Tessie D

Angel has been coming early to work every morning. He brings coffee and donuts, and we sit in the kitchen chatting and watching the sun come up. He is so beautiful that sometimes I catch myself staring. His long eyelashes, his dark hair, his wide shoulders, and his narrow waist.

If I can be completely honest, I’m not sure why he’d want to spend so much time with me. He does most of the talking, and I sit and listen. I could listen to him talk all day. About his life before coming to the dairy, about his desire to get married, buy a ranch, and start a family of his own.

I’d just about convinced myself that he thinks of us as good friends or that we’re the only people on the dairy who are close to the same age. We’d naturally pair up because everyone else is older, married, or has children.

Has children in the present tense, at least.

Angel told me about his family. His father is a Baptist preacher at a big, popular church in the metroplex. His parents got married when his mother was still in high school. They met at church. Although his father was several years older, his mother was still in high school, he asked, and she said yes. Angel said it wouldn’t have been appropriate to study to be a minister while dating a high school student. They needed to be serious and get married. They’d known each other for a while by then, anyway, since they met at the church. They got married a few weeks into her senior year of high school. She graduated on a Friday and gave birth to Angel’s oldest brother the following Tuesday. Angel’s other brother came the next year, and then Angel after that.

Angel’s father is pretty conservative — no dancing, no drinking, no cursing, no sex before marriage, fire and brimstone and all that. None of that surprised me. The Baptists at home are much the same way. At my Grandpa Bruce’s funeral, the preacher spent the entire time at the graveside encouraging us to get baptised because we want to be in Heaven with Grandpa when we died. There was no other way to get to Heaven. It didn’t matter our good deeds or our heart. It didn’t even matter our age. Even babies can’t get into heaven because they haven’t been baptised and accepted Christ as their Lord and Savior. What kinda person gives a sermon and tells people at a funeral that even babies can’t get to Heaven?

Baptists, like Angel’s dad, have a narrow interpretation of the Bible and think they have some kind of moral obligation to call people out if they step out of line. Which, from my experience with Daddy, was often. To be fair, though, Daddy probably scandalized them, to all get out, as we’d say. Daddy never seemed to understand their rules. He said and did all the things that they hated — dancing, drinking, cursing. I’m sure Daddy was having sex before marriage, too. Most of the time, though, they made snide comments to Daddy that went over his head. When that didn’t work, they started making the comments to me. That somehow I could get Daddy in line.

For all the things about Daddy that they hated, Daddy never was twice as bad as some of the other Baptist dads I knew who asked their daughters to sit on their laps in the evening after everyone had gone off to bed.