Watch us for a year. If we mess up, the number’s on the back of your bulletin. Call it.”
The man thought about that, and sat down.
A woman in her sixties halfway back, whom June knew from the nine o’clock and the aunties’ rotation, asked why all six of them were men.
This time nobody looked at anybody. Curtis answered it. He said it was because of what the church’s statement of faith said about the office of elder, and that he believed it, and that not everyone at the table was as sure as he was, and that the church was going to study the question in the Year and tell them what it found. “I can’t promise you what we’ll find,” he said. “I can promise you’ll hear it from us first.”
The woman said, “Okay,” in a voice that was not okay, and sat down. In the third row Tamsin looked at her own hands.
Near the end, a girl of maybe twenty in the balcony, with a nose ring and an ASU sweatshirt, called down without waiting for the mic runner: “Are we going to be boring now?”
The room laughed. Naomi smiled and looked around for someone to hand it to, and her eyes landed on June.
June took the mic. She hadn’t meant to say anything. She stood there for a second with it in her hand.
“Probably,” she said. “For a while.” The room laughed again. “There’s rice.” She tried to think of what else, and couldn’t, and shrugged. “Tuesdays. Six o’clock. Come see.”
Brynn found Eli in the lobby afterward, by the connections table, while the aunties were packing up the steam trays and people were drifting out onto Monroe Street into the three o’clock heat.
June was ten feet away, stacking bulletins. She didn’t move closer. She’d told Brynn on Thursday night that she’d be there, in the room, if Brynn wanted her to be, and that she wouldn’t say a word.
Brynn stood in front of Eli with her hands in the pockets of her hoodie. She was starting on June’s team on Tuesday, as care coordinator. She’d asked for the job herself.
“It was me,” Brynn said. “In April. The screenshots. I sent them to her.”
Eli looked at her. June watched his face and saw several things go across it, one after another, too fast to name—and then saw him stop, and let them go by, as she’d seen him learn to do at the name-tag table when somebody said a name he didn’t know how to spell.
“Thank you,” he said.
Brynn blinked. “That’s it?”
“I’m sorry you had to do it that way,” Eli said. “We should have made it so you didn’t have to. That’s on me. Not you.” He paused. “Thank you.”
Brynn’s face did the complicated thing it had done in the dirt lot in July, and then something simpler, and she laughed, a short wet sound, and wiped her nose on her hoodie sleeve, and said, “Okay,” and walked out the front doors into the heat without looking back, and June let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.
In the car on the way home, on the I-10 heading west with the air on high and the sun coming through the windshield like a blowtorch, Rosa sat with her purse in her lap and looked out the window for a long time.
“So?” June said finally.
“The tall one talks good,” Rosa said. “She got good shoes, I told you.” She considered. “The old man with the hat is boring. Your pastor is too skinny. The lady with the purple dress, I like her. She’s gonna be good for the dying people.”
“That’s her job.”
“I know is her job. I’m saying she’s gonna be good.” Rosa looked out the window at the exit signs for 35th Avenue going by. “Everybody was kneeling,” she said. “On the floor. I didn’t know Protestants did that.”
“Sometimes.”
“Hmm,” Rosa said.
When they got home, Rosa went straight to the shelf over the TV, still in her good dress, and stood in front of the two candles. The Virgin of Guadalupe was burning, as always. Next to her, San Judas Tadeo, in his green robe with the little flame over his head, patron of desperate causes, had been burning since April. It was the eighteenth glass, or near it. Rosa bought them by the case at the Food City on Thomas and lit each new one off the stub of the last, and this one was black with soot halfway down.
Rosa leaned forward and blew him out.
June watched the smoke go up in a thin gray line and curl against the ceiling.
“Is not desperate no more,” her grandmother said, and went to change her clothes.
29The Return
He was awake at ten to five and didn’t fight it.
He made coffee in the dark kitchen and took it out to the back step. The grapefruit tree had fruit on it again, small and hard and green, the size of tennis balls; they wouldn’t turn until December. The air was eighty-six degrees and smelled like somebody’s sprinklers. Inside, the hallway was lined with Theo’s boxes, half packed, labeled in Theo’s square capitals—BOOKS, BOOKS, KITCHEN (THEO’S), KITCHEN (DISPUTED)—and Eli had stepped over them in the dark on the way out and stubbed his toe on DISPUTED.
He didn’t look at his phone. He’d left it on the counter.
At six Theo came out in a T-shirt and boxers and stood behind the screen door. “Are you eating breakfast?”
“My mom told you to ask me that.”
“Your mom texted me at five-thirty,” Theo said. “She said, and I quote, make him eat an egg.” He went back inside. A few minutes later Eli heard a pan on the stove.
