Anomaly: Chapter 2

"Mom and Dad met nine months earlier in Chico, a small college town in the agricultural belt of Northern California. Dad had just turned 20"

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Chapter 2

A Devine Conversation

Mom and Dad met nine months earlier in Chico, a small college town in the agricultural belt of Northern California. Dad had just turned 20—fresh-faced, with a Tom Selleck mustache and a full head of long black hippie curls—ready to start his freshman year at Chico State. He rolled into town without a care, sporting his classic positive attitude and boyish good looks. He’d been the pride of his close-knit Catholic Italian family—the second oldest of six kids and the star pitcher at Cal Poly High School in Palo Alto. He grew up in an impressive home with well-educated, well-traveled parents who valued education, faith, family, and exploration. Dad was destined to do big things.

He had just returned from spending his gap year abroad, backpacking through Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, filled with the confidence and glow that travel affords. He had attended Mass conducted by the Pope at the Vatican, prayed at the Wailing Wall, lived on a kibbutz in Israel, worn traditional garb and eaten with his fingers in Morocco, and gotten drunk on champagne in Paris. He had experienced a bit of life, and now he was ready to live.

Mom, on the other hand, was actively praying for a savior. And at twenty-seven, with two failed marriages and three kids, she needed one. She’d ended up in Chico after following Ricco, the boyfriend who’d saved her from Bob, the drunk truck-driver husband. She knew it was time to end her marriage when Bob came home shitfaced one night and woke her from sleep with the cold barrel of a gun pressed against her cheek. “If you get me out of this one,” she told God, “I’ll leave him, I swear it.”

That’s when she’d met Ricco, a regular at the Denny’s where she worked the graveyard shift, serving Grand Slams and lukewarm coffee to college kids trying to sober up after hitting the clubs all night. He was charming and good-looking, and Mom was easily charmed by a handsome face.

As a kid, I hated when she told stories about Ricco and his chiseled face. First, because I sensed this was probably disrespectful to Dad, but he honestly didn’t seem to mind, so I minded for him. Second, because this guy gave me the creeps, even if it was just through the secondhand relaying of events. These weren’t the sometimes funny, wild tales she boisterously shared to get a laugh or garner the attention of a room. They were the kind that made your stomach feel like something bad was about to happen.

Ricco sounded like a real piece of work. A drifter slash predator slash wannabe commune leader. He had this strange, magnetic pull over people, and Mom was under the spell. He’d convinced her to pack up my siblings, leave Bob, and follow him to Chico, which she immediately did, seeing this as a direct answer to her prayers on how to escape her marriage.

They moved into a shabby pink house on the outskirts of town, a house filled with strangers and chaos—the kind of place where nothing good happens. It was the mid-70s, after all, so anything went. Tarot readings? Normal. Drugs? Highly likely. Sex among housemates? For sure. Abuse? Probably. Devil worship? Apparently, yes.

That last part seemed to be the breaking point for Mom. Somehow, in all the dysfunction, the threat of devil worship was what finally snapped her out of her blind addiction to Ricco. She once again started praying that God would get her and the kids out of that house before someone became a human sacrifice. If there’s one thing that can raise the fear of God in my mother, it’s the threat of the devil.

But Mom’s prayers must have begun too late, because they couldn’t stop what happened next. Child protective services knocking on their front door after being tipped off to what was happening in that house, where three small children resided with numerous unaccounted-for adults. When they arrived and found my twin sisters lying on a bare mattress in the back room—their small bodies weak, dehydrated, and malnourished—the level of neglect and abuse was evident. And when they found Andy in the backyard, unsupervised as usual, smashing things against the fence and trying to set it on fire—it was more than enough for the state to step in with social workers, pack up the kids, and place them in foster care.

Yeah, she desperately needed a hero.

One morning, before Ricco or their strange housemates could catch her whispering prayers in the kitchen, Mom slipped out of bed and made herself a cup of tea. She sat at the wobbly kitchen table with her Bible, thumbing through its pages in her usual game of spiritual roulette. She believed that somewhere within those thin, crinkled sheets of paper lay the answer—if only she could land on the right verse. She needed something concrete. A sign. Anything.

