"Oh," Pepper said, disappointed, as if she hadn't noticed that Claire had been on the phone in the first place.

"But maybe," Claire said. She didn't want to hurt Pepper's feelings. Perhaps, if no one went to talk to her, she would lose her job. "Briefly."

"Fair enough!" Pepper exclaimed, and led the way to her office.

First they talked about Joshua. How he was never around. How he wouldn't come to see Teresa at the hospital. How whenever Claire saw him he was high on marijuana. Pepper said this was called disa.s.sociation, Joshua's version of coping. They sat on twin rocking chairs, wooden, with multicolored afghan blankets slung over the backs. Claire rocked steadily in her chair and then stopped.

"So what about you?" Claire asked shyly, when there seemed to be nothing more to talk about.

"Me?"

"Well ... I mean how long have you worked here?"

Pepper said that she was an ex-nun, married now to a man named Keith, a nurse, whom she'd met on an Indian reservation in New Mexico. She told Claire how Keith had become addicted to gambling after his first wife left him. "Everyone has their own way of grieving," she explained. "And that was Keith's way. Joshua has his way. You have your way. There is no right way. There is no wrong way. All ways lead to the mountaintop."

"What mountaintop?"

Pepper didn't answer. She leaned back and folded her hands on her lap and looked magnificently amazed, which is how, Claire had noticed, Pepper always looked. As if she held a giant ruby. As if cool rain were falling softly on her hot, grateful head.

Without warning, Claire began to cry. She simply inhaled and when she exhaled she was weeping-gulping and choking and bawling loudly. Embarra.s.sed, she reached for a tissue from the table between them and blew her nose and then took another one. To gather herself, she concentrated on the row of cornhusk dolls that stood along the edge of Pepper's desk and went up onto the sill of the window that looked out into the nurse's station.

Finally Pepper said, "G.o.d is with you, and G.o.d is with your brother. G.o.d is with your stepfather, and G.o.d is with your mother. He is standing right next to each one of you and holding your hands whether you know it or not."

"I don't think so," Claire squeaked. She was taking small puffing breaths, trying to get ahold of herself. "Maybe for you, but not for everyone."

Pepper stayed looking like she did. Happy and holy and amazed and gazing directly into the eyes of whoever was looking at her, which made it impossible for Claire to look back at Pepper for any length of time. She took the afghan from the back of her chair and wrapped it around her shoulders even though she wasn't cold.

"You don't choose G.o.d. G.o.d chooses you," Pepper said, and Claire began to cry again, but softly now, gushing silent tears. "You are chosen by G.o.d. You, Claire. I know in my heart that you are and that your mother is too."

"Well, I don't know it," Claire said sharply from behind the tissue she held pressed to her nose. "I mean, I don't feel his presence. I don't even feel whether it's actually a him. It could be a woman, you know. Did you ever think of that? Or it could not even be a person. And isn't G.o.d supposed to help you or protect you or something? I don't feel at all protected. And what use is G.o.d if you don't feel that?" She cried in a few small gasps and then collected herself again and blew her nose. "It all just seems so indirect. And I need more than that."

Pepper smiled kindly. "G.o.d is not a hotline," she said. "You don't get to just dial Him up. No. The problem is that you-oh, me as well, all of us, every last one of us-we expect happiness. G.o.d has a plan for each and every one of us and perhaps for you, perhaps right now for you, m.u.f.fin, happiness is not in the plan. We are at the mercy of the Divine. Every last one of us!" She sat looking sadly at Claire and then crossed her legs and smoothed the fabric of her pants on the tops of her thighs. "Now look at that," she said, "my shoe's come untied," and leaned forward to tie it.

Claire didn't say a word. Her tears fell thicker and came down her face in hot streams and dripped off of her chin while Pepper sat quietly watching and then she sprang up out of her chair and bent to hold Claire.