The elders met for the first time on Monday night, the last day of August, at the mesquite table, and the first thing on the agenda was him.
He had asked them in writing to decide it without him, and then he’d sat in the dirt lot in his car with the windows down for an hour and forty minutes while they did. Dr. Park was in the room. So was a letter from Dr. Hadley, one paragraph, which Eli had signed a release for and not read: he had come to every session; he had done the work he’d been given; it was not Dr. Hadley’s place to say whether he should preach. David had his legal pad, twelve weeks of Mondays on it, what Eli had done each day and for how long.
When they called him back in, Ray Ochoa told him. Four to one. He could preach on the sixth. No more than twice a month through Christmas; they’d take it up again in December, and they could say no then. David every week, still. Dr. Hadley, still. No livestream that Sunday—that part had been unanimous—and a line on the website saying so.
“I was the one,” Ray said.
Eli had guessed. Ray had been the one, in July, who kept coming back to how much he slept.
“You’re better,” Ray said. “I’ve watched you for twelve weeks and you’re better. Better isn’t well, and I don’t know how to tell the difference yet in somebody who’s spent three months with nobody needing anything from him. I want to see you when people need things from you. I’d have waited till October.” He shrugged. “I said so. I lost. I wanted you to hear it was me, so you don’t spend any time guessing about the others.”
“Okay,” Eli said.
“Do you think I’m wrong?”
Eli thought about it long enough that Ray’s eyebrows went up. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’d like you to be.”
In the lot afterward he asked David how he’d voted.
“The other way,” David said. He had his keys out. “Ask me in December.”
The line went up on the website Friday, above the service times, in plain type:
This Sunday’s services will not be livestreamed. The sermon audio will be posted on Monday.
Kenzie had asked him on Thursday, in the hallway at the warehouse, very carefully, whether he wanted a count this Sunday. He’d thanked her and said no. She’d nodded like that was what she’d hoped he would say, and then she’d said, “It’s nice not to have to watch the number go down,” and then looked horrified at herself, and he’d laughed, and after a second she had too.
At 7:15 the Monroe’s marquee said only the service times: 9 & 11. Somebody on the setup crew had taken down the big vinyl banner that had hung in the lobby since February over the connections table—REBUILD, in the church’s thin white font, with ELI MERCER under it and a photo of him on the stage with his hands raised. There was a paler rectangle on the wall where it had been. He didn’t know who’d taken it down. He decided not to ask.
Ade Okonjo was on the loading dock, as he had been every Sunday at six for a year, in a reflective vest and work gloves, directing two college kids with a hand truck full of chairs for the overflow room. He saw Eli coming up the ramp and lifted one gloved hand.
“Elder,” Ade said gravely.
“Elder,” Eli said.
“I’m told we don’t need the upstairs overflow anymore,” Ade said. “I’m setting it up anyway. For the parents with the babies.” He went back to the chairs.
Inside, Jonah was at the center doors in a black ushers’ lanyard with a stack of bulletins, being trained by Mr. Dwight, who was explaining with great seriousness how to hand a bulletin to someone so they could take it without breaking stride. Jonah saw Eli and did a small thing with his chin that meant I see you, go away, I’m working. At the connections table June was setting out cards—not the old decision cards; new ones that said TUESDAY TABLE on one side and had a space for a name and a phone number and nothing else—and Brynn was next to her with a roll of name tags, tearing them off one at a time and sticking them to the edge of the table in a row. Lorraine Pitts was there too, in the purple dress, with a lanyard that said CARE, talking to a woman Eli didn’t know who was crying a little.
The stock tank was gone from the stage. It had gone back to the warehouse in July, on Gil’s flatbed, and now stood in the corner behind the Tuesday tables under a tarp. There would be baptisms again in October, on a Sunday afternoon, after a class that June and Lorraine had written. Nobody had decided yet how many.
At 8:30 the elders prayed for him in the green room.
He’d asked for it. He hadn’t asked for it to be anything; he just asked if they’d come. Ray came in scrubs, because he’d come straight off an overnight urgent-care shift, and Curtis in a pressed shirt and tie, and Luis carrying his bass case, and Ade in his reflective vest, and David last, slowly, with his hat. They stood around him in the small room with the mirror and the ring of bulbs and the couch nobody sat on, and put their hands on his shoulders and back and head, and prayed. Curtis prayed longest. Luis prayed in Spanish, which Eli hadn’t known he could. Ray prayed like a doctor, specific and brief: for sleep, for his heart rate, for his hands.
David didn’t pray out loud. He kept his hand on the back of Eli’s neck through all of it, heavy and dry and a little shaky, and when the others said amen he took it away and said, “Well,” and went to find Ruth.
