Five days later—his begonia underwatered then oversoaked and already going crispy from its outside in—I boarded the train to military school.

2. NEW TESTAMENT

Return

… he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat, and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart, because they believed not … that he was risen.

Mark 16:14

When I was thirty, I returned to Falls. One of those class reunions you dread attending. You force yourself and, afterward, can’t believe you nearly missed it. Why? Because of stupid vanity over hair loss or your recent job performance, just hating to explain all that.

Since Mom shipped me off to that stern Anglican military academy. I couldn’t have named five people from my third-grade class. The Worst Possible Sunday had made of me a nomad like that pitiable jokester, the shirt-selling Clyde M. Delman, Sr.

Odd, in a gym still draped with twisted midnight-blue crepe paper, the very second that my former grammar-school chums stepped up to me, adults now—widened, sobered, overly painted, and sometimes genuinely improved—I somehow spoke their names aloud: “Jennifer,” “Walter,” “By God, if it’s not ole ‘Mutt.’”—Like some irregular Latin declension I’d memorized once if perfectly at age eight, these monikers hopped easily free of me. So did deep old fondnesses for them.

My shock at catching Mom under Doc Dix, the added penalty of losing Dad a week and one day later, all that had thrown a shadow Bible-black over each previous local joy. Our old school gym still vaguely smelled of pubescent sweatsocks and radiator-scorching. With its rafters echoing a young young band’s startling New Age arrangement of our old “Blue Moon” (itself a revival), I danced. I danced with several different, kind, remembered women.

I held, in turn, the class secretary, our girl math-genius (tragically still no further advanced than chief teller at Falls’s major bank). Such “nice girls” had become even decenter women. They admitted having always wanted to tell me how sorry they’d been. About what I’d endured and seen while in third grade. “Whatever you did see,” one half-whispered to my neck, still sexily begging for details already twenty-two years old.

Friends swore they’d heard about my recent progress way up north. They claimed to know how hard I’d worked at prep school once shipped away unfairly and in such a hush-hush hurry. “We did wonder, all those years ago, what really happened to you, Meadows. First Reading Circle was never the same after you left. You were always so … prepared. We all felt a little scared of you, you know? You kept so quiet but certainly smiled a lot. You seemed drowsy half the time. And we girls all wanted hair your color!”