Keeping Faith: A Novel by Jodi Picoult

both of these subjects, is telling the truth.
I know this because the child kneeling in the chapel, and feeling … something indescribable … was me.
And because thirty years later, in my own office with another child as a subject, I have felt it again.”
Allen McManus tears his eyes away from Dr. Keller, slips out the back of the auditorium, and places a call to his editor.
At the departure gate Colin watches Jessica check their tickets for the hundredth time. She looks like any other business traveler, with her tailored suit and laptop case–she looks like Colin himself. To see her,
no one would know that at the end of this ten-day sales conference in Las Vegas, she plans to get married in a drive-through church and gamble her way through a weeklong honeymoon.
“Are you excited?” she purrs, leaning into him.
“Because I am.”
“I, uh, need to hit the bathroom.” Colin gives her a smile and walks off, ostensibly toward the men’s room. He does not know how he feels about getting married in Las Vegas.
Performed by a hack justice of the peace, with an Elvis impersonator serenading them and bargain bouquets available for five dollars a pop, it will be considerably different from his wedding to Mariah.
It had been Jessica’s idea. They were headed to Vegas anyway for the conference. “Besides”–
she had laughed, rubbing her abdomen–“imagine the stories we can tell him.”
He wonders now if his marriage to Mariah might have lasted, had he married her at the Light of the Moon chapel in Vegas instead of at St.
Thomas’s in Virginia, with more pomp and circumstance than a royal wedding. If he’d been willing to do–what was it called? the hora!–
or break a glass beneath his foot, if he hadn’t just assumed that his way was the right way, maybe their differences wouldn’t have been so pronounced. As it is, Colin blames himself for what happened to his ex-wife. He asked her to bend to his wishes so much that she actually broke.
Instead of entering the men’s room, Colin sits down in a narrow phone cubicle and calls his former home. “Mariah,” he says when she answers.
There is a moment’s pause. “Colin.” Even though he tries not to, he can hear the thread of delight wrapped around her voice. It makes him uncomfortable; it always has. Who in his right mind wants to be someone else’s savior?
Colin presses his forehead against the metal wall of the booth and tries to find the words for what he must say. “How’s Faith’s back?” he asks instead.
“Much better. She’s wearing shirts now.”
“Good.”
In the silence that follows, Colin suddenly remembers how uncomfortable Mariah once was with spaces in conversation. She’d rush into sentences,
chatter about nothing, rather than sit through the delay.
Yet here she is, closemouthed, as if she is trying to hold in a secret just as much as he is.
“You’re okay?” she finally asks.
“Yeah. Headed to Las Vegas for a conference.”
“Oh,” she says softly, flatly, and he knows what she means with that one word: How is it your life has gone on? “I guess you’re calling for Faith, then.”
“Is that … would it be okay?”
“You’re her father, Colin. Of course it’s okay.”
There is a shuffle of static, and before Colin can say anything else to Mariah, Faith is on the line. “Hi, Daddy.”
“Hey, cupcake.” He wraps the metal snake of the phone line around his arm. “I wanted to tell you I’m going away for a few weeks.”
“You always go away.”
It strikes Colin that she is right. With the amount of travel he does for his job, his memories of Faith–and presumably hers of him–almost always involve good-byes or reunions. “But I always miss you.”
“I miss you, too.” Faith sniffs and hands the phone back to Mariah.
“Sorry,” she says. “She’s a little unpredictable these days.”
“Well. It’s understandable.”
“Sure.”
“She’s just a kid.”
“I know. I’m sure she appreciates that you called.”
Colin