His parents came at 8:40, having left Yuma at five. His mother was in the navy dress she wore to weddings and funerals and her own church’s anniversary Sunday, with her good purse and a foil-covered casserole dish, which turned out to be caldo for him to take home, which she had driven three hours with in her lap. His father was in pressed jeans and a pearl-snap shirt and his good boots.
“You ate breakfast?” his mother said, before hello.
“Theo made eggs.”
“Good.” She hugged him too hard and too long, and pulled back and looked at his face and touched his hair where it was shorter. “Better,” she said.
His father shook his hand. Then, a second later, pulled him in and hugged him with one arm, briefly, clapping his back twice, as he’d done at Eli’s high school graduation and at no other time Eli could remember.
“Where do you want us?” Rick said.
“Row M,” Eli said. “On the left. That’s where I’ve been sitting.”
He preached it at nine.
He would not remember much about it afterward. He remembered that it was shorter than any sermon he had preached in three years. He remembered that his hands shook for the first five minutes and that he let them, and that he didn’t walk around, and that he kept one hand on the music stand the whole time as if it were the rail of a boat. He remembered his mother in row M with a tissue already in her hand before he’d opened his mouth. He remembered that at the end, when he came down off the stage for communion, the room made a sound he didn’t have a word for—not applause, not a gasp, just a sort of shift, eight hundred people all adjusting in their seats at once.
He did not remember how many people were there. He had decided not to count, and for once in his life, walking out onto that stage, he had not counted.
Between services he stood in the lobby with his parents and did the thing he’d been practicing since June on Tuesdays with a Sharpie.
People came up. Some hugged him. Some shook his hand and said welcome back or good word or, in one case, you look thinner, Pastor. A few didn’t come up at all; he saw them see him and turn toward the doors. He let them.
To the ones who came up, when he didn’t know their names, he asked.
“I’m sorry,” he said, to a woman in her forties with a toddler on her hip who’d been coming for a year, he was fairly sure, maybe more. “Tell me your name again.”
“Rachel,” she said, surprised. “Rachel Castañeda.”
“Rachel,” he said. “And this is?”
“Mateo.”
“Rachel and Mateo.” He said it again in his head. Rachel and Mateo Castañeda. Toddler. Hip. The blue diaper bag. “Thank you for coming, Rachel.”
His father, beside him, watched him do it four or five times without saying anything. Then, when there was a gap, Rick leaned over.
“Dale used to do that,” he said quietly. “At the door. Ask you your name again if he forgot. He’d say it back. Even your mother’s. Every week for about a year when we first came. Carol, right? Carol.”
“I remember,” Eli said. He didn’t. But he believed it.
David and Ruth were in the back row of the balcony at eleven, the same seats as the Sunday in May. Eli could just see them from the wings before the lights went down—Ruth in a flowered blouse with her hands folded, David with his hat on his knee and his arms crossed, like a man waiting for a bus that he doubted would come.
Micah was at the keys. Hannah was in row D on the aisle with Nora in the gray wrap, eighteen days old, asleep. Luis was on the bass. There was one camera on the balcony rail, and it was off; Omar had put a piece of gaffer tape over the lens that morning and drawn a smiley face on it in Sharpie.
The band played three songs. None of them was “Morning Comes.” The last one was the one Micah had played at Tuesday Table, with the rhyme that was wrong in the chorus, which Micah had taught the band that week and asked them not to fix.
When it ended, Micah let the last chord ring out, and sat back on his bench, and put his hands in his lap. There was no walk-up music. There was no light cue. Omar left the stage at Tuesday Night at Grandma’s.
Eli walked out from the wings with his old Bible under his arm and stood at the music stand in the plain warm light and looked out at the eight rows.
He knew some of them. That was the first thing he noticed. The Hernandez boys in row B in their matching polos. Big Ernie Salcido, who had cursed in the stock tank the first winter, and his wife. Mr. Dwight at the door. Jonah, at the end of row Q, in his lanyard, standing because he was on duty. Rachel Castañeda in row H with Mateo asleep on her. His parents in row M. He did not know all of them.
He opened the Bible.
“Mark six,” he said.
30The Sermon
“And the apostles gathered themselves together unto Jesus,” Eli read, “and told him all things, both what they had done, and what they had taught.”
He read it from the King James because that was how he’d read it all summer, out of David’s soft-covered Bible on the bench under the lemon tree, and because the old words made him slow down.
“And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.”
He looked up.
“I haven’t been up here in twelve weeks,” he said. “Most of you know why. If you don’t, it’s on the website. There’s a thirty-eight-page report. Read it. I’m not going to tell the story again from this stage. It isn’t mine to tell, and we’ve told it enough.”
