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Show 346 her husband sitting ghastly pale at her side, dark half-moons under both eyes. He had resolved to stand by her and help her fight her way back into the church. She thought the whole ceremony was pretty heavy and she didn't at all like having her body talked about at a conference table in front of a tape recorder. She cried through most of it. Lorin did not see her again. Three days after his own excommunication he was driven to the airport by the district president and two strong elders, neither of them Sorenson, who had been reassigned a new junior companion and was back on the streets tracting again, still a little shaky. Left to himself, Lorin was quite sure he would have fled to Canada or joined the army or sneaked onto a Greyhound bus going any direction but home. But the district president and Elders Boynton and Fitzpatrick stayed close to him, carrying his suitcases and garment bags for him, all the way from the multitiered parking lot, to the ticket desk, up the escalators and down the long concourse to the gate, stood with him while he was issued his boarding pass, waited with him in the queue behind the sliding glass door until it opened. They shook hands with him and he was swept away down the long accordion-pleated funnel into the plane, where the girl in the bright green dress with yellow piping took his boarding pass and scowled at him. Later he watched the vineyard of his labors collapse below him into squares, patches, wrinkles, and finally wisps of thready wet gauze. * * * * * * His mother and father met him at the airport in Salt Lake. Both had haggard faces. His mother threw her arms around him and wept into his ear. His father's hand shook when he reached to take Lorin's attache case to help him carry i t . His mother had to s i t down while he and his father |