Gideon - 03 - Religious Conviction by Grif Stockley Page A

twenty pounds (I could stand to knock off about ten myself), but the beauty is still there thirty years later in her face even if concealed a bit by the beginnings of an extra chin.
    “I’m Pearl Norman,” she gushes.
    “So glad to meet you, Mr. Page. I hope you can help us.”
    I take her moist hand, feeling there is something deeply familiar about this woman.
    “I would very much like to,” I say, glancing at Leigh, whose expression seems to evidence a slight distaste for her mother’s effusiveness.
    “This has been the most horrible six months in our lives!” Mrs. Norman wails.
    “Why, Leigh’s never harmed a fly!”
    “Mother,” Leigh mutters, loud enough to be heard, “how do you know?”
    Mrs. Norman, whose bulk is well packaged (I imagine an oldfashioned girdle squeezing and firming her soft flesh), positively gasps at such impudence, as tears form in her heavily made-up eyes.
    “You’re our daughter, that’s how!”
    Embarrassed for her mother, Leigh laughs, but the sound coming from her mouth is sour and derisive, as if maybe her mother doesn’t know her very well. Though I haven’t yet met Shane Norman, I surmise that Leigh must be her father’s daughter in temperament. Pearl Norman reminds me of a woman of an increasingly by gone era the ineffectual, weak Southern belle who flutters her hands helplessly and expects a man to save the day. She is a bit of an actress but such a familiar one from my past that I feel right at home with her. She is also drunk, unless I am totally misreading the signs.
    Like any small community, my hometown of Bear Creek had its share of alcoholics, male and female, who went through most days pleasantly (or not so pleasantly) sloshed. She is not offensive; in fact, she is much more pleasant than her daughter, who is plainly distressed at her mother’s condition.
    Leigh forces a smile.
    “I’ll call you later in the week, and we’ll set another time.”
    I’m being needlessly run off. Pearl Norman would stuff a bale of cotton in her ears if I asked her to.
    “When does your father get back in town?” I ask, standing at the door like a suitor who doesn’t want to leave. Maybe the old man can shed some light on his daughter. According to Bracken, I won’t understand Leigh until I talk to him, anyway.
    Halfway across die room, where she is lurking as if she knows she will draw a reprimand if she comes too close, Mrs. Norman pipes up, “My husband gets in day after tomorrow.”
    “Where is he?” I ask her, unwilling to trust her daughter even for a single fact.
    “Peru,” Mrs. Norman calls, edging closer despite the dark looks coming from her daughter.
    “He and about forty members of Christian Life have been there for a week assembling a prefabricated health clinic.”
    At the mention of Latin America’s most troubled country, I feel a grudging respect for the first time for Shane Norman. With the Maoist Shining Path revolutionaries assassinating thousands of Peruvians, I think I’d send a CARE package instead. My own days in the Peace Corps in Colombia convinced me that politics in South America is truly a life-and-death matter.
    “Would you ask him to call me?” I say to Mrs. Norman, who has begun to remind me of the actress who played Aunt Bee on the old Andy Griffith show. Her voice is all quivery and anxious but full of goodwill and probably gin. No mother and daughter could be less alike. What I had interpreted as resigned hopelessness seems almost like hostility in light of Leigh’s attitude around her mother.
    “Certainly,” she says, gratefully coming to the door like a forlorn puppy being punished for shitting on the rug.
    Leigh all but rolls her eyes back in her head.
    “Daddy doesn’t know anything. Mother,” she says.
    “Mr.
    Bracken has talked to him half a dozen times already.
    You know how busy he is right after he gets back from a mission.”
    Now that she is standing next to me, mrs. Norman’s perfume, suggestive of lilacs,