What was the right response? Some statement, maybe, about how things happen for the best—but would she sound lonely, saying that? Would it underscore the fact that it was he, David Hardy, sitting across from her now, instead of Dermot? She opened her mouth.

“Fate,” he said, sitting back. “I don’t question it. I accept it with open arms.” His steak was finished, reduced to a twist of gristle. Where his baked potato had been, there was an empty husk of foil. The lower half of his shirtfront, she noticed, was pushing out against his tie; he was like a puppy that balloons around its middle after it eats.

“Was she your high school sweetheart?”

“God, no. Those two were old maids before they reached fifteen. Sarah I met at U.Va., and she was the one, I thought, but there were problems. She didn’t want to have kids—can you imagine that? A woman who doesn’t want kids?”

She could imagine such a woman, but she would never admit it. She wanted only to say whatever would be right and true to his mind, even while part of her felt appalled by the deceitfulness of wanting such a thing.

He asked her if she was Catholic.

“I am,” she said. Her steak was half-eaten. She’d barely touched her potato.

He smacked his hand against the table. “I knew it. Why are you Catholic?”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you really believe it? The whole three-days-in-the-cave, roll-back-the-boulder business? Purgatory-as-heaven’s-waiting-room?”

She believed it all. True, she’d slipped some. She’d forgotten how to say a rosary. But she wanted to learn again, wanted to be a good Catholic and wanted her children to grow up belonging to the church. It was the only religion she’d ever known. Believing in its rewards all these years—since childhood—felt like an investment she would be a fool to pull out of now. It felt wrong to even think about not believing in the sacraments, in the teachings of Christ, as out of practice as she was. “I do,” she said.

David Hardy dug a St. Christopher medallion from beneath his shirt collar and wagged it at her. “Where do you go?”

“Well, I haven’t really gone since … I became single. You know how the church is.”

“About divorce? Just show up. Tell them your husband’s a Methodist. What are they going to do—come to your house?”

That she’d gotten a divorce was apparently part of the coffee urn gossip. She didn’t correct him. “The church is pretty strict. I do miss it, though.”