I told her while I stayed with her the summer before I went. It was days before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, so we didn’t have war to worry about yet. She was watering her plants. Midday light flooded the living room. It was so bright I shaded my eyes.

“Maybe your mom didn’t do the right thing, but she had her reasons. It’s a hard place for women.”

“How do you know?” I told her. “I have to see it for myself.”

“Fine. Don’t tell me when you go so I won’t worry. Don’t tell me till you come back.” She’d spilled water on the hardwood floor but she didn’t rush to wipe it up.

“That’s silly. You’ll know I’m there because I’m not calling you like I usually do.”

“I’ll pretend I don’t know.”

So, I went radio silence while I was in Saudi, except for one answering machine message. But when I came back to Ohio, she was the first person I called.

CONVERT

1998

SANCTUARY

Coventry Second Church of Christ sits on a leafy triangle of land, surrounded by brick and wood colonials but a place apart from them. It is not near Coventry Road, and Sadie often wonders why it bears that name. Did the congregation move? Is there a Coventry First Church of Christ? Who are the people kneeling in the building’s stained-glass windows? What would it be like to stand on the other side of the glass and have sunlight cast those greens and blues and reds onto her body?

After nearly thirty years of living in America, Sadie knows next to nothing about Christians. They have their Christmas and their Easter. Some of them are Catholics and some of them are Protestants and a few of them are other things, but she doesn’t know what makes these groups different. Long ago she accidentally memorized the words to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” when Hannah learned it in school. The same year—or was it?—she bought a fake three-foot-tall Christmas tree from Kmart because Hannah wanted a tree. The box fit in the trunk of Sadie’s car. As easily as buying groceries, she could bring Christianity into her house.

Oddly, her parents had had a Christmas tree in their formal salon before she left them, handed down to them by American neighbors who were returning to the United States. Sadie’s mother thought the tree was beautiful, and hadn’t cared about the religious symbolism.

Her father, on the other hand, questioned the tree in his pragmatic way.

“We are different than Christians,” he said.

Sadie hadn’t asked how, besides not celebrating Jesus Christ’s birth.