Can I Get An Amen? Read online

  Praise for

  CAN I GET AN AMEN?

  “A sparkling debut novel about dealing with family and finding love. An absolute treat!”

  —Janet Evanovich, New York Times bestselling author of the Stephanie Plum series

  “An emotional and satisfying novel that’s as tender as it is funny—a fabulous debut that’s fresh, honest, and addictive. Don’t miss it!”

  —Emily Giffin, New York Times bestselling author of Something Borrowed and Where We Belong

  “Sarah Healy’s Can I Get An Amen?’s wonderfully flawed heroine suffers like Job at the book’s opening. Infertility, unemployment, divorce. At thirty-one, Ellen is forced to move back home to New Jersey, and in with born-again parents she can’t relate to. Former enemies surface, as do old hurts and bad memories.… Funny, smart, wise, and refreshing, Can I Get an Amen? is the work of a great new talent and an obviously gifted writer. [This book] doesn’t need my blessing to be a huge success!”

  —Valerie Frankel, author of Thin Is the New Happy and Four of a Kind

  “A soaring debut! Sarah Healy examines divorce, parental relationships, sibling relationships, religion, and love with humor, poignancy, and a compelling tension. Can I Get an Amen? is a beautiful story that will leave readers waiting breathlessly for her next book.”

  —Beth Harbison, New York Times bestselling author of Shoe Addicts Anonymous and When in Doubt, Add Butter

  “Can I Get an Amen? is touching, funny, and full of heart. A highly entertaining novel about love and family, secrets and forgiveness. Don’t miss it!”

  —Lisa Scottoline, New York Times bestselling author of Come Home and Save Me

  Can I Get an Amen?

  • • •

  SARAH HEALY

  NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

  Published by New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First Printing, June 2012

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Sarah Healy, 2012

  Readers Guide copyright © Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  Purchase only authorized editions.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

  Healy, Sarah, 1977–

  Can I get an amen? / Sarah Healy.

  p. cm

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58869-7

  1. Life change events—Fiction. 2. Adult children living with parents— Fiction. 3. Mothers and daughers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3608.E2495C36 2012

  813’.6—dc23 2011048197

  Set in Stempel Garamond Pro

  Designed by Elke Sigal

  Printed in the United States of America

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  For my parents, Peter and Maureen

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My sincerest thanks…

  To my editor, Ellen Edwards, for her skill and patience in shepherding this book through the publishing process. And to my agent, Stephanie Kip Rostan, whose keen instincts and insights have been invaluable.

  To my parents, Peter and Maureen Enderlin, for believing in me before I did.

  To my siblings: Matthew Enderlin, for occasionally returning my calls; Jonathan Enderlin, for all of those delicious nuts; and Erin Enderlin Bloys, for loving this story despite the fact that I wrote it.

  To my husband, Dennis Healy, whose kindness, optimism, and love have sustained me. And to our three beautiful boys, Noah, Max, and Oliver.

  And finally, my deepest gratitude to my remarkable sister, Jennifer Enderlin Blougouras, without whose generosity of expertise, encouragement, and time this book would simply not exist.

  Can I Get an Amen?

  • • •

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  CHapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  CHAPTER ONE

  We loved Jesus. We loved Jesus and Jesus loved us. This was what we were told. This was the message that accompanied the lukewarm apple juice and stale Nilla Wafers we had every week in Sunday school. We were Christians, and that meant that an omnipotent and benevolent deity had our backs. He bestowed upon us his love in the form of blessings, which we preferred in lump sums, as blessing was often just another way of saying tropical vacation or new car. We had blessings. And we prayed for more.

  We went to Christian camps where fresh-faced counselors with bangs and friendship bracelets coached us on accepting Christ into our lives. We said our prayers, we read Bible stories, and we never, ever played with Ouija boards. “Amy Jenkins used to play with Ouija boards,” warned our mother with crossed arms and wide eyes. Yes, Amy Jenkins. She was once a sweet little blond girl whose well-respected family belonged to our country club. Now she lay foaming at the mouth and strapped to a bed in a mental institution. My mother’s head began a sub
tle and rhythmic nod as we connected the dots; terrible things can happen if you allow Parker Brothers to patch you through to Satan.

