“As soon as your feet can reach the pedals.”
        Daniel merely nods at this, but Michael lets a thin smile stretch his lips as he rests his elbows on the checkered table cloth. He knows I mean it.
        On the other side of the screen door it's twilight, the sharp green silhouettes of Cook pines dissolving into gray air—the same blurred, ambiguous light that erased the day two evenings ago as your mother and I strolled you along the narrow sidewalk on Fraser Avenue, past Sacred Heart Catholic Church. You won't remember it, but Sacred Heart is the largest church on the island, a steepled, unimposing white wood-frame structure about twice the size of a plantation cottage. As we passed it, I realized that although none of us went to church, we'd all been baptized Catholics, except you.
        When we stopped so your mother could adjust the pink blanket covering your bare feet, an idea came to me.
        “You know, if you want, we could have Rachael christened right here at Sacred Heart. They have a priest, and lots of people on this island know us now.”
        Your mother understood without explanation why I had proposed this. Baptizing you here would bind us all to this place in a way your Hawaiian middle name cannot. Her brow furrowed, she took longer than usual to tuck the blanket around your toes. I waited.
        By the time you read these words, you will already know that your mother grew up in a large Catholic family, with religion a part of her daily life. You might not know that my parents, your Grandma and Grandpa Heller, were married in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Kansas City and later had me baptized there, even though they had already fallen away from the church. Surely you know all about the small bedroom community of Yukon, Oklahoma, where your mother and I both grew up, where many of your aunts and uncles and cousins still live. But you may not realize that until I was seventeen or so I was fair game for Yukon's Catholics, evangelicals, and fundamentalists. I tried each of them and rejected them all. Bullshit, I concluded with adolescent existential glee. The Big Lie.
        Years later, when I acceded to your mother's desire for a church wedding and agreed to raise you Catholic, I created my own lie, a ghost that would pursue me over the years, like the ghosts of this island pursued the young prince from Maui. I couldn't bear your attitude, your mother told me years later. It drove me away from the church.
        In the decade prior to our summer on Lana`i my attitude toward religion mellowed, partly because of a few devout but non-proselytizing friends whose lives had earned my respect, and partly because of writers like Flannery O'Connor who engaged religious issues seriously in their work. One undeniable truth about Lana`i: Almost everyone on this island, including the native Hawaiians, is Christian.
        At last Mary finished arranging your blanket, then stood erect and faced me. “I don't think so, Steve. We've never even been in that church.”
        Your mother has always been beautiful. Especially her eyes: large, round, and direct, yet somehow also expressing the appealing shyness that first drew me to her the summer after we graduated from Yukon High. As she stood before me two evenings ago, strong and certain in the ambiguous gray light in front of Sacred Heart Church, I couldn't help but think of another twilight, almost three decades earlier, in the driveway of a forgotten classmate's house, the reedy voice of Davey Jones of the Monkees singing about daydreams and prom queens from the pulsing depths of a crowded garage party. From the middle of the driveway I called to her, drawing her away from the safe huddle of her giggling girlfriends, coaxing her to turn and face me in the gray light, her eyes glowing back at me like twin memories of the vanished sun behind us, as I offered the following prayer: Tomorrow night, how about you and me . . .

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