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fine, and that we wouldn’t share intimacies with each other. I don’t know. I think that lack of sharing weakened us.
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    Dear Lord,
    I pray for the souls of the three killers, but I don’t know if that is right or wrong.
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    It always seemed to me that people who’d discovered religion had both lost and gained something. Outwardly, they’d gained calmness, confidence and a look of purpose, but what they’d lost was a certain willingness to connect with unconverted souls. Looking a convert in the eyes was like trying to make eye contact with a horse. They’d be alive and breathing, but they wouldn’t be a hundred percent there anymore. They’d left the day-to-day world and joined the realm of eternal time. Pastor Fields or Dee or Lauren wouldhave pounced on me if I’d ever spoken those words aloud. Dee would have said something like “Cheryl, you’ve just covered your halo with soot. Repent. Now.”
    There can be an archness, a meanness in the lives of the saved, an intolerance that can color their view of the weak and of the lost. It can make them hard when they ought to be listening, judgmental when they ought to be contrite.
    Jason’s father, Reg, always said, “Love what God loves and hate what God hates,” but more often than not I had the impression that he really meant “Love what Reg loves and hate what Reg hates.” I don’t think he imparted this philosophy to Jason. Jason was too gentle, too forgiving, to adopt Reg’s self-serving credo. As my mother always told me, “Cheryl, trust me, you spend a much larger part of your life being old, not young. Rules change along the way. The first things to go are those things you thought were eternal.”
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    Getting married in Nevada in 1988 was simple. At noon on the final Friday before school started, Jason and I cabbed out to the airport and scanned the list of outgoing flights. There was one to Las Vegas in ninety minutes, so we bought tickets-cash-walked through U.S. Immigration preclearance, went to the gate and were on our way. They didn’t even bother to check our ID. We each had only a gym bag for carry-on and we felt like bandits. It was my first time flying, and everything was new and charged with mystery…the laminated safety cards, the takeoff, which made my stomach cartwheel, the food, which was bad just like they always joke about on TV, and the cigarette smoke; something about Las Vegas attracts the smokers. But it was all like perfume to me, and I tried pretending that every moment of my lifecould be as full of newness as that flight. What a life that would be.
    The two of us had dressed conservatively-shirt and tie for Jason, and me in a schoolmarm dress; our outfits must have made us look all of fifteen. The flight attendant asked us why we were going to Las Vegas and we told her. Ten minutes later there was a captain’s announcement telling everybody on the plane our news and our seat numbers. The other passengers clapped and I blushed like I had a fever, but suddenly it was as if we were blood kin with all these strangers. At the terminal, the men all slapped Jason’s back and har-har’ed, and this one woman whispered to me, “Honey, I don’t care what else you do, but the moment he hints that he wants it, you give it to him. Doesn’t matter if you’re fixing a diaper or cleaning out the gutters. You give it, pronto. Else you’ll lose him.”
    It was over a hundred degrees outside, my first exposure to genuine heat, Jason’s too. My lungs had never felt so pure. In the taxi to Caesars Palace I looked out at the desert-real desert -and tried to imagine every parable I’d ever heard taking place in that exotic lifeless nothingness. I couldn’t have stood five minutes out there in that oven, and I wondered how the Bible ever managed to happen. They must have had different weather back then-or trees-or