Free The Last Days of California: A Novel by Mary Miller

stress and anxiety, salvation.
    On one side of the rug was a picture of Jesus’s face. His eyes were closed, but it said if you continued to look at them, they would open. They hadn’t opened for me and I wondered if they were opening for my father. I’d only glanced at them because it reminded me of standing in front of a mirror chanting Bloody Mary, something I’d done at a sleepover once that had freaked me out. It would have been horrifying if Jesus opened his eyes, same as it would have been horrifying if a Bloody Mary had appeared in the mirror. Had anyone in the history of the prayer rug seen His eyes open? And if they hadn’t, and no one was ever going to, why did it say that we would?
    “Call her,” my mother said.
    I liked the picture that popped up, Elise’s face in the plywood body of a meerkat at the Atlanta zoo. It rang and rang. I hung up and tried again, but there was still no answer so I left a message, trying to make it sound like she was on the other end. But then my mother asked where she was and I had to tell her I’d left a message.
    “Maybe her phone’s dead,” my father said. Elise was always letting her phone die. I didn’t understand how peoples’ phones were always dying—all you had to do was plug it in at night. Who were these people who couldn’t even manage that?
    “It’s not dead, it’s ringing,” I said.
    “Well, try again.”
    It went straight to voicemail.
    My father sat at the table. “I need a pen,” he said, holding out his arm to my mother. She couldn’t find one and his arm stayed there, outstretched with his hand waving, while my mother dug around in her purse.
    He looked at the prayer needs for a long time before circling one. I wondered which one. I didn’t like that our needs were going to get all mixed up, or that he knew I’d circled all of them. He left it on the table and took his robe into the bathroom, came out a few seconds later with it on.
    “Turn it to the news,” he said, getting into bed.
    My movie was almost over—Big Russ getting test-zapped by the machine—but I flipped around until I came to the news, the weatherman giving tomorrow’s forecast.
    “I kinda miss that ole fat boy,” he said, which is what he called Brett Barry, the weatherman at home.
    I plugged my phone into the charger and looked at my mother. I knew we were both thinking about last summer, in Destin, Florida, when Elise left the condo and didn’t come in until three o’clock in the morning. She’d come back to us so drunk she couldn’t stand or speak, and my mother had undressed her and put her in the bathtub.
    We slipped on our shoes and went outside.
    “Let’s pray real quick.” She took my hands, bowed her head, and closed her eyes. She asked for His protection and compassion and guidance. She asked Him to watch over us and keep us safe. “Mother Mary—” she said.
    “Mom?”
    She kept her head bowed, a tight grip on my hands. She was quiet for a moment. “Elise is too beautiful and naïve, Lord,” she said, and then she squeezed my hands once hard before releasing them. I wanted to be too beautiful and naïve. No one would ever apologize for me because I was too beautiful and naïve.
    We walked slowly across the parking lot. It was quiet and the few lit-up rooms somehow felt lonelier than the dark ones.
    Before entering the bar, my mother turned to me. I thought about the bottle of whiskey and how I’d put too much water in it. How I’d done it on purpose. My father would take one sip and ask what she’d done to his drink.
    She opened the door and we stepped inside. The place was small, with a couple of video games on one side and a pool table on the other. I stood in the light of the cigarette machine and watched my mother approach the bartender. There were a dozen men, leaning and sitting around the bar, the kind of big, sad men who told a lot of jokes. There was only one other female in the place, a skinny woman playing pool with a short,