“You’re not talking to me,” she said, bringing the broom back in a wide arc so she could send all the debris scattering from the top step and out onto the yard. She turned to face him and tucked the broom handle against her shoulder. He could see the young woman he had married so clearly: that clean-scrubbed face of youth, mesmerized in the second pew while he preached a fiery sermon.

“How could you give up everything for two strangers?” she said now. “You know what those men do is wrong.”

“Those men are no different than my own brother.”

“But they’re not Luke.”

“It’s the same difference, Lydia. You turned them away because of who they are.”

She sat in one of the rockers and looked out at the river, the muscle in her jaw tensing. “I don’t know how to get through to you.”

He looked down at his hands.

“I should’ve offered for them to stay,” she said, with hesitation. “But I didn’t know how to do that. I didn’t know how to say to them, ‘Y’all can stay here as long as you don’t sleep together.’ I couldn’t have that, around Justin. So it was easier to just not invite them.”

“The world’s not the same as it was when we were growing up, Lydia.”

“So I should accept just any old way?” She scoffed, a sound in the back of her throat. “I should agree with the world because it’s changed?”

“There’s no use denying to Justin that different kinds of people exist. He’ll live in this world with them. He’ll know them. And those kids at school might be backward now but that whole generation—they think about this differently than we were taught to.”

“That don’t make it right.” Her lovely brown eyes could become hard so quickly. “And my job is to let him know what’s right and what’s wrong.”

“It’s more important to show him how to be good to people than how to judge them.”

She arose as if she was going to go inside, but she reconsidered and eased back down into the rocker again.

After a time she spoke. “When I was a real little girl my daddy told me that the world would try to change me. And to not let that happen. I don’t want to judge them. I want to love the sinner and hate the sin. But that don’t mean I’m going to let it come into my own home.”

Asher stepped off the porch—

“Where are you going?” she called after him, agitated now. “You used to believe this way, too.”