"Oh, angel. Oh, sweet child. I know it's hard. I know it is." She held the sides of Claire's face and then kissed her forehead and sat down on the floor and rubbed her ankles, then leaned back on her hands and told Claire about her life as a nun. Being called, knowing, knowing since she was ten that she wanted to be a nun, despite the disapproval of her parents. Her family owned a paper products manufacturing giant. They'd been the wealthiest family in Duluth for a century. Roads were named after them, ships, parks, and a museum that Claire had visited on a field trip in sixth grade. Pepper had given this all up and had been a nun for thirty-two years, from the ages of twenty-two until fifty-four. She lived in Chicago and then Green Bay. But most of the years she lived in El Salvador running a goat farm with three other American nuns and three Salvadoran nuns until one day a gang of men raided their house and kidnapped all of the nuns except for Pepper, who happened to be out back feeding the goats when the commotion started. She jumped into an oat bin and stayed there for two days, trying not to make a sound or think about water. Meanwhile, the other nuns had been taken away and gang-raped, tortured with a pair of scissors, several cigarettes, and an electric cattle prod, shot in the head, doused with gasoline, and set on fire.

Claire wiped her face with the balled-up tissue. She got the hiccups and listened hard. It was immensely helpful.

"So now you're friends with the Bible thumper," her mother said the next morning. And then, before Claire could answer, "To think it was me who raised you."

"Pepper isn't a Bible thumper. Anyway-who said we're friends? I talked to her once. I wouldn't call that friends."

"I'm not going to say a word about it," Teresa said. She tapped her feet together. "Far be it from me to tell you what to do. I always raised you to think for yourself. You want G.o.d, go take a walk in the woods. Read a book. Read Emily d.i.c.kinson! What are you reading these days? Don't tell me it's some religious blather."

"Mom."

Claire told Teresa about Pepper almost being murdered by a rightwing death squad, about the Navajo reservation, and about her new husband, Keith.

Teresa scratched her arm, softening. "It isn't that I am against faith," she said warily. "I'm against the thinking that says that humans are shameful and bad. I know all about that, thank you very much. Had it shoved down my throat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for eighteen years, but I kept you and Joshua from all that."

"Why'd you have us baptized then?"

Teresa turned to Claire, alarmed, like an eagle with its feathers ruffed up.

"I was weakened by childbirth, for your information. I was in a maternal daze. It was what you did with babies then, smarty-pants. Plus, in case all that mumbo-jumbo about going to h.e.l.l turns out to be true, you'll have me to thank later. I was safeguarding you against eternal d.a.m.nation."

"Well, you can't have it both ways, Mom."

"Fine. I'm a terrible mother. I did everything wrong. Forgive me."

"I'm not saying that. I'm saying that Pepper is not a Bible thumper."

"Apparently not," Teresa said grimly.

"What?"

"I said okay!"

Claire sat in the wide bay of the windowsill.

"What's it doing out there?" asked Teresa.

"Snowing."

They sat in silence for several minutes and then Claire said, "It's nothing, Mom. I just talked to Pepper. I'm not going to be a Jesus freak now."

"I know, honey." Her voice lilted from the morphine in a way that Claire had come to recognize. "I don't mean to argue. I understand you perfectly. You're just exactly like me. A seeker."

In slow increments, she turned her head toward Claire sitting in the window.

Once her mother had fallen asleep, Claire walked down the hallway, but differently now, self-consciously trolling, looking for Bill without allowing herself to believe that. She pa.s.sed his wife's room, keeping her gaze straight ahead and then after a while she heard her name being called.

"You want to grab some lunch?" Bill asked, coming toward her. His face was marked with creases on one side, as if he'd been lying down.

They walked to a place a couple of blocks from the hospital called the Lakesh.o.r.e Lounge. The bar was dark, windowless, lit with dim yellow light bulbs and Leinenkugel beer signs. They ordered vodka and grapefruit juice and sat down in a booth. The only other person in the place was the bartender, an old lady with painted-on eyebrows who sat on a stool and watched television.

Bill told Claire that he'd grown up in Fargo and had joined the Navy and spent most of two years on a ship in the Middle East. He'd married his high school sweetheart, a woman named Janet, before he went into the Navy and by the time he'd returned Janet had a tattoo of a fire-breathing dragon on her a.s.s and was running around with a man called Turner, who was the leader of a Manitoba motorcycle gang.

