Amy Inspired Read Online Free PDF Page B

our mantra, but Zoë tended to have more lenient interpretations of just about any belief we shared. She was the daughter of a travel writer and a nurse who had met through the Peace Corps. The Walkers listened to NPR; they voted Democratic; they were open-minded. I was the product of a culture that considered the phrase “open-minded” anathema.
    My childhood was carefully policed by the powerful mandates of the First Fundamentalist Church of God, which discouraged fraternizing with nonbelievers. I had to save a boy before I could date him and even then there was little fun to be had without sinning, so I placated my hormones with fantasies and fueled my hopes with novels. I ascribed to the True Love Waits campaign without any real dilemma, having confused scriptural mandates with my own outrageous expectations: I believed God was the Divine Author and my life the story of an ultimate romance.
    I quit the First Fundamentalist Church of God soon after attending college, exhausted by its stringent legalism. Leaving behind the church that had raised me was hardly a novel thing to do (it was, in fact, the one stab at independence I had most in common with my smattering of freshmen friends) and it was hardly difficult. But forsaking Christ himself was impossible. The basic precepts of the faith defined my life as the skeleton gives the body definition: I could as soon function apart from Christianity as sever muscle from bone and retain shape.
    Particulars of its moral code, however, had grown increasingly tiresome. While I couldn’t make love where I didn’t feel love, chastity for its own sake had become pure drudgery. It had been fairly noble to champion virginity when I was sixteen, but the closer I got to thirty the more I began to worry. The more I felt like a baby-maker with a ticking egg timer.

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    Once I got around to telling them, everyone was kind about the break-up with Adam. Zoë said he didn’t deserve me. Mom recited her usual litany of animal kingdom analogies: There were other fish in the sea; you had to kiss a lot of toads to find your prince; don’t throw your pearls to swine. Valerie Powell came bursting into my office the next afternoon breathless and sweating. “He broke up with you?”
    “In the cafeteria,” Everett said from his desk without bothering to turn away from his computer.
    Valerie was the only other woman from our graduate workshop who stayed in Copenhagen after finishing the program. While our friends moved on to finish Ph.D.s or write their novels in mountain cabins, Valerie promptly went about the business of getting pregnant. By escaping academia when she had the chance, she lived a sane and unhurried life. She was also a practiced gossip.
    “Well what are we all doing here then?” She grabbed my coat off the filing cabinet. “You need to talk and I need carbohydrates.”
    Ten minutes later, we sat crowded into a Donut Shoppe booth, Valerie listening attentively to my now-detailed list of Adam’s inadequacies, and Everett who had invited himself along, interrupting to volunteer examples I’d forgotten.
    “He broke up with me in the cafeteria of the student commons,” I said for the third time. It had become the refrain of the story.
    “It’s sick,” she muttered.
    “And he had the nerve to be totally calm about it.”
    “Jerk.”
    “Not even an affectation of grief,” Everett added.
    “You want me to kill him for you?” Valerie asked. “Because I could do it.” She gave a wave of her arm over her very pregnant belly, inviting us to examine her late-term physical prowess. She once confessed to me that she’d spent all of junior high peeing in short, quick bursts, having heard at summer camp that doing so toughened your uterine walls for the birth process.
    I was grateful that Valerie was back in my life. She and I had been close in graduate school, our friendship the direct result of similar schedules and shared workloads. Once we’d graduated, we’d lost the