“Good,” I say, meaning it. Rainey’s soups are a meal in themselves. I follow my daughter through the living room and glance at Rainey’s numerous bookshelves, wondering if I will begin seeing religious works in this eclectic stew of a library. My girlfriend is a reader, and last summer was on a kick when she zipped through the novels of a woman named Jane Smiley and pronounced her the greatest living American novelist. Other seasons she gobbles serious nonfiction works like chocolate-chip cookies. Thick tomes on Freud, Arabs and Jews, and racial discrimination are regular additions to the McCorkle collection. How an intelligent, well-informed woman can regress to such a narrow view of life’s meaning is beyond me. Does a brush with death numb a person’s mind to such an extent that she can swallow a book whole and not taste the indigestible parts? It seems so transparently childish I am amazed that Rainey can’t see what she is doing.

I catch a whiff of curry as I enter the kitchen behind Sarah. Rainey, in Lee jeans and a man’s workshirt, is peering into her refrigerator, which is covered with notices of do-gooder happenings: tickets for a silent auction for the Battered Women’s Shelter, a note asking for volunteers to work in the food tent for an Arkansas Advocates for Children amp; Families benefit, a reminder of the next meeting of an AIDS care team. Rainey, a social worker at the Arkansas State Hospital, apparently can’t get enough of human suffering. Maybe this new religious venture is a natural step, but before she gets on the boat and heads for Calcutta to work with lepers fulltime, I’d like to make love to her just once. Charity begins at home, I have reminded her.