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Sister Mary Sebastian hadn't shown up on Thursday afternoon. Jean had given up waiting for her and gone back to bed; Stannie had disappeared completely. It was Ed who'd kept watch for the nun deep into the night, wanting to talk about a job at St. Francis—the Sister had found him this job here, after all, so why couldn't she just as easily arrange a job over there with the children? Maybe teaching auto shop or welding.

Ed sat out in the driveway in a folding chair for hours, listening to the birds and the frogs and the wind in the long grass. He fell asleep waiting, with his head on his chest, and dreamed that he saw Sister Mary wading through a swamp in the dark, pulling apart cattails and reeds and staring out with her man face, watching, waiting. Then he saw A.J. sailing away on a boat with a grey-haired woman who wore a long purple dress and a white cloth draped over her arm like Jesus in the picture books. The woman turned and gave the ugliest look: pointed her finger and said words he couldn't figure out. Ed knew who it was.

He had only glanced at Ernetta from the back, climbing into A.J.'s rental truck on the day she came with Tom McLeesh. He'd seen a short, bent-over woman in her sixties, or thereabouts, with thick arms and a curly head of grey hair. For a second, he'd stopped right dead in his tracks; he'd squinted his eyes against the glare of the sun and the world had squeezed itself up like old cars flattened in a junkyard: green palms, blue sky, and white sand squashed into black lines that raced along in zigzags when he turned his head. Then the truck door slammed and the world exploded up to size again. He looked from house to car, from car to house, and finally turned around and walked out of the bright air, back inside and down the stairs to the basement. In a damp corner he crouched over his tools at his work bench, breathing loud, his stomach swollen over his belt like a giant ball about to burst open.

Ed had wondered about that woman in the car, sure enough, and what exactly A.J. was up to, but his mind was caught up in other things, too—the fellow on the steps who'd mocked his scars; the communist brothers down on the beach and that homosexual sitting there with his bleached hair; the lazy boy crying in the dockhouse and the drunk woman upstairs and the whore on the balcony steps who thought she was doing him a favor by fetching his hat (there was people you didn't want to scare, but there was also people you did). Whores and hypocrites everywhere you looked. Over all these lazy evil people, Ed thought, he was a like a rock of righteousness, waiting for the day when God would push him rolling down the hill. Like in the book of Daniel, a rolling rock of destruction.

Except he had to be careful because of A.J., to take it slow. Ed could tell in his writing that it was almost time: A.J. saw through people and he saw through Hollywood. He knew it was whores and perverts trampling down America, lying to everybody. And he hated the whores for it, you could hear the hate spilling out of his words even when he tried to be funny. Just like Ed, A.J. looked at himself and at other people without the softness that lied to you about what was right and what was wrong. He was hard as a soldier of God should be.

The only difference between them was that A.J. had been raised by these hypocrites here and he hadn't heard the truth from nobody—hadn't even been taken to church to hear it, nor heard it from his aunt who was supposed to tell him, nor anyone. A.J. saw the hypocrites and whores and the demons and stood against them, but he didn't know yet that there was angels in the world, too, looking after the innocent. A.J. needed to have his eyes opened. Sitting out late on that Thursday night, waiting for the nun to come back so he could talk to her about a job with children, Ed realized that he wasn't waiting for Sister Mary at all: he was actually waiting to talk to A.J. For the first time ever, he'd really talk to the boy.

Yet A.J. never came home that night, and by early morning Ed had a crick in his neck from sleeping slumped over in his chair. He went back in the house and took a little more fitful rest, dreaming again about a woman crouching in the grass, watching him with cat eyes. By Friday noon, with the boy's room still empty, and knowing that the boy was due to leave for Washington just the next day, Ed decided that the time just hadn't come yet. The time was coming soon, but God had clearly shown that he must wait. So Ed went back to the basement again and to his tools, and he squatted in his dark corner with his stomach hanging over his belt, working hard. You could hear him breathing all over the cellar, and even upstairs, if you listened hard enough. Linda Kate thought she heard him breathing and she felt sorry for him: she was busy tracing her route on a map of the Western United States.