Summary: Summer 1984. Teresia Eklund is dropped into a small Southern town that runs on church attendance and punishment. She moves into the apartment attached to The Well Fellowship, and within days she’s on the radar of Charles Connors, the pastor’s son with a wild reputation.
Teresia doesn’t believe in God, sin, or confession. She believes in appetite, attention, and staying in control. Charles has never had to work hard for women and he doesn’t expect Teresia to be different.
Chapter 1: The Move
(Glenwood, 1984)
We landed in early August.
The heat hit me first, wet and heavy, like someone had thrown a damp quilt over the sun. My lungs recoiled, unsure if they breathed in air or soup. Everything smelled like car exhaust, stiff hairspray, and fried grease.
Back in Weldon, summer arrived differently, thick but familiar, softened by the lake wind. Here, it barged in and demanded to be noticed.
Mother had started crying before we even got off the plane.
Not loud, just steady, like a faucet someone forgot to turn off. She pressed a tissue to her cheek with the same hand that held her boarding pass. The paper had become creased and softened at the edges from being folded and refolded during the flight.
I didn’t cry. Not because I wasn’t sad; I was. I’d just done all my crying an hour earlier, quietly, while she slept with her head against the window. The sunrise rose over a cloud bank that looked like a glacier dissolving into gold, and that was when it hit me: we were really leaving. Not for a trip. Not for a summer. Leaving. The kind you didn’t come back from.
I didn’t say anything on the taxi ride to our new place, content to watch the streets go by.
It felt like a different planet.
Everything looked beige and strangely permanent, like a city that had stopped evolving a few decades ago. Sun-bleached signs. Strip malls with fake palm trees. Apartments in the color of waterlogged paper. Kudzu-infested chain-link fences and cars on cinder blocks under a sky that stretched flat, blue, and lifeless.
“Glenwood,” Mother had called it. “Where Rick grew up.”
Rick. I’d flinched at the name. I wanted to ask her how this marriage would be different from all the others.
R-I-C-K, who I’d met for the first time three months, two weeks, and four days ago, a month before my mother married him. I didn’t know my real father. Only that he’d been married back in Sweden, and not to Mother.
Mother came to America while she was pregnant with me, carrying me across the ocean like contraband, determined to start over where no one knew her name.
My father’s name wasn’t on my birth certificate. Only a blank space, like even the paper knew better than to tell that kind of secret. Over the years, Mother had told me a thousand stories about him. They all contradicted each other. One minute, he died on a foreign mission trip, and the next, he worked on an oil rig in the North Sea.
I used to imagine what it would’ve been like to see his name in print on my birth certificate, proof that I’d been something more than a speed bump in some couple’s marriage.
I’d had plenty of step-fathers in the meantime.
The first, Stephen, was a rebel. A skinny man who played in local bands and cut hair on the side. I met him when I was about five.
I’ve tried to forget the next stepfather’s name, but I never forgot the way his voice turned ugly after a drink, or how long Mother stayed to herself afterward. The third was Rick, the one now, a pastor’s assistant. Mother says he saved her. I think he made her disappear.
Mother used to dance barefoot in the kitchen, listening to ABBA, or some other 70’s pop group, while stirring sauce or scrubbing the counters. She would sway her hips like she was somewhere else entirely. There was always music. Always light.
When Rick came, the music stopped.
She started wearing longer skirts, speaking in chapter and verse, and bowing her head before meals.
Sometimes I’d pass the kitchen and stare at the radio, dust thick on the dial, and wonder if it even worked anymore.
Mother said we hadn’t been living right, and it was time to make some changes.
R-I-C-K.
We arrived at The Well Fellowship in Glenwood a little before noon. Rick showed us around.
Modest but tidy. It looked like it had been hand-painted more than once, and not by professionals. The white clapboard chapel had navy trim and a single steeple rising clean into the sky. The windows were tall and plain, no stained glass, just bare panes that caught the afternoon light and threw it back without ceremony.
