Free The Noah Confessions by Barbara Hall Page B

my father get set up in a good job, maybe even a financial contribution. But the heftiest part of the deal was that Gregory would remain with them. I can picture my father shaking on the deal, in the backyard of my grandfather’s house, overlooking his prosperous farm.
    The final part of the agreement was that my mother was never to know.
    It was a deal with the devil. And once you make a deal with the devil, your soul is up for grabs.
    I’m not entirely sure how I feel about evil, if it exists, and if it does exist, how it works. But I do think that once you sell a tiny part of your soul, you may as well sell the whole thing. You may as well have a sign over your head saying, “I can be bought.”
    My father was bought.
    How did he feel when he walked away from that deal? I want to believe that he was just in love and hopeful and certain that he could somehow make up for it. I want to believe that some small part of his soul was still engaged and hoping for the best. He was betting on a bright future. He wasn’t selling the best part of himself to the highest bidder. He had plans.
    But the thing about dancing with the devil is this: You’re not done dancing until the devil is done dancing. And the devil is never done.
    So they got married. It was a small wedding in the Methodist church in Union Grade. My parents were dressed to the nines and they looked beautiful. My brother Gregory was a groomsman. It all looked very good and that’s what they were buying into: how it looked.
    The first years of their marriage are murky, uncertain years to me. Suzanne didn’t provide any information as to how that went, so I can only imagine. What I imagine is this: My mother kept talking about getting Gregory back and my father kept giving her all these rational arguments as to why it was better for him to stay with his grandparents. They’d be taking him away from the life he knows. If my father adopted him, Gregory would have to change his name. They can still see him anytime they want. They’re going to have their own family. As the years passed, it got harder and harder for her to get him back and she just got worn down by the arguments.
    But in the back of her mind, she knew this: She only married my father to get her son back. Without that, what was he to her? He moved her away from her job in Danville and into a stifling small-town existence in Union Grade. They lived near his parents, and my father’s meddling, semi-crazy mother dropped by whenever she felt like it. He wasn’t making that much money, so her life was far from comfortable; she had to make sacrifices. And none of this fit in with how she saw her life evolving. She was beautiful, after all. One of the pretty people. The pretty people don’t have to suffer. Yet she was suffering.
    She missed her son, I imagine. She thought of him living out his life a few miles away, turning into a really spectacular young man, gifted in music and academics, with no reflection on her because she wasn’t raising him. She was losing him to her parents. Deep down, her resentment grew. This was not the deal she had made. Unconsciously, she must have been aware that some other deal had been made. Some kind of secret deal that her husband would never admit to her. She lost respect for him. She wanted to go home. But she couldn’t. She was trapped.
    She was trapped in Union Grade, where the social class was intact. No one acknowledged her pedigree because it came from some distant place, and anyway, a woman’s pedigree was only defined by her husband’s achievement. They were permanently on the outside looking in. It was a place she had never been to before and she hated it. And because she hated it, she blamed my father. Nothing he could do was good enough for her. The only thing she ever really wanted him to do was get her son back.
    Still, she persisted. She hung in there. A second divorce was unthinkable. She smoked, and ate