Free Good Christian Bitches by Kim Gatlin

Amanda said quietly, aware of the fact that her decision would set off shock, even outrage, in her mother’s mind.
    Predictably, Elizabeth exploded. “Are you crazy?” Her voice was loud enough for both children to hear.
    Will and Sarah glanced up from the television screen. Will had little interest in a brewing argument between his mother and grandmother, but Sarah was all ears. Quietly, she crept from the living room couch where she had been sitting to the doorway leading into the kitchen, hoping to eavesdrop.
    “Young lady,” Elizabeth continued, in a tone of voice that instantly reminded Amanda of how happy she had been to leave Dallas with Bill; it brought back the hundreds of run-ins she had had with her mother while growing up. “Do you realize what an opportunity this is? Somebody obviously thinks the world of you! Somebody—and we don’t know who it is—is clearly very financially secure and is clearly very interested in you! And you’re not even going to bother?”
    “Mom, not in front of the children,” Amanda replied wearily. She peeked around the kitchen doorway into the living room, where Sarah stood, listening attentively, not surprising her mother.
    “Okay, guys, why don’t you watch in the media room until your grandmother and I have had . . . had a chance to talk?”
    Will gave a resigned, uncaring look. “Whatever,” he muttered, turning off the TV and ambling out of the room. His sister gave her mother a pleading look, begging permission to stay for the fireworks, but Amanda would have none of it.
    “Hit the trail, young lady,” Amanda heard herself saying, a phrase that her mother had said to her countless times. That was alarming.
    Reluctantly, Sarah tore herself away from the controversy and followed her brother to the media room.
    Now that the children were out of earshot, at least in theory, Elizabeth cut loose. “Are you insane?” she hissed. “A guy sends you a car—a Mercedes—a black Maybach, your favorite color for a car, and you won’t even go meet him to say thank you? Is that how I raised you?”
    Amanda, about to respond, first marveled at the way her mother could globalize an issue, turning it from simply a matter under discussion into a referendum on her entire career as a parent. She checked on her hamburgers before she spoke. The last thing she wanted was to get into an argument with her mother, especially about her personal life. She knew it would be only a few moments before the subject would turn from the mysterious suitor with the black Mercedes to why she left Bill in the first place.
    “Mom,” she finally said quietly, “doesn’t it seem a little over-the-top to you to give somebody a three-hundred-thousand-dollar car as a way of inviting them out to dinner?”
    Her mother shook her head. “When your father was trying to get my attention, he used to fly me in a helicopter, which he landed at Vanderbilt Stadium, on the fifty-yard line, to take me to dinner with him in Knoxville, where he was working on a project. I was just a college student, but that’s how he did it.” Elizabeth angrily plucked a crumb off the kitchen table and tossed it into the trash can. “What’s wrong with a man trying to impress you or show you how interested he is?”
    “If he’s so interested,” Amanda countered, immediately regretting that she was getting drawn into a discussion she did not want to have, “why is he so interested in keeping his identity a mystery?”
    “You can spend a lot of time trying to figure out how men think, and you’ll always be wrong. That’s because they’re so much simpler than we are. They don’t think half the time. They just want what they want and then they go for it. And this guy obviously wants you.”
    “This is too strange,” Amanda said, genuinely perplexed. “Unless he’s been going to women’s Bible study, he has no idea what’s going on in my life. And even if he did, who would want a woman coming off a divorce with two