To the right of the church was the attached, two-bedroom apartment that Mother, Rick, and I would move into.
In front of the church sat a gravel parking lot, and behind that a small storage shed—half-collapsed on one side—where the youth group kept folding chairs and old holiday decorations. It marked the start of the woods, which pressed in from behind, covering the back of the shed with its leaves.
And on the far left side of the property stood a low, tan ranch-style house with green shutters and a sagging porch swing. An exposed garage jutted out from the side, propped up on wooden stilts, sheltering a few cars in various stages of falling apart.
The pastor’s house.
Unremarkable, but I couldn’t stop looking at it. Something about it made my chest feel tight—not fear exactly, but a kind of quiet knowing, like how you feel right before something changes.
A curtain in a window snapped back in place, too quick to be the wind.
I shook the thought away as we entered the attached apartment. Two squat bedrooms in an attached wing that might’ve once been the church overflow. A beige rotary phone sat on a tiny shelf by the door; its cord curled as if it had been planted there forever.
The apartment had its own entrance on the inside and one on the outside, with a crooked screen door that creaked like it needed to be greased.
That night, Rick prayed over our dinner and thanked God for the “new beginnings” He’d gifted our family. Family. The word sat inside my stomach like a piece of spoiled fruit.
Rick had a bald patch he tried to cover with combed-over strands, thick glasses, and teeth that were a little too white for someone who claimed not to care about appearances. I didn’t like the way he looked at me when he thought I wasn’t paying attention. Like I was a riddle he wanted to solve. Not in a curious way. In a possessive one. Like he needed to figure out how to use me.
After dinner, I retreated to my bedroom. My suitcase sat on the floor where I’d dropped it earlier. I sat on the edge of my mattress, still no frame yet, and listened to the cicadas scream outside.
The pipes knocked, and the apartment walls were thin enough for me to hear Rick and Mother make love in the other room. The air conditioning wheezed like an asthmatic old man, and the persistent dampness in the carpet made my socks feel slimy. I lay in bed with my feet uncovered, a habit I’d never had before.
Rick had left church pamphlets on my pillow. Folded clean and crisp, like origami. I didn’t read them, but I memorized the titles.
The Path of a Godly Girl.
Fathers Are the First Men in Your Life.
The War for Her Soul.
Temptation Wears Many Faces.
I thought about home. About the rattle of trains and the smell of hot pavement after summer rain. About how small my bedroom had been and how the radiator hissed in the winter. I missed corner stores with neon beer signs in the window. Mother’s cardamom bread cooling on the counter, and how the whole apartment filled with spice when she baked. I missed the noise, the neighbors arguing through thin walls and music drifting up from the street.
Mostly, I missed how safe that cramped apartment had felt compared to all this silence.
Unable to sleep, I tiptoed outside and walked out to the parking lot. I stared up at the church steeple. The cross looked like it floated. I tried to pray, but nothing came out. Not even tears.
All I got was the buzz of the streetlamp and the slow realization that I didn’t know what I believed anymore. Not in God. Not in people. Maybe not even in myself. Maybe.
I didn’t hate it here. I just didn’t know who I was supposed to be anymore.
Over the next few days, I stopped looking for myself in mirrors. I stopped flinching when men brushed past me in the street. I stopped telling Mother when I felt scared, or overwhelmed, or anything at all.
Inside me, something started to harden, like wet cement just beginning to set.
I started writing in the margins of my notebooks. Lines that didn’t mean anything yet. Descriptions of people. Sentences that sounded like they belonged to someone older and wiser. It made the days bearable.
I still remember that afternoon back in Weldon, years ago in ninth-grade English class. Mrs. Donnelly handed back our essays, dropping mine onto the desk with a quiet nod. At the top, in neat red ink, she’d written: You have a voice.
I stared at it for a long time.
No one had said that to me before.
I hadn’t known what I was going to do with it then. But I knew now. Be a writer. I’d held it close, like the boarding pass Mother wouldn’t let go of.
Like proof I still mattered.
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