“I know it. I just need to get some clothes,” he said. He moved to go into the house but she stood in the middle of the open door.

“You really intend to do this? To leave?”

“I don’t see any other way around it.”

“But I don’t believe in divorce. I can’t do that.”

“Let me get my clothes, Lydia.”

“Asher,” she said. He could hear the hurt in her voice, could see it on her face.

“I want out of this,” he said. “All of it.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s over, Lydia. There’s no use pretending—”

Lydia shook her head as if she couldn’t wrap her mind around what he was saying. But she refused to cry. She steeled herself, her face becoming squarer with determination, then stepped aside so he could pass.

He threw some clothes into a duffel bag and filled a couple Walmart bags with shoes. He took a small framed photograph of Justin holding up the first fish he’d ever caught, the Robert Frost book where he kept the postcards hidden. He was surprised by the strange sense of freedom he felt as he gathered his things. She was still standing in the door when he came back with the bags, the book tucked under his arm.

“I’m going to take this little picture with me,” he said, holding it out.

“We can’t just throw our family away,” she said. He could see how afraid she was. He left her there on the porch, where she was still standing as he pulled away.

He drove on over to Zelda’s to tell her the news.

“I hate this. I do. But I can’t live with her, either,” Zelda said. “You know I love her better than anything. But she’s too hard on folks,” Zelda said. Asher suspected she had seen it coming even longer than he had. “I never was a good enough Christian for her liking.”

“Nobody ever was except her daddy,” Asher said, and they laughed a bit at that.

“That’s the truth,” Zelda said. “I’ll say this for her, she sticks to what she believes. But a person can believe something so hard they lose sight of everything else.”

“You know it’ll be a big scandal. A Pentecostal preacher getting a divorce,” he said, feeling loopy with relief. Perhaps this is what people meant when they said sometimes you had to laugh to keep from crying. “But after what I said Sunday they’ll run me off anyway.”