After the burial—after prayers and processions, quiet whimpers from strangers, booming wails from Nona—my father lit a cigarette and told me and only me, “Beautiful or faithful: You can never have both.”

“Who?” I asked, or maybe, “What?”

“Women,” he explained. “They can either be beautiful or faithful.” He pointed at my face with two fingers and the cigarette clamped between them. Ash floated from his hand like sparks from a tiny gray firework. “Do you understand, Robert?”

I nodded.

Recognizing, perhaps, that I was still a child who might not grasp this key message without cementing it in the cornerstone of my psyche, he said, “Someday, God willing, you’ll be sharp enough to pick a wife of your own. She will either be beautiful, or she will be faithful. Do you know what faithful means, Son?”

I nodded, thinking of churchgoers worshipping on Palm Sunday.

“Good. So that’s your choice.”

Strangers patted me on my shoulder as we walked toward a parade of cars with little orange flags clipped to antennae. When my father finished smoking, he let me stomp on his glowing Kent cigarette butt. I twisted my shoe into the gravel until he said, “That’s enough.”

We climbed into the limousine and the driver closed the door. Only then did I finally ask, “Which one was Mom?”

My father brushed a flake of ash from his lapel and cracked a smile that turned into a sneer. “Oh, she was beautiful all right.” Staring through a tinted window toward the canopied burial plot, a tender grin lingered on his face. “She was one hell of a beautiful woman.”

From this, I deduced that my mother must have been faithless, and so I reasoned—and for a long time believed—that Father was breaking the news that Mom would not be admitted to heaven after all. The preacher had been so cocky, so sure. But then, what do preachers know about women? Then again, what did I? My mother hadn’t lived long enough to explain birds and bees and intercourse and the like. It would be three years before I found a cozy corner in my father’s storage shed where I could masturbate to my stepmother’s Victoria’s Secret catalogs. It would be two years after that before I’d secure my first girlfriend. Infidelity, as a concept, didn’t even exist for me yet.