the poor relation who’s been taken in, but she continued to hope that escape was at hand.
The letter arrived on a Saturday morning. Sorting through the mail, Nicole said, “This one is for you.” In Nicole’s commonplace kitchen, the letter looked as out of place as Waterford crystal would have on the Formica table. The pale blue envelope bordered by diagonal stripes, with the words Par Avion printed below the Swiss stamps, larger and more artistic than American stamps, and the postmark that said Genève instead of Geneva, exhaled a foreign glamour, and so did the return address, the street number coming after the name, beneath the words, “WorldWide Christian Union—International Headquarters.”
“I’m saved,” she murmured when she finished reading.
“Since when did they start notifying you by mail that you’re saved?”
“Not that kind of saved,” Quinette said, and gave the letter to her sister to read. She hadn’t told Nicole, or anyone, about Ken’s offer.
“Omigod, Quinny, you don’t mean you’re going to take it, do you?”
That voice, its pleading whine marbled with the snappiness of a scold, was so like their mother’s. At twenty-eight, Nicole was beginning to look as well as sound like Ardele. Flab was robbing her chin of definition, her hips and bosom were growing ponderous. The first thing that had struck Quinette when she came back from Africa was how fat people in her hometown were. Women with upper arms like kneaded dough, men with gourdlike bellies hiding their belts—that rural midwestern lumpiness resulting from a tradition of heavy eating passed on by grandparents and great-grandparents who’d hauled water from draw-wells and chopped firewood and plowed with mules and horses. Not that everyone had put on twenty pounds in the time Quinette had been away. They hadn’t changed; she had, noticing their thick, coarse bodies because of the contrast they made with the slender Dinka. Over there all was subtraction, over here addition, and lots of it.
“You bet I am,” she said to Nicole.
“They want you to sign a two-year contract. You might, you know, give it ten seconds of thought?”
“Don’t need to. Ever since I got back all I’ve thought about is going back.”
“To Africa? And for not a whole lot more than you’re making now?”
“Twenty-five there is like a hundred here, and it’s not for the money anyway.”
And then her older sister teared up and embraced her in her squishy arms.
“Oh, Quinny! It’s so far. And two years! It scares me. Like if you go, you’ll never come back to us.”
Quinette said nothing. The prospect of never coming back wasn’t disagreeable.
There were sobs from her mother as well, and then an attitude of sullen disappointment. Her troublesome, unpredictable middle daughter was letting her down again. One cockeyed thing after another. Why, even when she mended her ways, she didn’t return to the solid Lutheranism she’d been raised in, but to some evangelical sect of hand-clapping holy rollers. Why couldn’t Quinette get married to a decent guy with a decent job and start giving her grandchildren, like Nicole? Kristen phoned from Minneapolis to tell her that she was making a dumb move. What kind of future could there possibly be in working in some African shithole for a bunch of starry-eyed do-gooders? Just the argument she expected from Kristen, the pick of the litter in the brains department, winner of a scholarship to Iowa State and now in her first year of graduate business school at the University of Minnesota. Even Pastor Tom questioned if she was ready for the hardships, the commitment.
As it happened, Quinette discovered that breaking away wasn’t as easy as she thought. She’d typed her acceptance and was going to fax it to Ken, but she carried it around for two days. Small-town midwestern caution, that don’t-stick-your-neck-out-someone-might-cut-your-head-off conservatism, was a gravitational force that bound people to the land of flat horizons generation after generation. It made them afraid of breaking away, and the insidious thing was the way it pulled you from the inside as well as from the outside. Quinette could feel that fear tugging at her guts. Her father and some other family farmers, she reflected, had taken a risk when the Farm Bureau advised them to “get big or get out.” Disaster was what Dad got when prices fell in the eighties and he couldn’t keep up his payments, and the only blessing was the cancer that spared him from seeing the farm, in the Hardin family for four generations, go on the block.