There were 30,000 or so residents of Green Haven—none we knew intimately, yet they knew us, & saw the lie that would someday become a truth.

David was a New York liberal in Christian conservative Florida—an oddity. However, in the enclave of academia, he’d found his place.

I felt like Ariel—a fish out of water—who wanted to be a part of their world, but I’d have to take up the Cross, with y’all on my lips.

Caitlin was the Audrey & I was the Marilyn, at least from the neck down.

Maxwell Manor was David’s home, & our little hideaway from the world that seemed strange to us, with its extreme religiosity.

The Nolan women and “that Dalton man” were known as “those Godless Northern folks”, or carpetbaggers, even though we had lived here for years.

We weren’t born-again, buckle-of-the-Bible-belt Christians.  David & I believed in Something—we just weren’t sure what that Something was.

I was the Jacob, Caitlin, the Esau; it wouldn’t be birth order or genetics, but a lie that sealed my inheritance.

Violet Girard, the First Lady of Green Haven—a gracefully aging Liz Taylor—loved David, for he would paint her as she saw herself.

David didn’t see Christianity and the American way of life as superior to anything else.  I daresay now, it was because he’d never known anything else.