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Show Moon - 95 wanted her to see a stateside doctor, she refused, and he seemed content enough to let her be. She'd written her mother about her return to the church, the brief hope kindling that this would release love between them. Ruth sent her clippings from the Monitor pressed into flowered cards, but always there was a hurried note, no real communication. Her sister Alice telephoned Anne nearly every week and said if she'd only give her life to Jesus she'd be a whole person. Anne figured she'd already given her life to Jesus without having to be formal about it, and she was already a whole person, whatever that meant anyway. She invited Joy to come to church with her, remembering how she'd splashed into the waters of faith like a thirsty fawn when they'd lived in Hempstead, but Joy seemed to have lost that early fervor. She was preoccupied with boys and with her after-school art class. Joy's first attempt at oils sat on an easel. Anne could see that her daughter had added new color before the first layer had dried, so there was a certain muddy cast that spoiled it. Joy wasn't a person who liked to wait. Taped to the walls of her room were strange blurred-together landscapes, nude studies, and trees so entwined, so sensual, if Anne were intolerant like Ruth, she'd tear them down. She thought of this with a sudden hollowness of great loss, and then a rush of memories and stabs of pleasure she thought she'd long forgotten. Josh finds God in every piece of wood he works with. He doesn't say, "God," but that's what I hear when he says, "Look how this strip of oak grows in my hands, |