"Such is life," he said, sipping tentatively from his drink. It meant something to him that they had the same kind of drink. Initially, he'd asked for beer. "Let me ask you this. You got a tattoo?"

Claire shook her head. Bill rolled his sleeve up and showed her the inside of his forearm: a cougar, ready to pounce.

"Take my advice and don't. It's a bad idea, especially for women."

"I've thought about it. Maybe a chain of daisies."

"Anyhoo," he said. "After all that with Janet, I took my broken heart to Alaska to work in a salmon cannery. Now that's good money. But that's work. That's not like what pa.s.ses for work with some of these guys. These white shirt types. That's where I met Nancy. She worked at the cannery too-women do it too-but that's not where we got together. Where we got together is about five years later when I moved to Duluth to take a job-I schedule the ships that go in and out of the harbor-and I thought, Who the heck do you know in Duluth? And I had never forgotten about Nancy, you know. I met her and never forgot her and I knew she was from Duluth, so I looked in the phone book and thought, Why the heck not call her up? The rest, as they say, is history."

Bill asked Claire where she lived, who her family was, whether she liked the Minnesota winters or not, if she'd ever been to California. He wanted to know what her favorite movie was, if she believed that life existed on other planets, if she ever wanted to have children.

"We were planning on kids, but then boom-Nancy has cancer." He looked around the room. There was a row of video games across from them repeating a display of wrecking b.a.l.l.s and exploding rockets, automobile crashes and little hooded men wielding axes. "So are we going to have lunch or not?" he asked.

"I'm not hungry anymore."

"Me, neither," he said. "You want another drink?"

"I don't know," Claire said. She could feel the one drink running pleasantly through her. She had the sensation that everything was going to be okay, that her mother was not as sick as she seemed, and if she was, Claire could accept that fact with calm and reason. "I could go either way. I'll have one if you do."

"I don't need one," Bill said, and they sat in silence together.

A woman with a rash on her face came into the bar with a bucket of flowers and asked them if they would like to buy some and they said no, but then Bill called her back and bought a bouquet after all. Red carnations with a ta.s.sel of leaves and baby's breath. He set them beside him on the seat.

"It's nice to talk to you, Claire."

"Yeah."

"There aren't many people you can talk to. People in this situation, so to speak."

"No."

"n.o.body wants to hear it. Oh, sure, they want to know what they can do for you and so forth. That's nice. But no one really wants to hear about it."

"No," Claire said. She was sitting on her hands. She rocked forward every few moments to sip from her straw. "I know exactly what you mean about all that." People had carved messages and names into the table. Tammy Z. it said in front of her, c.u.n.t.

Bill coughed into his fist, then asked, "You got a boyfriend in Minneapolis?"

Claire told him about David, about what he was studying in graduate school-a mix of political science and philosophy, literature and history, but none of those things solely.

"I know the kind of thing you're talking about. The humanities," Bill said, coughing some more. "You go to bars much?"

"No. Not too much. Actually, I just turned twenty-one a few weeks ago."

"No kidding," he said, and fished an ice cube out of his gla.s.s and tossed it in his mouth. "You seem older. I'd've guessed twenty-five. You strike me as a sophisticated lady. You've got a way that's very grown-up."

He had a small, firm belly and a thick bush of graying hair on his head. Tufts of hair sprang from his eyebrows and nostrils and the backs of his hands. His ears were red and burly and sat like small wings. He reminded Claire, not unkindly, of a baby elephant, in a lordly, farcical way.

Claire crossed her legs under the table. She rattled her ice. "We should be getting back. My mom is probably waking up now."

"Well. It was nice to get away. Everyone's got a right to that from time to time." He raked his hands through his hair, as if he were waking from a nap.

Claire was acutely aware of his body across the table, of her own pressing luxuriously back against the ripped-up vinyl. "Where do you live?" she asked.

"Not far from here. About a mile."

He set his hands on the table and knocked on it with his knuckles. She reached out and set her hands lightly on top of his. He stayed still for a moment, then turned his hands over and laced his fingers into hers.

"Shall we?" he asked, after a while.

"Yes," she said. "We shall."

