The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd

you’re being ridiculous,” he said, and his tone was lacerating. “Did you hear me? You’re being ridiculous.”
    And I hung up. I simply hung up. I refilled my coffee cup and sat with my hands wrapped around it. They were shaking a little.
    I waited for the phone to ring, for him to call me back. When he didn’t, I became anxious, filled with that strange turbulence that rises when you begin to wash up on the island of your own little self and you don’t see how you could ever sustain yourself there.
    After a while I bent down and peered under the table. The crucifix was still nailed beneath it. The storm-tent Jesus.

CHAPTER Ten
    T hat morning when I changed the bandage on Mother’s hand, I had to look away from the wound more than once. Mother sat in the brown wicker chair at her dressing table while I cleaned the skin around the sutures with hydrogen peroxide and dabbed antibiotic ointment on a sterile pad. The cut was just below her knuckle on the “pointing finger,” as she always referred to it. I kept thinking what a violent burst of energy it would’ve taken to bring the cleaver down with enough force to sever the bone. She winced when I placed the pad over the tender, swollen nub.
    I glanced at the photograph of my father, wondering what he would’ve thought of her now, the dreadful turn she’d taken after his death. What he would have thought of her slicing off her finger. Mother turned and looked at the photo, too. “I know what I did seems crazy to you.”
    Was she talking to him or to me? “I just wish you’d help me understand why you had to,” I said.
    She tapped the glass on the frame with her fingernail. It made a clicking sound in the room. “This picture was made the day he started his charter business.”
    I’d been five at the time. I didn’t remember him as a shrimper, only as captain of the Jes-Sea. Before he’d bought the boat, he’d worked for Shem Watkins, “scrimping for shrimp,” he said. He would take one of Shem’s trawlers out for a week at a time and come back with four thousand pounds of shrimp in the hold. But all he’d wanted was to run his own business, be his own boss, with the freedom to be out on the water when he wanted and home with his family when he wanted. He’d come up with an inshore fishing charter idea, saved and bought his Chris-Craft. Four years later it had exploded.
    He said his religion was the sea. That it was his family. He’d told Mike and me stories about a sea kingdom ruled by a gang of ruthless mud snails and the brave keyhole limpets who tried to overthrow them. His imagination was ingenious. He told us we could make wands out of stingray barbs and, by waving them a certain way, cause the waves to sing “Dixie,” something that had occupied us for fruitless hours. If we dreamed of a great egret, he said, we would find its feathers beneath our pillow the next morning. I woke more than once to white feathers in my bed, though I could never recall the egret dream that had brought them. And of course the ne plus ultra of all his stories—how he’d seen an entire pod of mermaids one dawn, swimming to his boat.
    I could not remember a single time he’d attended mass, but he was the one who’d first taken me to the monastery to see the mermaid chair, who’d told me the story behind it. I think he’d only pretended to be a reprobate.
    Though he refused to share Mother’s religion, he seemed to admire it. Back then she was not pathological about it. Sometimes I think he married her because of her boundless capacity for faith, how she could swallow every preposterous doctrine, dogma, and story the church came up with. Maybe her faith in the church made up for his lack of it. My mother and father made a peculiar couple—Walt Whitman and Joan of Arc—but it’d worked. They had adored each other. I was sure of