That’s when she heard it.

“Go check the mail.” Clear as day.

Mom pauses here when telling this story for dramatic effect, her voice shaky and low as she explains what it felt like to hear God speak to her for the very first time. It wasn’t scary or booming like in the movies. It was calm, warm, deep, and familiar, like the voice of someone who’d known her forever.

Mom says God talks to her because she listens and does what He says, even when she’s not happy about it.

On this day, she wasn’t thrilled. Instead of being surprised by this new divine conversation, she wanted to know why. She shook her head and spun the Bible pages again. That’s stupid, she muttered. Why should I check the mail when I’m busy praying for a husband?

But the voice was insistent. She needed to get up and go check the mail.

Still in her pajamas, she walked outside barefoot, her tea cooling in her hand, her toes sinking into the uncut front lawn as she made her way to the mailbox. She pulled open the rusted lid and found a stack of junk mail resting on top of a crisp copy of the Chico State fall class schedule. She brought the stack of mail back inside and laid it on the table.

“Now what?” she asked. “Okay, I have it. What am I supposed to do now?”

As a high school dropout since her sophomore year, and a dyslexic, Mom could barely read. She’d been sounding out the words in the Bible every day, trying to teach herself. Surely God wasn’t suggesting she go to college. That was laughable. She had no desire, means, or energy to do that.

The voice came through again, steady and unbothered by her impatience: “Pick up the class schedule and flip to the sports section. Look up the tennis class schedule.”

At this, Mom laughed out loud. She couldn’t help herself—it was just too ridiculous. She had never stepped foot on a tennis court and honestly never wanted to. Really? she scoffed.

Still, she thumbed through the booklet, looking for tennis in the sports section.

“Take the class tonight,” God said, calm as you please. Sure enough, there was a beginner class starting that evening. Mom’s heart sped up a little. This was actually kind of exciting.

“Tonight, you’ll meet your husband.”

And that was all He said. He must have gone about His business after that because Mom still wanted to know: How was she supposed to register with no money? What would she wear to make the best impression on her future husband? And oh yeah, how would she get a ride to class? But there were no more answers.

She was nervous. She spent the whole day imagining what her new husband would look like and how she’d know which one of the tanned, athletic-looking college guys on the court he would be. She even tried on her limited outfit options several times, just to be sure she’d catch his eye.

This self-doubt was new, and she didn’t know what to make of it. She knew she wasn’t the smartest girl in the room. She had no job or money. But she did have her looks. She flaunted her tanned, toned, long legs whenever possible, brushing her long, straight dark hair every night until it shone. Even after four babies (including twins), she had a great figure. All she had to do was get his attention. If he looked her way, she knew she’d have him.

She got on the city bus at the stop down the street and sat with a stomach full of butterflies as it wound its way through town to the college campus. She was so worried about being late and missing her husband window that she arrived much earlier than expected.

When she reached the empty court, she decided to grab a loaner racket from the bucket at the entrance and a tennis ball, then started practicing her serve. Fifteen minutes passed, then thirty, and still, she was the only one on the court.

“Okay, God. I’m here. Where is he?” she asked aloud, hitting another ball over the net with accelerating force and frustration. Her butterflies were quickly turning to stones of disappointment in the pit of her stomach. Maybe it wasn’t God talking to her this morning. Maybe she’d imagined the whole thing. This was pointless. What was she thinking? Meeting her husband at college when she was a twice-divorced single mom of three, soon approaching thirty? It was embarrassing.

All this she mumbled under her breath as she hit and chased balls, talking louder to herself with each annoyed swing.

“Need a partner?” a voice behind her asked.

Mom turned around and stared into the eyes of the most handsome man she’d ever seen, and said, “You must be my husband.”

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About the Author: Sarah Centrella is a multi #1 best-selling author, master life coach, executive coach, speaker and the Founder of VIVIAMO.

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