Excerpt from Crooked Hallelujah by Kelli Jo Ford, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"I talked to Daddy." Her nerves blurted it out for her.

Lula put her feet down to stop the swing. Justine couldn't read her mother's face, but she wished she could put the words back in her mouth, swallow them for good.

Justine's father had dropped the family off for a Saturday night service at Beulah Springs Holiness Church almost seven years back. As far as anyone could tell, he'd then been swallowed up by the Oklahoma sky. He'd never sent an ounce of child support or a forwarding address, never even called.

Lula held herself together with a religion so stifling and frightening that Justine, the youngest and always the most bullheaded, never knew if she was fighting against her mother or God himself, or if there was even a difference. Still, her father was a betrayal of the knife-in-the-heart variety— something far beyond all their fighting—and here he was on a cool spring evening, right between them.

"He's in Texas. Near Fort Worth," Justine said. She bit her lip. "He asked me to go to Six Flags with him. Just for the weekend. He has a little boy now, I guess."

She almost hoped Lula would hit her, but Lula stared into the hills. It wasn't clear she had heard, so Justine's mouth kept moving. "Six Flags is an amusement park. With roller coasters. I know you might think it's too worldly, but I can wear a long skirt on the rides and all. It's sort of like a big old playground!" Justine forced a smile. She pushed a strand of hair back into her bun and waited. "I'm sorry, Mama."

Lula remained quiet, focused on the horizon.

"I guess I pestered Mr. Bean at the plant so much he helped put me in touch." She didn't say that she'd gotten the information from her dad's old foreman almost two years ago and then been so ashamed that she tore the paper into bits she spread over Little Locust Creek. A few weeks back, her treacherous mind had begun to play the numbers across her thoughts, a musical sequence that interrupted her over dinner or during tests.

"I'm real excited about Six Flags," she said, and despite everything, she realized it was true. "I'll talk to Pastor about it," Lula said, finally. She pushed herself out of the swing and walked inside.

At first Justine was surprised at how well it had gone. Then she saw Lula's purse kicked over on the porch, her comb and Bible in a puff of cat hair. Justine scrambled to retrieve them and ran her hand over the textured leather cover of the heavy book.

She pushed past the screen door and went to her mother's room, where she could hear Lula already in prayer. One of Lula's drawings of a Plains Indian's teepee was tacked to the closed door. Justine knew that on the other side of the teepee, her mother knelt, as she did in church. Instead of a wooden pew or an altar, Lula's face was buried in her twin bed, if she had made it that far. Justine ran her finger over the smooth indentations of her mother's ink. She wanted to take Lula the purse and Bible, decided that if Lula stopped praying, she would make herself push through the door. She would go into the small, dark room, where maybe she would lay her head on her mother's shoulder. If she did, Justine knew that her mouth would open back up. Instead of telling Lula about Six Flags and a new half-brother, Justine would tell her about what Russell Gibson did to her.

She wouldn't be able to omit the details of the night she'd snuck out and met him down their dirt road, how he looked back over his shoulder then let her steer the car while he pushed from the open driver-side door, only cranking the engine once they were well out of Lula's earshot. How her stomach flip-flopped over the way he had looked at her as he drove, shaking his head, saying, "Fif-teen," and how her insides had frozen when she noticed a blanket folded neatly in the back seat. She would say how very sorry she was that she had pretended to be asleep that night when Lula stuck her head into the dark room and said, "Good night, my Teeny. Love you." She would tell her how she'd thought his abrupt movements must have been what first dates were made of. She would tell Lula that she said no quietly at first.

Excerpted from Crooked Hallelujah © 2020 by Kelli Jo Ford. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.