Chapter 1

We named her Hadassah. It's an odd name, we knew, but we were reading in the book of Esther when she was born, and we both loved that name, Esther's original name, the one her parents gave her, and so we named our daughter Hadassah Ruth Garvin – Ruth, for another favorite person in the Bible. We named her Hadassah, and she grew up like that name – limber and sweet and mysterious, with just the slightest lisp to her speech that gave her sibilants the sound of extra significance.

The name fit the day of her birth, too. It was early September, but a bright warm day, with a gentle breeze moving the branches of the trees as I escorted my wife to the car. Somewhere in the neighborhood a lawn mower was running, and I could smell the mingling of freshly cut grass and gasoline exhaust on the air.

We named her Hadassah, which proved to fit her very well, and we brought her up in church, and did our best to teach her the ways of the Lord. She studied the Scriptures in Sunday School, she was with us for the sermons from the first, and we regularly read to her from the Bible and explained to her what it meant. When she was seven she made a profession of faith, and when after a year we'd seen what we considered good evidence of a genuine conversion, we brought her to the elders of the church, who examined her gently and confirmed her readiness for baptism. And that year on July 20 she went down the steps into the baptistery, and emerged dripping wet and shining with joy.

That was a spring day, cool and bright and full of promise. I'd heard birds singing as we led Hadassah to the car that morning, and again as we walked from the car to the door of the church. She'd spotted a butterfly dancing above her head, and tried to follow it, though we kept her with us lest she get accidentally run over. Her dress had been yellow that day, with her black curls bouncing against the ruffled fabric, and I'd known that I would remember that day forever.

Through her years we never had cause to find her displeasing. She was, yes, angry at times and rebellious at times, as are all children, but never malicious, never deliberately hurtful, never cruel. She shied away from the worst aspects of hip-hop culture, never caring for tattoos, never wishing to listen to the harshness of "gangsta" rap, never accepting the notion that women are "hos" and worse.

And so it was a terrible shock when she came to us just three weeks after her 17^th birthday and told us she was pregnant.

She came in after school and went up to her room to do her homework. My wife was fixing supper in the kitchen, while I stood looking out at the back yard – specifically at my studio. I'd been writing all day, working on the preface for a commentary that was nearing the deadline, a preface that just wasn't coming together the way it needed to. Whether it was some of the areas where I disagreed with the commentary's author, or something not quite right with how I'd phrased my meaning I couldn't yet figure out, and it was driving me insane. I'd given up for the day when my wife buzzed me for supper – two long buzzes telling me it was time. I'd saved my work and shut down the computer and locked the studio for the day, and was now thinking of my daughter in her room studying.

In late September the grass and the leaves were still green, and though the mornings were chilly the days were as hot, it seemed, as though it were still summer. I still had the smell of study in my nostrils, the odors of leather and the computer's ozone, of ink from a cheap ballpoint pen and musty pages from books that I didn't open often.

The sky over the studio roof was clear blue, with just a few puffs of cotton clouds drifting slowly along. The weathered wood of the studio walls was a soft brown, and one day would be the silvery gray of unpainted wood left out in sun and rain for years. I'd deliberately left the boards unpainted; I might live in the city and make my living in a scholarly pursuit, but I didn't want to forget my rural upbringing.

My wife's name is Gill, short for Gillian, and I'm William, Bill to my wife and friends. We'd been married 20 years that day, our anniversary having passed a couple of months before. I heard her voice from the kitchen: "Bill, would you please call Hadassah?"

"Sure." I walked to the stairs, and climbed up to knock on Hadassah's door. "It's time to eat," I said, and waited for her response. When I heard her acknowledge the call I went back down the stairs and helped Gill put the last bit of supper on the table – she carried the basket of warm rolls while I hefted the bowl of green beans. I saw a bowl of spaghetti on the table, and another of sauce – from the sauce came the odor of parmesan cheese, which Gill included liberally in her recipe. The rolls too smelled delicious, just yeasty enough, and I could see very faint curls of steam rising from the basket. And then came the thumping of Hadassah's feet on the sitars...

Over supper we talked of Hadassah's studies – she was learning Latin, of all things in this day and age, but Calvin Academy was a private school and hadn't followed the downward trend of public education. Her current assignment was translating a portion of the Vulgate Bible, the Latin version that Jerome had prepared and which to this day serves as the basis for Catholic translations. She'd chosen a portion of the book of Romans, and discoursed – not too learnedly, much to my relief – on her progress.

"I don't suppose you could study an easier work, could you?" I asked. I'm competent in Greek and Hebrew, but Latin is beyond me.

"We could have, but we decided to try the Bible. Mr. Contreras gave us the choice and seemed happy when that's what it was. And now I think we're all too worried about hurting his feelings to change our minds." She smiled – though it did seem to me that it was less of a brilliant smile than usual.

"You're stuck with it then," Gill put in.

"Exactly, Mom. But I'll manage. People my age once learned Latin so well that they could speak it in conversation, and I'm not about to say I'm stupider than they were."