They didn’t sleep together. They didn’t even kiss each other goodbye. The day after their trip to Disney World, she drove him to the airport and saw him to the gate, where he boarded a plane back to Savannah, and when she started her car in the parking lot, she realized he’d set her radio to a religious station out of Tampa. She kept it there because it reminded her of D.J. Some of it made her laugh. One song in particular sounded like a call to cannibalism, because the only words were “Jesus is good, feast on Him.” But there was another song they played repeatedly, about a woman who went to bed “on the good side of the Lord,” died in her sleep, and woke up in heaven’s courtyard being serenaded by angels. The song was catchy enough to sink into Karen’s head, and she caught herself humming it sometimes.

D.J. flew back down to Orlando twice more (they went to Epcot Center and SeaWorld), then bought her a ticket to Savannah for a weekend. They took the historic tours and visited the tile company where he worked as a sales manager. She slept in his guest bedroom. He asked her politely, almost ceremoniously, if she would attend church with him, and when they arrived that Sunday there was a full-fledged revival under way, and people there already knew her name.

“Katherine,” an attractive, portly man said, smiling, his eyes glistening as if she were a family member whom he’d feared dead, “welcome.” She was smiled at and hugged more in that one afternoon than in all her previous days combined. A line formed in one of the aisles that pie-wedged the massive congregation, and D.J. squeezed her shoulders in the fold of his arm and said, “if you really want to do this, we’re here for you.” Her eyes followed the line up to the stage, where the pastor had removed his suit coat and was pivoting about in a white shirt turned the color of a peach from perspiration, shouting into a microphone he held so close to his mouth that the sound of his lips scraping the mesh dominated the speakers. A pair of suited church members steered the people in line onto the stage. Another pair presented them to the pastor, who shouted into their faces and mashed the heel of his free hand against their foreheads, causing them to fall backward into the arms of yet another pair of church members, one of whom held a second microphone to the mouths of the saved. As they collapsed, these everyday-looking women and men began to prattle like auctioneers.