“And that is as far as anybody can take you, and if you need more than that you are going to be looking for the rest of your life.”

I have never looked any further.

I want to say that I decided not to out of faith.

It is not true.

I looked at two other state indexes over the following spring, because I am who I am, and then I stopped, and the reason I stopped is that I could not construct a version in which it mattered.

If Walter Strand was married to somebody in 1979, then a woman somewhere had him and lost him or left him, and he spent the next forty-five years not mentioning it.