![]() Later that evening my mother told me about Nan, the condemned house, the goat, the word “prostitute.”įour days later she was gone. I heard my parents discussing the situation in my father’s den, the pleading tones in my mother’s treble, the increasingly acquiescent notes of my father’s bass. One of the deacons-only men were allowed to be deacons-phoned my mother. ![]() ![]() There was also a goat that roamed from room to room, leaving droppings on the floor. The deacons discovered she’d been living in a condemned house with five other women, all of them sex workers. She’d looked up churches in the phone book, and ours, Antioch, was first on the list. I use that term-“prostitute”-because that was what she called herself. When I was eight a prostitute came to live in our pool house. She was always putting herself in the way of the sufferings of others. That my mother would cross Phoenix to bring yogurt to a sick boy didn’t surprise me. I guessed his mother couldn’t leave him alone long enough to drive to our part of town, where the yogurt shop was. She said that frozen yogurt was one of the few things he liked that he could digest. I gathered he was very sick, possibly dying. I’d never met the boy but had overheard my parents talking about him. ![]() On Thursdays, she said, she would be taking frozen yogurt to Benjamin, a boy whose family lived out near the Air Force base. The week I started middle school, my mother told me she would be late picking me up on Thursdays. ![]()
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