Gilead (Gilead #1)

by Marilynne Robinson

If Rebecca had lived, she’d be fifty-one, older than your mother is now by ten years. For a long time I used to think how it would be if she walked in that door, what I would not be ashamed, at least, to say in her hearing. Because I always imagined her coming back from a place where everything is known, and hearing my hopes and my speculations the way someone would who has seen the truth face-to-face and would know the full measure of my incomprehension. That was a sort of trick I played on myself, to keep from taking doctrines and controversies too much to heart. I read so many books in those days, and I was always disputing in my mind with one or another of them, but I think I usually knew better than to take too much of that sort of thing into the pulpit. I believe, though, that it was because I wrote those sermons as if Rebecca might sometime walk in the door that I was somewhat prepared when your mother walked in, younger than Rebecca would have been in fact, of course, but not very different from the way I saw her in my mind. It wasn’t so much her appearance as it was the way she seemed as if she didn’t belong there, and at the same time as if she were the only one of us all who really did belong there.