  Oh, Satan. He was a nasty one. Any ill that befell us could be attributed directly to the work of Satan and his minions. We understood that this was the primary reason for being a Christian, to avoid Satan and his black realm of fire, torture, and agony. It seemed pretty simple and really quite reasonable: just accept and worship God in the earthly realm and you could spend the afterlife lounging on fluffy white clouds. You could hear the clear, bell-like voices of angels rather than the eye-piercing shrieks of the damned. Those were the rules and we followed them. We didn’t ask why.

  But like a political party changing its platform to attract the next generation of voters, the God that we were presented with slowly evolved as we grew. The tit-for-tat God that slammed the pearly gates and shooed you away with a broom was replaced by more of a Match.com type of deity. “The Lord wants a relationship with you, Ellen!” my mother would plead. “Your heavenly father wants you to know him!” This was after I stopped referring to my parents, brother, and sister as we. This was when they were no longer able to force me to get into the car and attend a two-hour service where palm fronds were waved and demons were cast out. This was when I was supposed to be forming a new we.

  I still selected “Christian” on hospital registration forms; it was as much a part of my makeup as other check boxes such as “female” and “Caucasian.” I always cottoned to the concept of a God and was quite keen on the idea of his unconditional love. My mother claimed that she loved us all unconditionally, but we knew better. There was always a loophole.

  “Would you still love me if I had a dead, milky eye?”

  “I’d love you more.”

  “What if I was a porn star?”

  “Ellen!”

  There is a limit to human love.

  I found this out when Gary came solemnly into the house one breezy summer evening in July. He set his briefcase on the floor and placed his keys quietly on the countertop. “Ellen, we need to talk.” I could see how he had steeled himself for this conversation. How his shoulder muscles were tensed, how his face held that determined set. It was early, too. At least for Gary, who had been putting in twelve-hour days at the firm for as long as I could remember. It was eight o’clock and I was just finishing up the dishes from the dinner that now sat neatly organized in square glass containers in the fridge.

  It turned out he wasn’t, as he had said, “okay” with the fact that we might never have children. And since the problem seemed to be mine and not his, the solution was simple. I wrapped my arms around myself as I fought, with clenched jaw and scarlet face, not to cry.

  “But the doctor said that we could try in vitro again,” I managed.

  He sighed, and only then did I see pain in his eyes. He pulled me to his chest and held my head against him, then spoke in quiet, sympathetic words. “Elle… we’ve tried that,” was all he said as he silently tabulated the bill for his ideal family of four children.

  “Maybe my parents could help this time,” came my desperate, muffled words.

  But there was the cost, and then there was the likelihood of success. And besides, blessings were few and far between these days, for both my current and my former we.

  Gary left that night with a bag he had taken the time to pack that morning. A bag that had been sitting in the trunk of his car all day, a bag that knew before I did that my husband was leaving me. I wondered who else knew.

  I stayed up until three a.m., sitting in a dark room in front of my laptop, poring over the same familiar Web sites and confessional posts in which sad, childless women talked about their feelings of failure, both as women and as wives. But rather than camaraderie, I felt nothing but animosity and resentment that I shared their emotions. Fuck you, I thought. I am nothing like you. I pictured a group of middle-aged women with faces like balls of rising dough sitting on folding chairs in some dank church basement, wads of tissues stuffed into the pockets of their terry-cloth sweat suits. I had done everything right. We had started trying three years ago, when I was twenty-eight. I was healthy and educated and I was supposed to have children. I fell asleep that night just knowing Gary would come back. That we would somehow conceive. Or that he would change his mind about adoption.

  The next day, when I heard the clatter of dishes echo through the vacant house as I emptied the dishwasher, I began to understand what had really transpired the night before. I drove to work with no recollection of how I got there; I simply found myself at my desk, clicking through e-mails and drinking a cup of cold coffee. Throughout the day, I waited and prayed and pleaded that my cell phone would ring, that I would hear Gary’s voice. And when I had to leave my office and face our home again, I held my breath as I turned onto our street, waiting to see him weeping on the porch with flowers in his hand. He would fall onto his knees and beg me to forgive him. It was only when I slipped my key into the lock and shoved open the front door, swollen from the summer humidity, that it all began to seem real. It was then that I decided to call my mother.

