I know my dad loves me because I saw the pain in his eyes when he told me to never come home again. “Nina, I need to talk to you outside for a minute,” he said moments before the exile, his voice heavy with resignation. Time and age had weakened my fear of being summoned much in the same way they had weakened the man, but there were remnants. A quick twinge in my stomach, reflexive almost, at the sound of my childhood nickname on his lips. I glanced at Mom a few feet over in the kitchen. Her face bore no inkling of what awaited me on the patio. She kept her eyes trained on the stove, methodically stirring a pot as if a moment without oversight would scorch its contents. She could be found in the kitchen more often than not – our family of six grew up with daily home-cooked meals – but her presence that day felt scripted. It was not the first time I had found myself in the middle of a scene where everyone knows their lines except me. The twinge became a pit in my stomach.

Our familial brand was silence and secrecy. We left important things unsaid, swept them under a rug and navigated around the mountain that grew beneath until ignoring it became a willful, ridiculous thing. Eventually, as we smushed our backs against the walls to shuffle around the massive peaks of denial and resentment, the undertone of everything we did say could only be some variation of, “What mountain?” I tried to remember the last time Dad and I had talked about anything real. Nothing came.

My kids weren’t privy to the less palatable details of my childhood, but even an eight-year-old could sense when mountains were moving. “You stay here, Ryann,” Dad told her when she stood up to follow us outside. The subtle softening of his voice is an imperceptible shift to most people, but everyone who grew up in this house could hone in on it with precision. “I just wanna talk to ya mama for a minute,” he said. Ryann looked at me questioningly and I shot her a quick smile, reassurance enough to turn her attention back to the cartoons on television.

The humid Louisiana heat painted a damp sheen across my forehead as soon as I stepped from the air-conditioned house to the screened-in backyard patio. A thin layer of dust on an old glass-top table swirled up and resettled as Dad plopped down into the faded green La-Z-Boy rocker beside it. Broken appliances and other random knick-knacks that no longer had a place in the home cluttered the shelves of a tall dust-covered bookshelf in the far corner. It had been replaced years ago by a three-piece set with neat rows of encyclopedias and colorful Jehovah’s Witness books, giving the living room a scholarly vibe. I stood awkwardly next to the treadmill by the door, hoping for a sidebar instead of a sermon.

“Have a seat, Nina,” Dad said. He held a hand out towards the two-person patio swing against the opposite wall and started in before I sat down. “I had a conversation with the circuit overseer recently, and he wanted to know why I was pet-sitting my disfellowshipped daughter’s dog.” Roxie had slept on this patio during a Niagara Falls holiday road trip with my daughters, then again during a solo Valentine’s Day trip to Amsterdam. I wiped invisible dust from the swing seat before sitting. It didn’t buy me enough time to get ahead of whatever was coming. I couldn’t figure out why a high-ranking clergyman gave two shits about my Shiba Inu, but I knew nothing good was coming next if he was involved.

“I must’ve mentioned it in passing, not even thinking nothing of it,” Dad said almost to himself this time. He looked at the ground and sighed. “Told ‘em we were keeping Roxie while you were on vacation. And he asked me why I was keeping my disfellowshipped daughter’s dog while she celebrated the holidays. And ya know…” He shook his head, raised both palms up and plopped them on his knees. “I didn’t even know what to say. Because he was right. He was ab-so-lute-ly right.” His sad eyes belied the conviction of his next words. “And so, ya know, you’re not gonna be able to come over here anymore.”

I looked at the ground and thought of all the things I had never had the courage to say to him, things I still wasn’t brave enough to say in that moment. I wanted to tell him this was lunacy, something not of God. That he was in a cult being controlled by men who made him believe that hurting me is loving me. That they had taken something as sacred as love and turned it all around and upside down.

“Now, I don’t know what your beliefs are now…”

“I believe in love, Dad,” I said, barely louder than a whisper. At thirty-eight years old, he still had the ability to transform me into a timid little girl. I hated it just as much as I felt powerless over it. He didn’t know my beliefs because we never talked about them. I had tried to keep our worlds from colliding over the years. I never brought up religion when the girls and I came over for dinner. They had no way of knowing how awkward their innocent talks of birthday parties and holiday gifts made everyone. I never said a word when, ten years prior, I had learned I was raised in a cult. The daughter I pretended to be within the four walls of my family home did not exist outside of them. She never had much of an existence within them either.

“What was that?” Dad asked. I looked at his face, the first time in a long time. Dark, raccoon-like circles ringed both eyes. His scalp was visible through the sparse carpet of white hair that had replaced the dense afro and sideburns of a younger man. He would be seventy in a few weeks. My heart ached for him because of the way he was choosing to live out the rest of his years, and it burned with anger for his choice to make me collateral damage.

“I believe in love,” I repeated a bit louder, mimicking his pseudo conviction. A thoughtful look flashed across his face before he found his way back to the script.

“Yeah. Yeah. And, uh…that’s good. But you know what I believe because you know what I taught you. Now this was coming through the circuit overseer, but actually coming from Jehovah God, because he’s one of Jehovah’s representatives. He’s been going around to the congregations in their various circuits to keep them uplifted spiritually in view of all this that’s going on. And so a lot of times when we have disfellowshipped relatives, and we ourselves are trying to remain loyal to Jehovah and to his organization, sometimes we have to make hard decisions. And those decisions hurt. They hurt me and they hurt you as well. But they have to be made because that’s Jehovah’s arrangement. That’s Jehovah’s standard. And we can’t go against Jehovah’s standard with impunity.”

