The Abstinence Teacher. Tom Perrotta

she said. “You're the guitar player.”

      “Bass,” he corrected her, momentarily distracted by Pastor Dennis, who was having no more luck with the bag than Carrie had. He was tugging at it with both hands, grimacing fiercely, like a man trying to rip a phone book in two.

      “Gosh darn it,” he muttered.

      “That's really thick plastic,” Carrie warned.

      With one final heroic grunt, the Pastor tore the bag asunder, unleashing a mighty cascade of utensils all over the table, including a few knives that landed in a bowl of bean dip. Tim and Carrie tried to help him with the mess, but he shooed them away.

      “I'm okay,” he insisted. “You two go and get acquainted. I bet you have a lot in common.”

      THEY SAT in the shade, drinking lukewarm soda, watching the kids tie themselves together in preparation for a three-legged race. The Tabernacle was a relatively new church at that point—it had only been planted for two years, after Pastor Dennis and a handful of disaffected families had split off from the Living Waters Fellowship in Gifford Township, which he accused of being “a namby-pamby, touchy-feely bunch of mealymouthed hypocrites who loved their cable TV better than they loved Jesus Christ”— so there were only about a dozen contestants in the race, ranging in age from five or six to twelve or thirteen.

      On the whole, Tim couldn't help thinking, they were an unprepossessing bunch, the boys scrawny and somber, the girls overdressed for such a hot day, visibly uncomfortable, nothing at all like the confident little jockettes Abby played soccer with. They stood at slouchy attention, nodding earnestly as Youth Pastor Eddie explained that sin was like a third leg, a foreign growth that hobbled us on our walk through life. If we could just cut ourselves loose from it, we'd run like the wind, with our Savior at our side.

      It was an interesting metaphor, and it didn't seem to spoil anyone's enjoyment. When the first heat began, the little kids leapt forward, managing a few herky-jerky steps before squealing in alarm and toppling onto the grass with their partners. After a few seconds of hilarity, they untangled themselves, got up, and started over, dragging that extra limb around as best they could.

      “You've had such an interesting life,” Carrie told him. “I haven't done hardly anything.”

      As far as he could tell, she wasn't exaggerating. She was a twenty-four-year-old woman, raised in a strict evangelical home, who hadn't gone to college or even lived on her own. She rarely dated, had no close friends outside of church, and spent her days running the office of a Christian insurance agent who was a friend of the family The way she described it, the only act of defiance she'd ever committed was to follow Pastor Dennis to the Tabernacle, against the wishes of her parents, who'd stayed behind at Living Waters. It made sense that she'd be intrigued by Tim's checkered past, especially the rock bands he'd played in when he was her age.