Rudy and I would take holy field trips together, visiting a big pink church on Campbell Avenue, where nuns prayed day and night, in four-hour shifts, in front of a rayed gold monstrance in which the Host was displayed, going to Catholic bookstores to look at prints by Sister Mary Corita (WONDERBREAD, her red letters proclaimed above big floating spots). Without exactly thinking about it, I infused my new religiosity with my ardor for Rudy, right to the point of abandoning Saint Michael and All Angels with its liberal sense of social responsibility and becoming Catholic myself. I joined Rudy’s anonymous, modernist church with its sad statues and cheerful new felt banners across the street from the shopping center on East Twenty-second, a church with no noticeable politics at all. Conversion was weirdly easy: a few classes, a baptism, the uncomfortable and hasty experience of a first confession. Are you troubled by lustful thoughts? Nothing to worry about. Now, did I feel different now?

What I’d expected, of course, was that I’d feel closer to him, more Rudy-like, but it doesn’t work. I thought there’d be less of a barrier between us. I envision us as chaste brothers, impossibly close in our joint aspiration toward grace, helping each other in the progress of our faith. But in fact I think he’s moving farther from me, nervous about our friendship. One day he and I go to the large ugly church to pray. I’m mad at him, he’s holding me at a distance, I want—something, I don’t know what—and before I even think about what I’m doing I’ve slipped from my pew onto the cool terrazzo of the floor. I’ve fainted, or I’ve pretended to faint? I’ve gotten his attention, anyway.

I am my mother’s son.

Word from Memphis comes back slowly, in bits and pieces; my mother doesn’t tell me what my sister says when she calls from jail, where she’s awaiting trial, or about what her lawyer says, or much else. I overhear a little, and try to picture a world I can only imagine in little fragments of image: green uniforms like hospital scrubs, bars, rough sheets pulled across thin mattresses, women with scrubbed faces bartering for a little makeup or a hairbrush.