  Her heart broke for me in a way that only a mother’s can. It was a brief conversation. I told her that Gary was leaving, or rather that he had left, and I told her why. She wept and moaned and offered to drive up from New Jersey to stay with me. “No,” I said. “Please don’t, Mom.” I know that when I hung up, she got down on her hands and knees and begged God for his mercy. During those first few nights, when I felt the gash of loss most acutely, I crawled down from my bed, clasped my shaking hands together, and did the same.

  “Did you feel at peace last night?” she asked, desperate to think that her prayers were answered, silently saying another that my response would be yes.

  I took a deep, relief-less breath. “Yeah, Mom. I did.” It was a lie, but at least I was capable of showing mercy even if God was not.

  “Oh, thank you, Jesus! I know how hard this is, Ellen. But this is just an opportunity to trust him. The Lord wants you to trust him.”

  While my mother turned to God, my sister, Katherine, turned to her wellspring of anger and hostility, formed when she was young and wild and believed what boys told her. By the time I was ready to talk to her, I welcomed it.

  “That motherfucker,” spat Kat. “That Gary-named, visor-wearing motherfucker.”

  “I hated that visor.”

  “I hope he marries some fat sow named Linda, and they spew out dozens of ADHD little freaks. I hope her vagina rips open during childbirth and for the rest of his life it feels like he is fucking a bowl of soup.”

  I hoped for worse. I hoped for unspeakable things. But it was all directed at my faceless replacement, a woman with a farm-fresh reproductive system that churned out healthy, fertile eggs by the dozens. Because Gary would move on and move on quickly; that I knew. He was single-minded when he wanted something, a trait I used to find admirable but now saw as borderline ruthless. And he wanted to be a father, more than anything. More than me.

  Fatherhood was part of the idealized future he had concocted for himself as he spent his adolescence behind his brother’s wheelchair, taking care of the two of them while his mother tried desperately to eke out a living. Gary had grown up in a working-class neighborhood outside of Boston, and his father had died suddenly of a heart attack when he was eleven, leaving the family, including his brother, whose body was captive to cerebral palsy, without life insurance or any real savings. Gary wheeled that chair through slushy streets during New England winters. He patched its tires and thwarted holes in the seat with duct tape.

  We heard stories about families like this in church, and we prayed for them. We prayed that God would change their lives and that money and good health and comfort would flow to them in torrents. And then we went home and sat surrounded by our blessings. But Gary wanted to be the one to change their lives. He wasn’t waiting for prayers to be answered, and he wasn’t going to rely on the generosity of strangers. Gary was unfailingly devot
ed to his small, sad family, and he was going to be the one to pull them out of their shitty, gray little existence, with its chain-linked fences and one-bedroom apartments. His vision for the Reilly clan was straight out of Camelot. They were going to live like the Kennedys. His mother and brother would sit in comfortable, shaded chairs as he and his sons played touch football on the lawn of their well-appointed home. His wife would bring out a tray of iced teas for everyone after the game, and he would regale them with stories from the courtroom, where he was a living legend. I had been cast in the role of the lovely wife. And I am sure he appraised me like a Thoroughbred horse breeder. He noted my thick, shiny brown hair, my good bones, and the blue eyes that I had inherited from my mother. My tall, slender frame would marry nicely with his thicker, mesomorphic body. It was a good match, despite one quiet little detail that was lying in wait.

  To his credit, Gary was well on his way to achieving his idealized future. He had gone to a well-respected Boston-area college, thanks to a combination of financial aid and scholarships. And after taking a few years off to save and work and save, he entered law school. He took out student loans and lived like a pauper, and because he didn’t have a gray-haired father in a leather chair writing checks on his behalf, he had a ferocious ambition to succeed. But though he graduated near the top of his class and won a position with a well-known Boston firm, law school had left him with a hefty pile of debt, making more than two rounds of in vitro impossible, at least at present.

  But he would soon find someone who would render that unnecessary. They would conceive without the aid of hospitals and drugs and procedures. Gary was a handsome, charming lawyer who wanted to find a woman to marry and have his children. He was a devoted son and brother and, to the right woman, I’m sure, husband. He wouldn’t be single for long.

  When Gary finally did call, three days later, he was all business. He gave me cursory apologies and told me that he did love me, that he always would, but then he changed the subject to the delicate matter of our divorce. I nodded and mumbled and was too dazed and wounded to take an active role in my fate.