Karen went with it. She felt like a spectacle, and then like a failure, for as that sweaty hand swung like a door into her face, she knew nothing was going to pour out of her, and when it hit her forehead and she fell, nothing did. So she faked it. But when she faked it, she felt … something. Halfway through her babbling, some other force took over, and by the time they were holding her shoulders a foot off the floor, speaking encouragement into her ears and extending her mike time as if she were a jazz musician running with a solo, her tongue was writhing and her lips were spasming and her jaw was jumping around in what amounted to the closest sensation she’d had to an orgasm in years. In his home that night, D.J. got teary-eyed describing what it was like to witness the event. Then he kissed her, told her he loved her, and, to her great surprise and relief, began to help her out of her clothes.

In the morning he proposed.

It was only after she’d accepted, and after they’d prayed together to ask God’s forgiveness for jumping the gun, that he eagerly inquired about her family. She no longer ranked herself above any of them, as she’d done when she was a teenager; in fact, her opinion of herself was far lower than her assessment of anyone else in her family—except maybe her stepfather. Still, she didn’t have it in her to conjure them up for D.J. and then watch the scaffold of his handsome face begin to collapse one joint at a time as she filled his head with this roster of “sinners” from which she’d sprung. She considered inventing entirely new people, but the logistics of maintaining such a charade seemed overwhelming to her, and doomed to failure.

Her parents, she told him, were dead. Her father when she was a teenager; her mother two years ago, from cancer. She had no siblings.

“Sweet babe,” he said, tearing up. “Sweet babe.” He put his arms around her.

He didn’t want her touching herself. He embraced the idea of oral sex if he was the recipient but not the other way around (in fact, he wouldn’t touch her vagina with anything but his penis), and he pulled the plug on the whole production if she tried to talk dirty. But he loved her—fiercely, sincerely. She would maintain the household, but a job, he told her, was out of the question. There was the home-based education of their future children to consider, and for that, she should save her energy. Meanwhile, he wanted to help her make peace with the loss of her family. God saw straight into this great void in her life, D.J. said, and He intended to fill it.