42 pages • 1 hour read
Deesha PhilyawThe Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Story 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story 2 Summary: “Not-Daniel”
A grieving woman (nameless) sits in a car in the dark behind a hospice center with a box of condoms on her lap. She waits for a man (also nameless) that she met in the hospice center a few days prior. When she first saw him, she believed him to be Daniel McMurray, a boy she went to Jr. High with; quickly she realizes that he is not Daniel, but another grieving stranger. Not-Daniel’s mother is dying of breast cancer and the woman’s mother is dying of ovarian cancer.
Despite that Not-Daniel has a wife and two kids in another state, the two strangers begin to meet in a car behind the hospice center to have sex each night after being with their dying mothers. The woman wonders if one of their mothers will die while they are down in the car “rutting around” (15).
Story 2 Analysis
Philyaw presents the clear tension and irreverence of two strangers having sex in a hospice parking lot to complicate the concept of infidelity. The two strangers are responsible adults yet they’re still vulnerable in the space where death is looming and inevitable. The infidelity is unspoken yet understood; while waiting for Not-Daniel to meet her, the woman asks herself, “What do you call it when someone wears a wedding band but never mentions his wife by name? A wife and two kids back home in the next state over. Don’t ask, don’t tell” (14). Rather than guilt or fear for their infidelity, the woman feels only relief from her grief.
Philyaw shows the tenderness of teetering at the edge of death through the awkward and strangely comforting relationship of these two strangers. They both know that it is wrong; it is not something that will last; it is meaningless in the sense that they will not leave the hospice center together and start a relationship with one another. Still, it is meaningful because in each other they find someone who understands the experience of “endless and sleepless” nights, being the family’s chief “shit handler,” and “someone else who both welcomes and dreads death as it loiters in the wings, an unpredictable actor” (13).
In the dark car behind the hospice center, the two grieving strangers find themselves beyond the reach of “[their] mothers’ Jesus” and “garbage theology about God’s will disguised as comfort” (14). Both people seem to have come from a background and culture where God and Jesus were meant to comfort them in times of sickness and death. Rather than continuing those beliefs, the two reach for each other’s company, body, and touch for the comfort they crave.
This story is similar to the first in that the sexual encounter is taking place in opposition to religious fervor. While Caroletta tries to reason that God wouldn’t want Eula to be unhappy, trying to redefine her understanding of religion, this couple discards the idea of God entirely. Poignantly, it is their “mothers’ Jesus” and not their own, and they therefore don’t feel guilty about their encounter. We'll see this concept repeated in “Instructions for Married, Christian Husbands.”
