May drove onto Elk Road, pulled into the parking lot of Elk Plaza, and shut off the ignition. I gotta get a grip on myself, she told herself. Pastor Denny sees me like he does any of his parishioners, nothing more, nothing special. I’m gonna go crazy thinking about him like this. I ain’t felt so mixed up and sick to my heart since I was sixteen and had a crush on that salesman come to sell Daddy a tractor. I sure wish there was someone I could tell about this, someone who could help me get my head straightened out. Maybe I could tell Amelia what I been feeling. She shook her head. It was a comforting thought, but not one she trusted. Best not to tell nobody.

5

Zachary

Once he was ensconced in his father’s home, Zachary’s anger, which of necessity had been contained and controlled on their journey out of India, found an outlet at the news that his father had married Hannah. Had he been less self-centered, he would have compared his father’s failure to inform him of his marriage to Hannah with his failure to notify his father of his marriage to Sarina.

Max—that’s how he thought of him, not Dad—had welcomed him home with open arms, and then Hannah walked into the house, their house now, and that changed everything, though he wasn’t sure what everything was, since he hadn’t formulated a concrete plan of his own.

Hannah, they explained, did not actually live with his father, though she spent a great deal of time and many nights there. What kind of a marriage was that? Was it even legal? His father must be getting senile to get into such a stupid situation.

Sarina breathed deeply and shifted in the bed they shared in his boyhood room. Her pregnancy weighted the mattress, and his body slanted toward her, making it hard for him to relax, to be comfortable, to sleep. There had been no time to think, to digest the meaning or the consequences of that terrifying night when, waving flaming flares and screeching, hostile men had surrounded his father-in-law’s compound. Unwittingly, the family had reverted to their native language, further confirming Zachary’s foreignness and his inability to immediately grasp what was happening and why.

“It is nothing. It will pass by morning,” his father-in-law, finally speaking in English, lied, even as the women of the household wept, and servants hauled trunks and suitcases from storage, and cars with darkened windows pulled into the driveway. Zachary had stood on the sidelines while police in heavy armor materialized to push back the crowd gathering beyond the locked gate, and when they departed, at daybreak, an armed escort conducted their several cars south, away from the town.

Nor had he had any say in the decisions that followed.

“You go to America now. It is better,” his father-in-law, the patriarch, had said.