The room was very quiet. He could hear the air handlers, and somewhere in the balcony a baby fussing, and a car horn outside on Monroe Street.
“I’ve been sitting in row M,” he said. “On the left, on the aisle. Some of you sat next to me. Back in May, in the last row, a guy named Raul gave me a piece of gum. Thank you, Raul, if you’re here.” A few people laughed, carefully. “I’m going to try to keep this short. I’ve been told that’s one of my problems.”
“So Jesus sends out the twelve,” Eli said. “Earlier in this chapter. Two by two. No bread, no bag, no money. And they go out, and it works. It really works. They preach and people repent. They cast out devils. They anoint sick people and the sick people get well. It’s the best ministry trip anybody’s ever been on.
“And then they come back. And verse thirty says they told him all things, both what they had done, and what they had taught.”
He put his hand flat on the page.
“I know that meeting,” he said. “I’ve led that meeting every Monday for three years. You come back from Sunday and you tell everything. What we did. How many came. How many decisions. How many baptisms. How many views.” He paused. “I used to think that was faithfulness. I used to think the report was the point. That God wanted the number, and we brought it to him like a cat bringing you a bird.
“And look what Jesus says. He doesn’t say great work, let’s do it again, bigger. He doesn’t say what’s the plan for next quarter. He says, come away. Come to a desert place. Rest. Because there were so many people coming and going they didn’t even have time to eat.”
Somebody in the back said mm.
“I didn’t eat breakfast for about two years,” Eli said. “My mom’s here. She’d like you to know that.” In row M his mother put her hand over her face, and people laughed again, and some of the tension went out of the room like air out of a tire.
“Here’s what happens next,” Eli said. “Verse thirty-two. They get in a boat to get away. Verse thirty-three: the crowd sees where they’re going and runs around the lake on foot and gets there first. And the people saw them departing, and many knew him, and ran afoot thither out of all cities, and outwent them, and came together unto him.
“So Jesus gets out of the boat, tired, looking for a desert place, and there are five thousand people waiting on the shore.”
He looked up at the eight rows, and past them, into the dark.
“Verse thirty-four,” he said. “And Jesus, when he came out, saw much people, and was moved with compassion toward them, because they were as sheep not having a shepherd: and he began to teach them many things.”
He let it sit.
“He saw sheep,” Eli said. “Not a crowd. Sheep. Scared animals with nobody to watch them. That’s what he saw when he looked at five thousand people. And it moved him.
“When I looked at you,” he said, “I saw a crowd.
“I’m sorry. I’m not saying it to be dramatic. I mean it as information. When I stood up here and looked out, I saw a crowd, and a crowd is a thing you can count, and a thing you can film, and a thing that can go up or down. I watched the crowd so closely I forgot the sheep were in it. I forgot your names. I used to know every name. In the warehouse, the first year, I knew all eighty of you. I knew Big Ernie’s wife’s name and his dog’s name. And then there were a hundred, and then there were a thousand, and somewhere in there I started saying hey, you and hey, man and hey, friend, so you wouldn’t notice I’d forgotten. Some of you noticed.”
He found he had to stop. He waited.
“So here it is,” Eli said. “Plainly.
“I confused attention with fruit.
“When people watched us, I thought God was blessing us. When the clip went up, I thought that was revival. When the numbers went up, I thought that was the Holy Spirit. Some of it may have been. I don’t know. God is kind, and he works through fools, and he worked through me. But I couldn’t tell the difference anymore between people being saved and people watching people be saved. And a lot of people got hurt in the space between those two things.
“And I confused urgency with obedience. I thought if we slowed down, we’d be disobeying. I thought if we stopped to build what Naomi told us to build, a year and a half ago, in a memo I answered with an emoji—“ a few people laughed; Naomi, in the front row, didn’t “—that we’d be letting God down. That the moment would pass. That he’d go somewhere else. So I didn’t stop.”
He turned back in his Bible, a long way back, to Nehemiah. The pages were loose there; he’d had them open so many times since February.
“Some of you have a shirt,” he said. “Some of you have a mug. It says I CANNOT COME DOWN. Nehemiah six three. I picked that verse. I put it on the shirts. It was my verse for three years.”
He read it.
“And I sent messengers unto them, saying, I am doing a great work, so that I cannot come down: why should the work cease, whilst I leave it, and come down to you?”
He closed the Bible on his finger.
“You know who he’s saying that to?” Eli said. “Sanballat and Geshem. The guys who’ve been trying to stop the wall. They send him a message—come meet us on the plain of Ono. And it’s a trap. The verse right before says so. They mean to hurt him. And Nehemiah says no. I’m not coming down. He’s right. It’s a trap. You don’t go.
