Free Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen by Susan Gregg Gilmore

just like we'd always done. But today, Miss Raines sat on the other end, across from Daddy, probably where Mama used to sit. She'd look up at him with gooey eyes and call him by his first name: “Marshall, would you mind passing me the salt? Marshall, would you mind passing me the pepper?”
    And Daddy would look at her and smile as if she had said something really profound. Sometimes I wondered if Daddy used to look at Mama the way he did Miss Raines. You could tell he thought she was real pretty, sitting there with her big, blue eyes and long blond hair.
    I wanted to show her his crooked smile and the white hairs that were popping in around his ears. I wanted to tell her that he snored so loud at night sometimes I thought it was a train passing through town. But preachers seem to have a powerful hold over some women, at least that's what Gloria Jean said.
    I think she was right. Women, and men for that matter, would do anything and everything for my daddy, long before he could even ask. Mrs. Blankenship dropped off five pounds of fresh butter from her husband's dairy farm on the first Monday of each month. In the summer, Brother Fulmer brought us the juiciest, sweetest watermelons from his own garden. He said he saved the very best for the preacher. And Ida Belle could hardly let a day go by without delivering some kind of tuna-noodle casserole or cold, fried chicken.
    One time Gloria Jean was pulled over for speeding down Graysville Road. She was driving me and Martha Ann to a Saturday matinee over in Fort Oglethorpe. But when the sheriff walked up to the car and saw us two sitting in the backseat, he just told Gloria Jean to slow down. “Sure wouldn't want anything to happen to Reverend Cline's little girls.”
    It was as if a gift to my daddy was a gift to the Lord Himself, just as fine as any pot of frankincense or myrrh. Miss Raines was no better, except she seemed to know it was the preacher's daughters she needed to impress. She brought me and Martha Ann some kind of candy bar every single Sunday. I wanted to let her know right from the start that it was going to take a lot more than some chocolate and caramel to get me to change my mind about her dating my daddy, but, on the other hand, I hated to pass up a perfectly good Milky Way.
    Miss Raines tried real hard to be our friend, even offering to play Monopoly with us on the living room floor. And once or twice, she stayed with me and Martha Ann when Gloria Jean was visiting Meeler down in Dalton and Daddy had to rush to the hospital to pray some poor soul back to health.
    Personally, I never understood why Miss Raines was ever interested in an older man with two children and his own healthy crop of tomatoes. Surely she was going to want her own little babies and her own house and her own tomatoes growing right out her very own back door. Gloria Jean said pretty, young women always do.
    But Miss Raines had Sunday lunch with us for the next five years. And sometimes Daddy took her to dinner or to a movie on a Friday night. One time I even saw him kiss her on the lips, with his mouth wide open. But he insisted she was just a good friend. That was kind of hard to believe since I never saw him kissing Brother Fulmer on the lips like that.
    He said he had only one true love in his life and that was Lena Mae Cline and that nobody could replace her. But sometimes I thought Miss Raines sure was willing to give it a try. Everybody at church sure seemed to be hoping for a wedding. I saw all the blue-haired crones clucking among themselves whenever they spied Daddy and Miss Raines standing anywhere near each other.
    “What could be more perfect,” Roberta Huckstep said to Ida Belle one Sunday morning when she hadn't noticed I was sitting right behind her, “than our handsome preacher marrying our beautiful Sunday-school teacher? Besides, it's about time those girls got themselves a new mother and quit watching so much football and
Guiding Light,
if you know what I