No way was Dellarobia getting involved. The main point of coming to church was to drop off Preston and Cordie in the Sunday school building and take a breather from squabbles over who hit the other one first. Evidently Crystal had already taken Jazon and Mical over there, pawning them off on Brenda’s kin. That must have been interesting. Dellarobia downed her scalding coffee in a couple of gulps where she stood, tossed the styrene cup in the trash, and headed down the hall for the sanctuary. The heels of her oxblood boots struck the waxed floor loudly, advertising her traveling whereabouts like a GPS. A disappointed-looking Jesus eyed her from the wall. She’d ruined herself on these boots for sure, by donning them a month ago for the purpose of committing adultery. Look, look, her steps called out, here is a redheaded sinner on the move. She felt out of control in some new way, unfixable, unless she could fold her life back into its former shape: pre–Turnbow Family Sideshow, premarriage, back to being just one kid trying to blaze her own trail. It was exhausting, to keep being sorry for everything. Sorry she’d had to run out of the café just now. Bereft, actually, over that one. The café had definitely upped her quality time at Mountain Fellowship since it opened in September. The church was a thriving little village of its own, with new kinds of congregational space forever being discussed or under construction. The modular Sunday-school structure had been replaced last year with a red schoolhouse affair, and now with the new wing open, a person could walk around a good deal without technically leaving church. An enclosed walkway connected the sanctuary to the Men’s Fellowship room and the sunny, tile-floored Café in Christ, where she could sit and have some alone time with a blueberry muffin, with other congregants who would just as soon get their sermon over closed-circuit. The view of Pastor Ogle’s giant pixellated face on the multiple TV screens was perfectly up-close and personal if you didn’t need the live experience, which she did not. Church attendance was a condition of her marriage. Cub felt if they laid out on Sundays, his mother would either drop dead or disown him, and he didn’t care to find out which. Dellarobia would have been willing to give it a test run. But no, they went.

It did get her out, among people. Whether friend or foe hardly mattered; they ate with their mouths closed and wore shoes without Velcro. She hadn’t been much of a player in public after the diner closed six years ago, and she hadn’t planned on missing those long days on her feet or the wages that barely covered her gas. But being a stay-at-home mom was the loneliest kind of lonely, in which she was always and never by herself. Days and days, hours and hours within them, and days within weeks, at the end of which she might not ever have gotten completely dressed or read any word longer than Chex, any word not ending in -os, or formed a sentence or brushed her teeth or left a single footprint outside the house. Just motherhood, with its routine costs of providing a largesse that outstripped her physical dimensions. She’d seen ewes in the pasture whose sixty-pound twins would run underneath together and bunt the udders to release the milk with sharp upward thrusts, jolting the mother’s hindquarters off the ground. That was the picture, overdrawn. A gut-twisting life of love, consecrated by the roof and walls that contained her and the air she was given to breathe.

But here was church. An hour in the café, the slake of a tall cup of coffee, and stillness, and wearing shoes, a clean tile floor, time off for good behavior. A reminder that she could belong to something the size of this congregation, if they would have her. She was not outside the believer realm entirely. She’d had her phases. Back when her daddy lost everything at once—his furniture-making business, his health, his inner light—she’d prayed for Jesus to bring it all back. When he died, her mother resigned from religion and left Dellarobia working a double shift. By the time her mother got sick, the whole enterprise was tainted with doubt. Cub had persuaded her to give prayer another shot during the years when they were trying and failing to get pregnant, and finally that one had been answered times two, Preston and Cordie, sufficient for the time being.

So she was what Hester called a 911 Christian: in the event of an emergency, call the Lord. Unlike all those who called on Jesus daily, rain or shine, to discuss their day and feel the love. Once upon a time she’d had her mother for that. Jesus was a more reliable backer, evidently, less likely to drink himself unconscious or get liver cancer. No wonder people chose Him as their number-one friend. But if the chemistry wasn’t there, what could you do? Dellarobia scrutinized life too hard, she knew that. For a year she’d gone with Cub to Wednesday Bible group and loved the sense of being back in school, but her many questions did not make her the teacher’s pet. Right out of the gate, in Genesis, she identified two completely different versions of how it all got started. The verses could be a listen-and-feel kind of thing, like music, she’d suggested, not like the instruction booklet that comes with a darn appliance. A standpoint that won no favors with the permanent discussion leader, Blanchie Bise, cheerleader for taking the Word on faith. For crap’s sake, the first rule of believable was to get your story straight. Hester let Dellarobia stop coming to Wednesday Bible.

She paused in the doorway of Holy Beacons, the name given the sanctuary, where anyone present might be called out by Pastor Ogle as a beacon. The newly remodeled sanctuary was huge. This church was the biggest show in Feathertown by far. Bobby Ogle pulled people out of bed from far and wide on Sunday mornings, even from the larger town of Cleary, fourteen miles away. Dellarobia studied the backs of all those heads, the females vivid with individualized hues, the males surprisingly uniform. Three hundred people quieting down, readying themselves for what they were about to receive. The nourishment was so real to them. Dellarobia felt a stab of envy, as if everyone here was getting a regular paycheck and only hers bounced. It made no sense. Up on the mountain that first day, she’d had no trouble believing in some large glory tailor-made for herself, but here in this fold she struggled with everlasting doubts as to her status. The sole glory she could hold in mind at the moment was the blueberry muffin she’d planned to buy in the café. She craved it like a cigarette: the sticky, too-big puffiness of that muffin spilling over its fluted paper cup, crumbling all over the table, sweetly filming her throat with whatever it was those things had. Probably something that bunged your arteries like bacon grease in a drain. She weighed her options: that muffin, Crystal, Brenda. No. She located the back of Cub’s head towering over his mother’s and moved down the center aisle toward them, avoiding eye contact with the sanctuary regulars.