“I took that verse,” Eli said, “a verse about refusing to walk into a trap, and I turned it into a reason never to come down for anybody. For three years. It was on the staff shirts, over the heart. I would say it in meetings. When somebody brought me something hard on a Friday, I’d say it, and I’d smile, and I’d mean it as a joke, and they’d hear what I really meant, which was not now.” He swallowed. “I’m asking our staff to stop wearing those shirts. You can keep them. Wear them to mow the lawn. I just don’t want them in the building.”
“There was a magazine cover on the wall of my office,” he said. “Some of you have seen it. It was a picture of our stock tank from above, empty, and it said THE CHURCH BUILT OVERNIGHT. I had it framed. I looked at it every day.” He shook his head slowly. “It’s in a drawer now. I haven’t been able to throw it away yet.
“Nothing gets built overnight. Nothing good. You can get a crowd overnight. But the psalm says, Except the LORD build the house, they labour in vain that build it. And he doesn’t build overnight. He builds like my friend David keeps his garden. With a hose that’s patched in two places. Every week. On his knees in the dirt.”
“That’s it,” he said. “That’s the sermon. I timed it at nine; it’s the shortest one I’ve ever preached. I don’t have a big ending. I’m just going to come down, and we’re going to take communion, and I’d like to learn some of your names.”
He came down.
He came down the stage steps on the left side, past the empty place where the stock tank used to stand, and the elders came up out of the rows to meet him at the front—Ray and Curtis and Ade and Luis, and David, who had come down from the balcony while Eli was still talking, slowly, one step at a time, holding the rail. Lorraine and June brought out the trays: small loaves of bread from a panadería on 16th Street that June’s grandmother trusted, and cups of grape juice in plastic trays that had been in the warehouse since the first summer. They set them on a folding table at the foot of the stage.
Micah began to play, quietly. Not a song, exactly. Just chords.
The people came forward in lines. There were six stations, one for each elder. Eli stood at the one on the far left, with a loaf of bread in his hands.
The first person in his line was a young man in a Suns jersey he’d seen a hundred times and never spoken to.
“I’m sorry,” Eli said. “What’s your name?”
“Andre.”
“Andre.” He tore a piece of bread and held it out. “The body of Christ, broken for you, Andre.”
Andre took it and moved on to the cup.
The next person was a woman in her sixties. The next was a boy of about twelve with his father. The next was one of the nursing students from the balcony. He asked every one. Some of them looked startled. One woman said, “It’s Pam. We’ve met,” a little sharply, and he said, “I know. I’m sorry. Pam,” and she softened and said, “Pam Deluca,” and took the bread. A man who didn’t speak much English said his name was Tomás and then, seeing Eli’s face work at it, spelled it, T-O-M-A-S, with the accent in the air with his finger, and they both laughed.
He would learn forty-one names that morning. He’d count later, on the back step, on the back of the bulletin, trying to write them all down. He’d get to fourteen before he couldn’t remember any more. By the next Sunday he would remember maybe six.
About halfway through the line, an old woman came forward alone, slowly, with a cane. She was small, with white hair pinned up and a black cardigan despite the heat and a gold wedding ring on a chain around her neck. He had seen her every Sunday at eleven for more than a year, always in the same seat, row F, on the end. He had no idea what her name was.
“What’s your name?” he said.
She looked up at him. “Esther Ybarra.”
It went through him before he’d finished hearing it. Mrs. Ybarra’s husband. Hospice. Glendale. June had said it at the mesquite table in May, on the day of the boring questions. I did those.
“Your husband,” Eli said. “In April.”
“Rudy,” she said. “Forty-nine years.”
“I’m sorry,” Eli said. “I didn’t come. I should have come.”
Esther Ybarra looked at him for a long moment, leaning on her cane, with the whole line waiting behind her.
“June came,” she said. “Three times. She held his hand.” She considered him. “You’re young. You’ll come next time.”
She held out her hand, palm up, for the bread.
Eli tore off a piece. His hand was shaking again and he didn’t try to stop it.
“The body of Christ,” he said, “broken for you, Esther.”
31Six Months Later
June
In March there were twenty-six tables in the warehouse on Tuesday nights and six more in houses—two in Maryvale, one in Mesa, one in Glendale, one in an apartment complex off Buckeye Road where a woman named Yolanda had asked if she could just do it in her own kitchen because the bus to Grand Avenue took an hour and ten minutes, and one in Tempe that met in a Lutheran church’s fellowship hall on Thursdays because the host worked Tuesdays.