Bill's house was white, surrounded by a picket fence, and cloistered in a thicket of pines. It sat a few steps below the street, but above everything else-the buildings of downtown Duluth, the lake. Claire could see the roof of the hospital far off and she pointed it out to Bill. It was freezing. Claire was shaking but impervious to the cold.

"The snow is sparkling like diamonds," she said, idiotically.

"Diamonds?" Bill smiled at her curiously.

"I mean, the ice crystals. They're sparkling," she said, and blushed. "I like the word sparkle, don't you? It's one of my favorite words. Sometimes I'll just be attracted to a certain word for no reason at all, but that it sounds nice. Or it looks nice on the page."

"I can see what you mean," he said, guiding her onto the porch. "Sparkle has a ring."

They stepped into the house. Claire felt slightly dizzy, but alert, not at all like she'd had a drink and no lunch in the middle of the day. She took her coat off, and her gloves. She wanted to take everything else off as soon as possible so she'd stop being nervous. She wore jeans and a shirt that exposed a sliver of her lower abdomen, despite the cold, and boots that echoed loudly against the wooden floors as she followed Bill from room to room, on a tour.

"It's lovely," she kept saying, and it was. Every room was painted beautifully, a different color, but none of the colors clashed. She reached for the earring that she usually wore in her nose-often she twisted it when she was nervous-but it wasn't there. More and more, she'd been forgetting to put it in before leaving for the hospital. She held her little braid instead, pulling on one of the tiny bells as he showed her the cabinets that he'd built, the place where there had once been a wall that he and Nancy had knocked down to let more light into the dining room, the hardwood floors they'd sanded and refinished themselves.

In the bathroom, where Bill left her alone at last, there was a bowl of stiff rose petals on a narrow shelf and a photograph of Bill and Nancy-both of them completely bald-with their heads tilted toward one another. Claire washed her hands and face with a bar of green soap that smelled like aftershave and then went into the living room.

"You like Greg Brown?" Bill asked her, holding a record, blowing on it, putting it on the turntable.

"I love him," Claire said.

"This is some of his older stuff," he said, and the music began.

"You never see records anymore."

"I collect them." He opened a cabinet with several shelves of alb.u.ms. "I've got all kinds of music-anything you could want. Country, rock, cla.s.sical, bluegra.s.s, you name it."

"Me, too. I mean, that's what I like. All kinds." The skin of her face was tight from the soap. She sat down on a blue couch and instantly stood up again. "So ... come here," she said, smiling like a maniac.

He took her hair by the ends and pressed it to his nose and smelled it. He wound it around his fingers, pulling her toward him, and kissed her. His mouth was cool and shaking and strange, but nice, nicer to her than anything. She shoved her hands into the back pockets of his jeans and felt his a.s.s.

"I'm glad I met you," he said.

"Me too. Take this off," she said impishly, tugging at his shirt. He gathered her wrists in his hands and pulled her into the bedroom. The walls were the same color as the comforter on his bed. Amber, with an edge of smoke.

"Now," he said, unb.u.t.toning her shirt. They laughed awkwardly, pawed at each other. He bent to kiss her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, biting her nipples tenderly, and then harder. They teetered, finally onto his bed.

"Do you have a condom?" he asked her.

"No."

But they went ahead anyway. It seemed impossible that she would get pregnant, that anything at all could be transmitted or take root or live in them. She knew it. He knew it. This didn't make sense, but they were right.

Claire watched Bill's face while they f.u.c.ked. It was haggard and tense, as if he were concentrating on something either very far or very near, as if he were attempting to remove a splinter or thread a needle or telepathically shatter a gla.s.s in France. He saw her watching him and then his face became animated again, wide-eyed and carnivorous, until it crumpled as if he were about to sob in agony, and he came.

"That was nice," he said after a while, looking up at her, straddled over him. She rolled off of him and lay down beside him. A mobile of fat chefs dangled overhead, and farther, down near their feet, a birdcage without a bird. He turned onto his side and placed his hand delicately on her stomach. He found her birthmark and petted it and outlined it with his finger, as if he'd known her all of her life.

"Was that weird for you?" she asked.