Amity & Sorrow by Peggy Riley Page A

that she had been sexually active. For some time, he had pointed out, just as he was asking Sorrow to tell him her age. She wondered what would happen to the file he wrote in, about her.
    Hope came to them in the temple. She carried a fat bundle, wrapped in a quilt. ‘I’m going, Amy,’ she said.
    ‘You can’t go. I need you too much.’
    Hope smiled her crooked-mouth, freckle-face smile, the lines in her face long and deep now. They had been friends for more than twenty years.
    ‘He won’t let you go,’ Amaranth said and instantly regretted it, wanting to pull the words back into her mouth. She loved Hope far too much to threaten her.
    ‘I don’t care. I’m in love, Amy. Foolishly.’
    ‘My God,’ she said. ‘Not with him.’
    ‘No.’ Hope laughed. She, out of all of them, had never loved Zachariah, not as any wife would. ‘It’s Dawn,’ she said. Wife Six. ‘I can’t live here without her. I can’t live here. It’s all breaking apart. You don’t see it.’ Hope lowered her voice, looking at Sorrow.
    ‘It’s getting better. He’s getting better.’
    ‘It’s changed, Amy. We’ve lost something here. We’ve forgotten what we were trying to be.’
    But Amaranth shook her head, bitter to the core. ‘Get out, then.’ When she turned her back on her, she felt Hope’s hand drop something into her pocket. She stood as still and sullen as she could, for as long as she could manage it, and then she went racing from the temple to chase her car, waving it down the path and the trail, away from the world she had helped them build. Hope skidded to a stop. ‘Will you come?’ she gasped. ‘It’s not right this, with Sorrow. Someone should stop it.’
    ‘I know,’ Amaranth said and she started to cry. But she didn’t know. And she didn’t dare to think it. She watched her oldest friend in the world drive away.
    Back in the temple, it was dark and empty. She stood at the altar, head down, praying to be told the truth. For God to come and tell her, whatever it was.
    But it was Amity who came creeping in, to place her two hands on her mother’s heart as if she could stop its two halves from breaking. ‘I saw, Mother,’ she whispered. ‘I was watching.’
    ‘What were you watching?’ She pushed her child back to look at her. ‘Who told you to watch?’
    ‘Sorrow. He says if the daughter of a priest profanes herself, she should be burned with fire. I don’t want Sorrow burned.’
    ‘What did you see, daughter?’
    ‘I saw the Father. I saw them make Jesus. I saw him tell Sorrow he is God.’
    Amaranth looked at her daughter and the altar. She could feel them all on the edge of some precipice, as if the floor were cleaving open before them, to show them the very foundations of their church. With every act of her husband’s, every change in the church, she had moved her own line of what was acceptable further and further away, for love.
    Who was her husband, who claimed to be God? Who was her child to believe him? Who was she to have sanctioned this when it all started so long ago, back when their faith was made of charity and compassion, a dream of creating a family for women who had no one? How had love led them here?
    ‘Tell no one,’ she told Amity. ‘It’s Sorrow’s secret.’ Her arms did not go around her youngest daughter, to comfort her or explain to her. Her hands did not move to her child’s own heart. They went, instead, inside her pocket to find what Hope had given her.
    A key.

15
The Key
    A mity runs from her mother and the man and the house. She runs from the devil and the half-dead tree, past the fields and Dust in them. She shouts for Sorrow, but Sorrow is gone. Not standing at the bathroom door, not shaking the strap. She isn’t in the bathroom, isn’t splashing at the sink. ‘Sorrow!’
    She runs past the pumps to the red dirt road, but there is no Sorrow, no dust cloud of her running. She thinks that God has swooped her up, like the Great Red Dragon, for their