Ayanna nodded. It was impossible for her to forget. Their grandmother said this every time she planted something, every time she saw the little sprouts of a new spring. There was something beautiful in it, yes, sure, but Ayanna thought it would take years before the saying would be meaningful again. She was supposed to have been here, but now that she was approaching eighty, the heat and length of the day would’ve been too much. Their grandmother would be the one at the end of the long day who would clean Ayanna. There were white washcloths and a steel basin filled with cold water, lavender, and ice waiting. She tried not to think about it. The longing to be clean and to cool off felt far more urgent than being hungry.

Her grandmother had told her there was nothing wrong with staying on this earth. If the door opened for her, it was just as fine to stay as it was to walk. Ayanna hadn’t looked at her grandmother as she had said those things the night before. Her eyes had been on her grandmother’s hands, her fingernails painted latte-color. She hadn’t wanted to see her grandmother’s eyes.

“I just thought it wouldn’t feel sacred to me knowing that people had built these things,” Olivia said.

“Didn’t Jesus invent Mass?”

“What?”

“He was a real person, right?”

“I thought you were talking about the theory of mass for a minute, not like Mass Mass. I don’t know. I’m tired.” Olivia paused. “Do you think it makes me a bad person if I don’t think so?” She drew a heart on the condensation on her glass. “Or, like, not a bad person, but a bad Christian.”

“I don’t know if I can judge,” Ayanna said. It seemed like the only thing she had the emotional bandwidth to say at that moment.

“I just think it’s better sometimes if Jesus is a story God told us. When I start thinking of him as a real person, someone who had a body. Ayanna, bodies are so gross.”

“Body odor, farts, throwing up, backne, cankles, eye boogers.”

“Exactly.”

Olivia laughed. “Mom would ground me for this conversation. She can probably sense I’m having it right now.”

Ayanna kept what she was thinking to herself.

*  *  *

The expedition members put on their hiking shoes, their expensive sunglasses, their vests, and tested the weight of their packs. Then, at the table, they signed another round of contracts ensuring that if anything went wrong, they could not sue anyone from the church or the Sherpa company or the US government. One of them wondered if he should have brought his lawyer to look over these final versions, but knew if his lawyer was involved, there would be no journey, only hopping on the phone and years of parsing sentences in size-ten font.