This would be monologue, not dialogue. I sat back and focused on the rhythmic creaking of the rusty swing and let my mind wander back to the place it had immediately gone when he banished me. Does Mom know about this?

“So, like I was saying, I know you don’t know, but the last four or five years in a row, Jehovah has made various adjustments into how his organization deals with preaching the good news, with a focus on keeping ourselves closely aligned with Him. Now Jehovah isn’t gonna make any of us do anything, including his dedicated, baptized people. He gives us this information and he actually pleads with us and hopes that we would do it, because it’s gonna be to our benefit if we do it because we recognize that it’s coming from Him. So I recognize this fact, that this information coming through the circuit overseer comes from Jehovah. And again, like I said, I wanna maintain my loyalty to Jehovah. I would love to see you and Dame both come back. I really would. I pray for y’all, and I pray about y’all frequently to Jehovah in my personal prayers. But then again, it’s really not left up to me. That’s a decision that the both of y’all have to make because both of y’all are fully grown. Dame already made his forty. You…” He went silent a moment, then looked at me expectantly.

I met his gaze and raised my eyebrows. It’s harder to remember your children’s ages when you’ve never celebrated their birthdays.

“You…You gon’ probably be making yours…at some point this year,” he stammered. “So that’s a decision that both of y’all have to make. And both of y’all should keep in mind that it’s not only your lives that are at stake now. It’s your children’s lives as well because they’re still under y’all’s authority. But anyway…” He waved a hand, a small gesture that did nothing to erase the mental images of hellfire raining down from the heavens on me and my daughters at Armageddon. I wish I could say I was angry in that moment, that I valued myself enough to stop talking to any person who tells me I’m killing my children through inaction, but numbing myself to emotional blackmail was something I had mastered to keep my family in my life. A lot of good that’s done me, I thought. I gritted my teeth and inhaled long and deep.

  “Not to get off the subject, but I was just saying that to explain to you why you won’t be able to leave your car or your dog or your children here during the holiday time, and all these other times when you wanna go somewhere. You just gon’ have to find somewhere else, some other arrangements.”

“Ok,” I said flatly. I studied a crack in the concrete while he continued reciting lines. History had taught me it would be over sooner if I engaged less.

“And ya know,” he said, his voice rising, “its an act of love primarily coming from Jehovah to have brought this to my attention because I thought I was doing pretty good in that area. But I found out that I wasn’t doing as good as I thought I was.” I chuffed under my breath. “So, like I said, just during the course of our conversation, this came out. And I was absolutely embarrassed. But, at the same time, I was relieved. Because Jehovah, through him, opened my eyes to something I hadn’t even realized. And so, anyway, I just wanted to, ya know, bring you out here talk to you, and let you know that.”

“Uh huh.”

“Now I don’t have no problem with Dame, so that’s not a big issue, because I don’t have no dealings with Dame.” He was less careful with his words now, almost ranting. “He so stupid, and he done got so out of the box ‘til I don’t even bother wit’ him. Ya mama deals with him primarily because of the fact that he owes her so much money that she know she’ll never get anyway. He don’t owe me no money because I don’t loan Dame no money. I know Dame. I know my son better than that and I know he still has this gambling problem. I hope nothing ever happens to him but he’s out there living that kinda life where you always have to expect that. But then again, his mama got life insurance on him so I know she expects it as well.” He took a deep breath and softened his voice. We were coming to the end of it. “But anyway, I just wanted to, uh, I wanted to bring that to your attention. And I didn’t wanna talk to you in front of your children because it’s none of their concern. But you…but you do understand my point-”

“Uh huh.”

“-of view, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. I could tell this wasn’t his first diatribe about my brother. That’s the danger with letting your emotions get too close to the surface. Being on-script could be exhausting, but going off-script was where the quiet parts accidentally get said out loud. The truth was usually lurking somewhere between the things said and things unsaid. Dad knew shunning one disfellowshipped child and not the other was inconsistent and undermined his position. I knew Mom ultimately had the final say about who comes and goes in her home, and therein lay the betrayal. She had carved out an exception for my brother, a dubious one at best, but I was disposable.

“Okay. Like I say, I love ya. I’m gone always love ya because you’re my youngest daughter. I’m gone always love ya. But like…ya know…like I say, because of…ya know…because of your lifestyle right now, ya know… I don’t…I don’t know if you thinking about coming back to Jehovah. I hope that you would. I know that you see all the terrible things happening, and especially all these school shootings, one right behind the other, all of these terrible things. They not happening just…just because. They’re happening for a specific reason. So Jehovah is adjusting, uh, his organization, and how they do stuff according to the things that are happening in this world and they’re happening real fast. And the Apostle Paul, as I’m sure you recall, said ‘The scene of this world is changing.’ And even a blind man like Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles, they can’t even legally see. But they know that the scene of this world is changing as well. So us who can see, we should be able to see it. And, like I say, all these things are not happening just because. They are happening for a definite reason. So it’s…it’s Bible prophecies being fulfilled one right after the other. So anyway, I just wanted to talk to you about that.” He stood up and clasped his hands together.

“Alright,” I said, following suit. He fake coughed, an awkward quirk for when he was feeling nervous. I had similar idiosyncrasies to mask my own awkwardness. I could still parse out Dad amidst the ingrained cult-speak. It saddened me that he couldn’t.

Back inside, I told Ryann to gather her things. Mom was still at the stove, still stirring. She glanced at me briefly as I left home for the last time, before her eyes fell back to the pot. What mountain?