“What’s a pillar of salt?”

“I guess her body just —”

“— turned into salt?”

“I suppose, yes.”

“In, like, the shape of a pillar?”

“More or less. Maybe not smooth and round but —”

“How?”

“Well —”

“How quickly did it happen?”

“I don’t know, Jord.”

“Would she have felt it happen? Like would she have known she was becoming a pillar?”

“I don’t know, probably not.”

I became fixated on this moment of her transformation, this moment between being “Lot’s wife” and being “a pillar of salt,” between being a body and a thing, a geological feature, an extension of the earth, a rocky outcropping of sodium chloride.

And in my imagination, she had your face. She was you. I let myself linger in the thought of being with you in that moment, running beside my father Lot and sensing you falling back, stopping, turning around, knowing I couldn’t look back for you, knowing something terrible was happening to you, perhaps even sensing the precise moment you became a thing, a rock, a pillar of salt, imagining the sound you would make in this instant and whether I would even be able to hear it over the roar of the apocalypse.

When I was eight you secured tenure-track at Carleton, and we moved out to a new-build on the border between city and wilderness. A treeless, expectant street with six semi-detached houses and ten concrete foundations. Two storeys, white walls, berber carpets, a lawn to mow. Just you and me and the foxes. Some weekends you hosted potlucks for other single working moms while I was terrorized by their sons and their action figures in the basement. I still have a scar above my left eyebrow. It was the self-help era and you bought all the books. At night, in the bardo between waking and sleep, I would lie in bed and hear you crying down the hall. Sometimes murmuring to yourself. Or to Dora on the phone. Or to God.

One night I told you, very casually, that I thought people needed religion when they were vulnerable. “It gives them a sense of meaning and stability.”

“Do you think that’s true of me?” you asked.

I shrugged.

“That I need religion because I’m weak?”

“I didn’t say ‘weak’; I said ‘vulnerable.’ ”

You nodded, your mouth drawing itself into a thin, wounded line. You were standing in front of the microwave defrosting dinner at eight thirty at night, still in your pantsuit.

“But hey if it works for you then great,” I added with the sagacity of my dozen years or so on the planet as I fished a pop out of the fridge.