A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel Read Free Book Online Page B

reserved for when my mom left the room: “You know, Zip: Batsell Barrett Baxter was born dead.” Dad’s insults made me laugh and groan at the same time, because they were absolutely indicative of the power of being grown up. I not only had to spend countless hours of my life worshipping a God I didn’t believe in, I couldn’t even complain about it, whereas Dad just sat down in his chair and called it as he saw it.
     
    I HAD A FEW TRICKS to keep from leaving for church on time. I most often used the “I Can’t Find My Other Shoe” tactic, and when that failed, “I’ve Lost My Little Pink New Testament.”
    “We’re leaving!” my mom would call out, standing by the front door in one of the patched and remodeled dresses Mom Mary handed down to her. Sometimes she also wore a coat with three-quarter-length sleeves. Sleeves that stopped in the middle of her forearm! Go figure!
    “I can’t find my other shoe!” I’d shout back. “You go on without me; I’ll be right there!” And then I’d dig around under the couch halfheartedly, surreptitiously pushing the lost shoe further and further out of my reach. Eventually, exhausted, I’d flop down on the couch in a sprawled position that suggested maybe I’d just spend the morning watching fishing shows with my dad, who would turn almost without turning and give me the one raised eyebrow look which contained the whole of his childrearing philosophy: “I respect every way in which you are a troublemaker, now get up and do what your mother says.”
    “Okay, okay, I’m going.” Then I’d have to reach extra hard under the couch for my wayward shoe, sometimes giving myself a crick in the neck that would cause me to sprawl out on the couch again. I occasionally sprawled so long as to merit the thunderous
Zip!
warning which preceded any actual fury. Hopping on one leg, trying to squeeze my foot into a shoe that was inevitably too small, I’d look around the den frantically.
    “Daddy! I can’t find my little pink New Testament!” For reasons probably due to his own lack of churchiness, Dad believed me when I said I couldn’t attend Sunday School without my Bible. I’m sure he thought of it as similar to attending fourth grade without a pencil.
    The Little Pink New Testament device had worked long and well, so well that I thought of it as permanent. Then one Sunday morning, just as I was about to collapse on the couch in helpless surrender to my heathen fate, Dad reached down under his chair and pulled out my missing Bible.
    “Where did you find that?” I asked, genuinely perplexed.
    “In the bathroom trash can.”
    “You’re kidding! How odd. I must have totally accidentally without even knowing it thrown it away with my old church bulletin last week. How silly of me!”
    “Accidents happen,” he said, handing it to me.
    “You can say that again,” I said, taking it from him as if with gratitude.
    “But just to make sure this particular accident doesn’t keep happening, I thought that from now on you could just give it to me when you get home from church, and I’ll hold on to it for you. Then you’ll always know where it is.”
    I sighed and headed for the front door. “Bye, Daddy,” I said, not looking back at him.
    “Don’t sigh,” he called out to my defeated back. “And don’t dawdle.”
     
    WHEN I THINK of getting up for church, it is always winter in our house, but when I think of the actual walk, a small town block—our house and yard and the house and yard of Reed and Mary Ball, who never ever left their front porch—it is always a perfect summer day that will wither in my absence. I had to walk right past my bicycle, which sat in the yard as quietly and expectantly as a good horse; I had to ignore the hopscotch squares Julie and I had drawn on the sidewalk earlier in the summer, because hopscotching in a dress and too-small shoes was a recipe for disaster.
    Sometimes the side of the house would exert a strange and supernatural