“Gotcha.”

“So when I came along, we went to the church that met in houses,” Gemma continues. “Any member with a living room big enough to fit, they’d host. Which was not my dad and I. Though, certainly, I’ve been to traditional churches lots. When I visited my Oma out in Mitchell. Or when I stayed with my Opa in Roland. But out here, we went to houses.”

“Did your dad grow up with bonnets and buggies?” says Olive.

“No, he was Steinbach in the seventies. He grew up with record purgings and Hymn Sing.”

“What?”

“Never mind. He grew up conservative, yes. Sin and you go to hell, that stuff. But that didn’t mean the plain dress or the buggies or all that. It’s never that simple. Even the Hutterites, you know—we went out there for a meal once—they wear plain dress, and the family dining room was the sparest big room I ever saw. But still, they tooled around their colony in a four-wheeler. This old woman whipped me around in one and I was terrified. That would be to the west of here”—Gemma gestures with her head to the window—“in the valley, where you start to have hills.”

“That’s funny,” says Olive.

At first, Gemma does not respond. A world has begun to form in Gemma’s third eye as she has been talking about this. Then she says, “Funny. I suppose. All of those people, where they truly went wrong was in wishing to remove themselves from the world. ‘The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.’ It seems charming, in its own way, doesn’t it? They wanted to just be left alone. But on the scale of an entire life, or an entire community, that is a childish desire. Not to mention an impossible one.” “What do you mean?” Olive’s really focused on Gemma now. Gemma puts down her cutlery. It has been a long time since she has heard her grandparents speak, but there is little of their sonority she does not remember. “The temptation to remove oneself from the world does not lack for appeal,” she says. “The idea does not need a Scriptural mandate to accrue power. Anybody who doesn’t feel accepted within the world—which is most people, regardless of whether it’s actually true—can be excited by this desire.” She drains her glass. “The idea of forming a little pocket universe where everyone already believes the truths you hold, where you can build a family according to those truths, and where you make a promise to yourself and everybody else in that universe that you’re going to do right by them. And all the cruelty of the world, the ugliness, the bullheadedness—you and a few other people could just band together and make a bulwark against these things, couldn’t you? Put it that way, it sounds beautiful, no?”

“I see where you’re going with this,” Olive says calmly.

“Who would want to leave that? But the promise never, ever works that way. I still believe in God”—in her peripheral vision, Gemma sees Ava turn her head, stunned, to face her—“whether I want to or not. But isolation, walling off from the world with no expiration date, that I’ll never believe in. Isolation corrodes. Makes your mind do bad things. It narrows your trust to a tiny circle, and then it narrows it a little more.”