to church since the shootings, but the next morning she meant to meet Nora for a Bible study with her Naomi Circle at a house across town. Going to something as simple as a Bible study was a good way to make the church a part of her life again with the sheriff’s funeral tomorrow. When she married Logan, she had made promises.
Clara put on a pair of maternity shorts with a big stretchable waistband, an outfit she completed with a spaghetti-strap blouse and sandals. With her protruding stomach and pale stork-thin legs, she knew she cut an ungainly figure, but the unnatural heat wouldn’t let up, even in these first days of October. By late morning the asphalt blistered. Under the sun’s glaring eye lawns baked yellow, parched trees let down the last of their leaves, and a film of dust settled like ashes over the streets and houses. Wind-still, even the air had a seared odor, a faint sulfur reek from dying bullheads on the shores of the narrowing river, and as the townspeople went about their daily errands they sought shelter from the heat in what scant shade buildings and trees had to offer.
The walk gave her time to think about the readings, which included every passage about heaven or hell mentioned in Old Testament and New. It had surprised her how little the Bible had to say about what happens after we die. When she asked Logan, he had only shrugged. “The Bible is the record of a living God seeking out relationships with a living people.”
“I don’t know. I thought the whole point was getting to heaven. If that’s the end of the road, the Bible doesn’t describe it very well.”
Logan had scratched at his beard. “What if it did? What if heaven was described right down to the last cubit? A known place, mapped and explored to the furthest reaches.”
“You and your mysteries,” she said, wrinkling her nose, sensing where he was headed. “That’s your answer for everything.”
“God gave us an imagination. It may be one of the most beautiful functions of our brain. He left the space open for us to fill.”
Clara wasn’t sure what she would say about the afterlife. Her father would grow angry when she tried to talking about it with him. People die, he had told her, and that’s all there is. No world but this one we can see and touch. No hell but the one we make in our own brains.
But what about Mama; isn’t she in heaven?
No. She’s just gone. All you got is me. All we got is each other.
But I want her to be in heaven. I want to see her one day.
And he would get angry, the vein pulsing in his brow. No such thing. No world but this one here. Tapping his chest, hard, like a hollow drum, then taking up her damaged hand. This is what she did to you, your mother. That’s all you need to know.
But—
Enough!
Rosa’s home proved to be a low-slung ranch house, the walkway lined with weedy, wavering daisies. Clara was twenty minutes late, drenched with sweat, and praying that Rosa, the host of the Bible study, had air-conditioning inside her house.
Rosa didn’t. The woman was a widow in a ruffled navy dress that looked hand sewn, pads puffing up the shoulders, and she ushered her into the foyer. She was staring at Clara’s bare legs, the sandals on her feet.
All the women were staring at her legs once she went into the dining room where Nora waited along with few others, sitting around a lace-covered table and sipping iced tea from tall glasses. As a group they blended into one at first when Rosa introduced them. Hilda. Doreen. Helen. Gretel. They all wore polyester pantsuits in soft autumn shades, except for Rosa. Clara was the youngest one there by at least three decades.
Clara wiped the sweat of her palms on her shorts and shook hands with each of them. Was she supposed to shake hands or was that considered unladylike? The women had light bird bones under their porous skin, a brittle fragility, and she shook hands gingerly until she got to Gretel. Gretel’s iron-gray hair was done up in a tight bun, and she had a grip like a meatpacker. She looked in Clara’s eyes and said what some of the others must have been thinking, “You wore shorts out in public.”
“Of course she did,” cut in Nora. “It’s ninety degrees outside.” She tried to