On Sundays, across the two services at the Monroe, there were about fifteen hundred people. The ushers still counted, on a clicker, for the fire marshal, and wrote it on a whiteboard in the booth. There were empty rows in the balcony at nine.
The callers had finished the list in November. All six hundred and eleven names. Priscilla had made the last call on the Friday before Thanksgiving, to a man in Laveen who’d filled out a card the previous January and who said, when she told him who she was, “Oh, man. I forgot I even did that.” They’d talked for forty minutes. He’d come to a Tuesday in December. Now, when a new card came in on a Sunday, somebody from the care team called within two days—not texted, called—and June had a spreadsheet that showed it, and every Monday morning she looked at the spreadsheet before she looked at anything else.
Fifty-eight of the sixty-one people who’d started the Year in October were still in it. They met on Wednesday nights, in the warehouse, at Gil’s mesquite tables. They’d read all of Mark and half of Acts. They’d spent four weeks on how to listen to somebody who was grieving and three on what to do when someone told you something you were legally required to report. Eli was in it. He sat at a table with Kiana Ruiz, who was a Tuesday host now, and a plumber named Dave Kowalczyk, and a college student named Priya—not that Priya—and did the homework, and some weeks didn’t finish the homework, and said so.
In January someone had called Judge Treviño.
June had known it was coming someday, and she’d still felt sick when Lorraine told her. A young woman in a small group had called the number about her group leader. He’d been texting her for weeks, late at night, telling her that her antidepressants were a sign she didn’t trust God, that she should pour them out, that if she kept seeing her counselor she wasn’t really surrendered. She’d stopped taking them for nine days before she called. The judge had called the elders. The elders had called in Maureen Doyle, who’d done it in three weeks. The group leader had stepped down. Lorraine had sat with the young woman in her doctor’s office while she started back on her medication. The young woman had stayed at Anchor City, which June hadn’t expected. She’d told Lorraine, I didn’t think anybody would actually pick up.
It had been awful. It had also worked, which she had not been sure it would. June had gone home that night and sat in the car in the driveway on West Monterey Way for a long time before she went in.
She was on her ninth green notebook. She wrote names in it every Tuesday night after the chairs were stacked, sitting on a road case by the rolling door while Eli and Jonah raced. The new names first. Then the ones somebody at a table had asked for prayer about. Then whoever else was on her heart. Some weeks it was forty names. Some weeks it was six.
Rosa came on the first Tuesday of every month now and sat at the aunties’ table and told them their rice was wrong.
Tessa
She told her story on a Thursday night in March, at Barb Lindgren’s kitchen table in Tempe, to five women from Rural Road Community Church and a plate of lemon bars, because she wanted to.
That was the whole reason. Nobody had asked her. Barb’s small group had been meeting since October—six women, most of them over fifty, one of them eighty-two—and they went around the table at the start every week and said how they were. And one Thursday in March Tessa had said, “I’d like to tell you something next week, if that’s okay. About me. It’ll take about twenty minutes.”
“Take as long as you want, honey,” said Barb, who was sixty-eight and had buried two husbands and ran the church’s food pantry with the ferocity of a drill sergeant.
So the next Thursday she told them. She’d thought about it all week. She’d decided what she would say and what she wouldn’t. She told them about being fifteen. She didn’t say where the pills were kept; she just said my mother’s pills. She told them about Wickenburg, and about Margie, and about her four-year chip, which Margie had given her in January at the Tuesday meeting in the Methodist basement, and which was in her pocket. She told them, briefly, that the year before, a church had put her story on the internet after she’d asked them not to. She didn’t say which church. Most of them knew anyway; two of them had read the Ledger. Nobody said anything about it.
When she was done, Edna, who was eighty-two and had been silent the whole time, reached across the table and put her hand on Tessa’s wrist.
“Thank you for telling us,” Edna said. “That was yours to tell. You told it very well.”
Tessa drove home with the windows down. The orange blossoms had come in all over Tempe that week, as they did every March, and the whole city smelled like it had been dipped in honey.
Her mother was on half her old dose. She’d been tapering since July with a doctor in Chandler who was, in Denise’s words, very patient, too patient, I want to go faster, and who wouldn’t let her. They had lunch every other Saturday at the Chili’s on Alma School, and sometimes it was fine and sometimes one of them left early. Her mother had stopped going to Grace Fellowship in October. She hadn’t gone anywhere else yet. Kayla had come home for spring break and the three of them had eaten at the Chili’s together for the first time in four years, and Kayla had cried in the bathroom afterward, and so had Tessa, and so, Tessa suspected, had her mother, in the car.
It wasn’t fixed. It was better than it was.
