“It’s hard to say,” she began, before correcting her uncertainty. “I’m happy with the students. I think we have a good group.”

“Because the mix of students, that’s what will make the school,” Frances began.

“I agree completely. In graduate school—”

“They are pioneers, these students,” Frances said, and then she began her own monologue: how she and Eric and Mark and Marianne were all pioneers too, in this important and generous work they were doing. They would make a space for Christian writers to be taken seriously, to learn and grow and thrive. Anyone could open the kind of writing school that had been opened a thousand times already—what they were doing was new. It could become a model. It would be remembered. Did Marianne know what it was like to be taken not-seriously?

A rhetorical question, apparently, because when Marianne tried to answer Frances kept going. Of course she knew! The school was her idea, after all—the idea of someone who could be mistaken as crazy but was in fact a visionary. She did not answer when Marianne tried to confirm, or reiterate, or otherwise get on the record that the school was Frances’s idea, but kept on going, until suddenly she ran out of words and said she had to go.

A visionary, she’d called her.

Hanging up, Marianne had the unsettled feeling of having just ordered something she wasn’t sure of—a meal from a foreign menu, a large piece of furniture, an expensive trip.

She walked outside into sunshine that felt like it would go on forever. Blue sky reflected on smooth clear water, a tidy pea-gravel path that led from the pool to the guest lodging to the classrooms.

A truck had pulled up with a load of folding chairs—where did she want them? the exhausted-looking driver was asking. He’d already opened the back door, and she could see the cheap but matching chairs—white plastic seats, white metal legs—waiting on the truck bed. She pulled herself onto the truck—she’d learned to do counts and quality control inspections before accepting any order.

“Let’s take them inside,” she said, grabbing four. How small they all were! How light! There were sixty chairs, more than enough for the students and faculty, but it never hurt to have too many chairs, did it? In her Brooklyn apartment she’d only had one. “I’ll show you.”

She carried the first set to the doorway of the library, leaned them against the wall while she fished in her pocket for the keys.

“This a new wedding spot?” the driver asked, waiting with his own armload.