I had that decided before I put the car in gear.

I want that written down because it is the one piece of thinking I did that day that was any good, and because it turned out to be unnecessary, and because if it had been necessary and I had not done the thinking, I would have ruined everything.

The third thing I thought was religion.

This sounds absurd now.

It did not that morning.

Corinne had, in the two years since her own life had come apart, drifted through several intense enthusiasms, and I had a picture in my head of some group with a storefront and a lot of certainty, and a grandmother bringing a child to it, and the secrecy being about my known and stated opinion of that kind of thing.