She’d been back in exam rooms at Desert Willow since October, and in January she’d started night classes toward her veterinary technician license, which Dr. Kim had been after her about for two years. She had a C in pharmacology and was furious about it, and Luz thought this was the funniest thing that had ever happened at Desert Willow. In February Priya Natarajan had emailed her a link, no message, just the link, to a story in a Christian magazine about churches around the country rewriting their consent policies for testimony videos. It said more than forty churches had adopted a version of the form Anchor City had put on its website in August. It had a picture of the form, with the line about twenty-four hours highlighted in yellow. It didn’t mention her.
Tessa read the whole article at her kitchen counter. Then she closed the laptop and fed Biscuit, who’d already been fed, and stood at the window for a while looking out at the parking lot, and then she texted Margie a single word, Well, and Margie, who knew exactly what she meant without being told, texted back, Well.
On Sunday Frank had saved her a seat. She sat in it.
Micah
“Day of Small Things” came out in November, under the name Micah Reed, on no label, recorded in Luis Sandoval’s garage in Maryvale over two Saturday afternoons with a borrowed microphone and a quilt stapled to the garage door to stop the echo. You could hear a leaf blower in the second verse if you listened for it. They’d decided to leave it.
By March it had about two hundred and ten thousand streams. “Morning Comes” still did that in a day.
It hadn’t been playlisted. Colby had asked, in December, if Micah wanted him to make a call, as a friend, and Micah had said no, and Colby had said, I figured, brother, and hadn’t pushed. They talked every few weeks now, about nothing much. Colby had a new artist, a nineteen-year-old from Georgia, and he talked about her as he used to talk about Micah, and Micah found he was glad.
By October Dex had mostly stopped answering. In December he sent one thing, unprompted: a photo from a car commercial he was shooting out past Wickenburg, and no words. Micah still had it.
In February a letter had come to the Monroe, addressed by hand to The Worship Leader, Anchor City Church, Phoenix AZ. It was from a woman in Kingman who played piano for a Baptist church of about forty people, mostly retired. She said they’d found the song on the internet and they’d been singing it every Sunday since January, and the rhyme in the chorus bothered her, and she’d fixed it, and she hoped he didn’t mind. She’d written out her version on a sheet of notebook paper. Not the One who knelt with the fishermen / and met them in their need.
Micah had read it standing in the Monroe’s mailroom and laughed out loud. It was a better rhyme. He liked his better.
He’d put the letter on the refrigerator at home, under a magnet shaped like a saguaro, next to Nora’s six-month picture.
Nora was seven months old now and sitting up on her own and eating avocado, most of which ended up in her hair. On Tuesday afternoons, while Hannah worked her twelve, Micah had her. He sat on the kitchen floor with his back against the cabinets and the Yamaha in his lap and Nora propped against his leg, and played whatever came into his head, old hymns and half-songs and nothing, and she reached up with her fat hands and grabbed at the strings and pulled them, and they made an ugly, jangling, completely untuned sound, and she shrieked with delight at it, every time, as if it were the best thing anybody had ever played.
He let her.
32Remember the Name
A year to the week after Jonah Price came up out of the stock tank and said It’s cold, Eli stood at the center doors of the Monroe after the eleven o’clock and shook hands.
He did it every week now. He’d started the Sunday after his father told him about Dale at the door. He stood inside the lobby by the doors to Monroe Street, where the heat came in every time somebody went out, and shook every hand that came by, and when he didn’t know the name, he asked. It took a long time. Some Sundays it took forty minutes, and Naomi had given up trying to schedule anything after eleven, and around twelve-thirty Micah brought him a bottle of water.
He preached twice a month. In December the elders had met without him and kept the limit through Easter. It had been Ray’s motion, and it had passed five to nothing, and Eli had found when they told him that he was relieved, and hadn’t decided yet what that meant.
He knew more names than he had. Not all of them. He knew the names at his own Tuesday table. He knew the names of everyone in his group in the Year. He knew the ushers and the setup crew and most of the nine o’clock and a good part of the eleven. And every week at the door he asked the rest, and said them back, and forgot most of them by Wednesday, and asked again.
Easter had come early that year, at the end of March, and there had been no baptism push. There’d been a baptism Sunday before it, on a Sunday afternoon at the warehouse, in the stock tank in the corner behind the Tuesday tables, with the water at ninety degrees. Twelve people. Each one had been through the class June and Lorraine had written. Each one had someone standing in the water with them who’d known them for at least three months—a Tuesday host, a group leader, a friend—and Eli had stood at the edge of the tank and handed out towels. One of the twelve, a sixty-year-old grandmother named Doña Chela, had come up out of the water and asked if she could do it again, and everybody had laughed, and Naomi had laughed hardest. One of the twelve had asked to have it filmed, on the form, a week in advance, for his mother in Sonora. His cousin had filmed it on his phone. It had not gone anywhere. His mother had watched it eleven times.
