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in the broth with her fork. “Tell me how you got to the island?” she asked Phillip, who, to Georgie, always seemed to be sweating and had a knack for showing up when Joe had her best liquor out.
    â€œAfter Yale Divinity School—”
    â€œHe sailed up drunk in a dugout canoe. I threatened to kill him,” Joe interrupted. “Then I built him his own church,” she said proudly, pointing to a small stone temple perched on a cliff, justvisible through the brush. It had two rustic windows with pointed arches, almost Gothic, as if it belonged to another century.
    â€œHe sleeps in there,” Joe said.
    â€œI talk to God,” Phillip said, indignant, spectacles sliding down his nose. He slurped his wine.
    â€œIs that what you call it?” Joe said, rolling her eyes.
    â€œWhat do you have to say about all this?” Marlene asked Georgie.
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œGod.”
    â€œWhy would you ask me?” Georgie felt her face get hot.
    â€œWhy not?”
    Georgie remembered the way sitting in church made her feel pretty, her mother’s hand over hers. She could recall the smell of her mother, the same two dresses she wore to church, her thrifty beauty and dime-store lipstick and rough hands and slow speech and way of life that women like Joe and Marlene didn’t know. Despite Phillip, the church at Whale Cay still had holiness, she thought. Just last week Hannah had sung “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” after Phillip’s sermon, and it had brought tears to Georgie’s eyes, and taken her to a place beyond where she used to go in her hometown church, something past God as she understood Him, something attainable only when living away from everyone and everything she had ever known. Even if He wasn’t a certain thing, He could be a feeling, and maybe she’d felt Him here. That day she’d realized she was happier on Whale Cay than she’d ever been anywhere else. She’d been waiting all her life for something big to happen, and maybe Joe was it.
    â€œI suppose I don’t know anything about God,” she said. “Nothing I can put into words.”
    â€œYou aren’t old enough to know much yet, are you? Youhaven’t been pushed to your limits. And you, Joe?” Marlene asked. “What do you know?”
    Joe was quiet. She shook her head, coughed.
    â€œI guess I had what you’d call a crisis of faith,” she said. “When I drove an ambulance during the First War. I saw things there I didn’t know were possible. I saw—”
    Marlene cupped her hand over Joe’s. “Exactly,” she said. “Those of us who have witnessed the war firsthand—how can you feel another way? We’ve seen the godless landscape.”
    Firsthand, Georgie thought. What was firsthand about seeing a war from a posh hotel room with security detail, cooing to soldiers from a stage? Firsthand was her brother Hank, sixteen months dead, who’d been found malnourished and shot on the beach in Tarawa.
    â€œThat’s exactly when you need to let Him in,” Phillip said, glassy-eyed.
    â€œYou have a convenient type of righteousness,” Joe said.
    â€œPerhaps.”
    â€œI don’t see how a priest can lack commitment in these times,” Marlene said, scratching the back of her neck, eyes flashing.
    Phillip rose, flustered. “If you’ll excuse me, one of our native women is in labor,” he said, “and I must attend.” He turned to Joe. “Celia’s been going for hours now.”
    â€œHer body knows what to do,” Joe said, lighting a cigarette.
    Joe and Marlene smoked. Georgie poured herself another glass of wine, finding the silence excruciating. Nearby a peahen screamed from a roost in one of the small trees that flanked the balcony. The island had been a bird sanctuary before Joe bought it, and exotic birds still fished from the shore.
    â€œGrab a sweater,” Joe