The magazine was gone. He’d put it in the recycling on a Tuesday morning in February, after a session with Dr. Hadley in which they’d talked about it for fifty minutes and he’d eaten four butterscotch candies. The frame was in the warehouse, on the wall by the rolling door. June had put something else in it. It was a sheet of lined paper from her green notebook with the names of the first ninety-six people who’d come to Tuesday Table, written in her round handwriting, in the order they’d come through the door.
The lobby was thinning. The aunties had packed up the coffee. Through the doors he could see Jonah and Ade and two of the college kids running the chair carts back from the overflow room toward the loading dock, and hear Jonah telling one of the college kids he was doing it wrong.
A young man came up to him. He was maybe twenty-three, medium height, with a buzz cut and a sunburned neck and a navy work jacket over a T-shirt, even though it was eighty-nine outside. He had the look of somebody who’d been working up to something since the last song.
“Hey,” the young man said. “Sorry. Can I get a picture? With you?”
Eli felt it come—the old reflex. The half turn toward the light, the arm around the shoulder, the smile he could do in his sleep. A year ago he’d done a hundred of them on a Sunday. He’d stood right here and done them in a row.
He didn’t move for a second.
“It’s for my mom,” the young man said. “She’s never going to believe I went to church. I told her I was going to and she laughed at me.”
Eli laughed. “Sure,” he said. “Yeah. Let’s make her believe it.”
The young man held his phone out at arm’s length and they leaned in together and Eli smiled, a normal smile, not the one from the clips, and the phone made its fake shutter sound. The young man checked it.
“Thanks, man,” he said. “She’s gonna freak out.”
“Have you been here before?”
“No. I mean—not on Sunday. First time.” He put his phone away. “I actually came because my roommate kept bringing me to the Tuesday thing. Like, four times. He wouldn’t shut up about it. And then last week he was like, you should just come Sunday, it’s the same people, the coffee’s worse.” He grinned and pointed through the doors. “That’s him. With the chairs.”
Eli looked. Jonah was on the loading-dock side of the lobby, pushing a cart stacked seven chairs high, arguing with the college kid about the right way to tip it over the threshold.
“Jonah’s your roommate?”
“Yeah. Couple years. Off Forty-third Avenue.”
Eli looked at Jonah for a long moment. At the lanyard around his neck and the way he was showing the college kid how to lean the cart back on its wheels, patiently, with his whole body, the way Ade had shown him in September.
Did anybody come with you? Your roommate, your—
He’d asked that a year ago, in the wings, with a towel around his neck and Kenzie’s phone already coming at him. He hadn’t waited for the answer.
He turned back. The young man was looking at him a little uncertainly, the way people look at you when you’ve gone quiet in the middle of a conversation.
“I’m sorry,” Eli said. “I didn’t get your name.”
“Oh. Sam,” the young man said. “Sam Whitaker.”
“Sam Whitaker.” Eli held out his hand, and Sam shook it. “Thanks for coming, Sam.”
“Yeah. For sure.” Sam glanced toward the loading dock. “I should go help him. He’s going to give me crap if I don’t.”
“Go,” Eli said.
Sam went. Eli watched him cross the lobby and grab the other side of Jonah’s cart, and Jonah said something to him that made him laugh, and the two of them tipped the cart over the threshold together and were gone into the bright doorway of the loading dock.
He went back through the auditorium toward the green room, down the side aisle, past row Q, under the painted ceiling. The house lights were up. Omar was in the booth coiling cable. Somewhere backstage Micah was playing something on the piano, quietly, that might have been a new song or might have been nothing.
“Sam Whitaker,” Eli said, under his breath.
Jonah’s roommate. Forty-third Avenue. Navy work jacket. Asked for a picture for his mom. Four Tuesdays.
“Sam Whitaker,” he said again, at the stage steps.
Sunburned neck. Buzz cut. First Sunday.
He climbed the steps. At the top he stopped by the music stand, empty now, and stood there in the plain warm light for a moment, looking out at the empty seats.
“Sam Whitaker,” he said.
He said it once more at the green-room door, to nobody, and by then he didn’t need to.
END
About this editionSobre esta edición
This novel was written with AI assistance for the Wonderlain imprint. It is a work of fiction. Its characters, churches, congregations, businesses and events are invented, and any resemblance to real people or organizations is coincidental.
This is a reading edition of manuscript draft v02.