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Chapter 1
 
Every year on the Friday night before Halloween, we put on a ward Trunk or Treat in the gym for the whole neighborhood, Mormon and not. It was organized by the Primary Presidency, but the bishopric always manned the activity booths in costume. This year, Kurt and I were dressed up as Frankenstein’s monster and the Bride of Frankenstein, costumes we constantly had to explain to children who were more accustomed to comic-book heroes and Disney characters. We also enforced a rule that the children only received candy if they could compose a limerick, which we demonstrated first.
     The first counselor and his wife, Tom and Verity deRyke, wrapped in long strips of cloth as mummies, were running a variation on musical chairs, and I could tell they were enjoying it. The Primary children loved Verity and Tom, the honorary grandparents in the ward to families whose eldest generation had passed away or weren’t able to be with them.
     The second counselor, Brad Ferris, was sporting vampire fangs, black capes, and drips of blood down the sides of his chin, and had set up a booth where kids could make a witch or a ghost out of candy pieces. Brad had become second counselor just over a year ago. At the time, his wife, Gwen, had been emotionally fragile, struggling terribly with her infertility diagnosis and the tragic history behind it. I’d hoped that she had come out of her shell lately. She’d been exercising and had put muscle on her petite frame, but the fact that she wasn’t here and hadn’t been to church in a couple of months made me worry that something had gone wrong. Was it that there were too many children around, reminding her that she and Brad couldn’t have a “forever family?”
     Then I saw her, with three small children and a generously figured Hispanic woman trailing after them. The children were adorable, the youngest apparently having just learned to walk. The oldest, a girl, was dressed as Wonder Woman, the younger boy as Captain America, and the baby in Gwen’s arms as a peapod. Gwen seemed comfortable with them, leaning over to whisper to them something about what to do next, then laughing with their mother. It surprised and pleased me.
      “And what are your names?” I asked when they came over to us.
     The oldest girl informed me that she was Lucia, her brother was Manuel, and their baby sister, with the biggest, darkest eyes I’d ever seen, was Amanda.
     I helped them through inventing a limerick about superheroes, and then passed out the candy. I hesitated when it came to giving anything to the baby, but Gwen picked out a pack of Sixlets and opened it to pop one into her open mouth.
     She nodded to the mother of the children. “This is Gabriela Suarez,” she explained. “From the Spanish ward I’ve been attending.”
     So that was why she hadn’t been at our meetings. I wondered how I hadn’t realized.
      “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish,” I said.
      “I learned in high school and took classes in college, but I’m not fluent. That’s why I’ve been going.” She turned to Gabriela and then introduced me to her. “Hermana Linda,” she said, dispensing with my last name.
      “Nice to meet you,” I said, smiling.
      “I hope you don’t mind us coming to your party. Gwen said that we would be welcome,” Gabriela said in slightly accented English.
      “Of course not. I should have thought to invite the full Spanish ward.” It had only recently been organized in our stake. I hadn’t been aware we’d had so many Spanish speakers before now, and it hadn’t occurred to me that they’d have children who wanted to celebrate this very commercial American holiday. I felt terrible about that now.
      “It’s pretty new,” Gwen said. “We can think about doing some joint activities in the coming year. We’re still trying to figure out how this works.” This made me feel a little better, but not much.
     She moved onto the next station, once again introducing Gabriela and the children. I could see that Gwen and Gabriela were close. Gabriela kept reminding the older two to say “Thank you” to everyone who gave them a prize, and she tried to keep Gwen from giving the baby too much candy. When Gwen put little Amanda down and she began running across the slick hardwood floor, Gabriela chased after her and caught her before she fell.
     I stole a glance or two at Brad, who was looking on at the children’s antics rather stiffly. I wished I knew what was going on behind the scenes in his and Gwen’s home.
     Unfortunately, I was probably not the best person to come to for marriage advice. Kurt and I had just gotten over an intense months-long argument about the Mormon Church’s new policy of excommunicating married same-sex couples. Even now, we didn’t talk as much as we used to.
     I knew Brad to be a steady, compassionate man, but children were so important to completing a Mormon family that some men might have considered divorce so that they could have biological children who were “born in the covenant.” Others might have demanded adoption. But so far, Brad had accepted the fact that children had not come their way. And Gwen had clearly found other ways to fill her own need to nurture, though she and Brad had kept her infertility a secret from everyone in the ward but me and Kurt.
     I went to the bathroom and found Gabriela there alone, talking on the phone. I couldn’t understand much of the Spanish, but I heard her mention “obispo hope,” which was a strange combination of Spanish and English. She seemed agitated, and she kept glancing up. After a moment, she saw me and rushed out.
     I didn’t follow her, as I assumed she’d gone outside for privacy, despite the cold. I wished I could’ve comforted her somehow, but I didn’t want to pry by asking what was wrong. I looked up the word “obispo” on my phone and found out it meant “bishop.” Curious, I then checked the list of bishops in our stake and saw that the one for the Spanish ward was “Bishop Hope.” I wondered if she’d been speaking to him directly, or simply about him?
     The eleventh ward in the Draper stake, only a few months old, was created to attract the Hispanic members who were streaming into the area for work, since it was a more familiar space both linguistically and culturally. There were similar wards and smaller branches throughout Utah and most of the Southwestern United States, usually under the authority of a Hispanic member or someone who spoke fluently, often a former missionary who had become a bishop or branch president. There were also other language-specific wards, depending on the needs of the population, whether Tongan, Korean, Portuguese, or even Swahili. It had been the same in the early days of the church, when swathes of immigrants from northern Europe had necessitated Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, and Swedish wards.
     I went back to the booth with Kurt, smiling at children as the bishop’s wife and trying not to look for Gabriela and her children. I noticed that she was with them again when, an hour into the activity, Shannon Carpenter, the newly called Primary President, announced that it was time for donuts and cider.
     These were my responsibility, so I hurried to the kitchen to oversee the seventy-odd children, aged three to eleven, lining up to pass through the door to the outside. Each received one glazed Krispy Kreme donut and one cup of freshly pressed apple cider from Farnsworth Farms to take outside.
     I smiled at the Suarez children when they came through and said, “Buenos días,” which was the extent of my Spanish. Gwen laughed at me and then whispered to the children to say “Gracias.” As for Gabriela, her eyes were shadowed, and she still seemed unsettled.
     Once the donuts were distributed, Kurt came to help me clean up. Then we headed out to say goodbye. It was still light out since we were on Daylight Savings, so children could walk home, but parents usually preferred to pick up their smaller children for safety reasons. I could see Gwen helping to bundle up the three Suarez children and waving goodbye to them as they drove away in a tannish twenty-year-old Honda.
     I watched Shannon Carpenter’s husband, Glenn, usher their three sprites—three, five, and seven years old—into the back seat of his SUV. Then I headed back to the multipurpose room and I found Gwen and Shannon in the midst of a loud argument that Kurt and the other male bishopric members were attempting to ignore.
     Not quite five feet tall, Shannon was even smaller than Gwen. She sometimes seemed like one of the Primary children, not the President. I didn’t know where she shopped, but her tight-fitting knit dresses and tunics accentuated her petite frame. I was always impressed with her ability to manage a room of children, given her sweet disposition and the fact that any three senior Primary children could run her down if they put their heads together.
      “I’m concerned about our children,” Shannon was saying, her voice a high squeak. “They need to feel safe at church activities. I don’t feel it’s appropriate for you to invite random strangers to participate without getting any clearance from those in charge of the activities.”
      “Random strangers? Gabriela and her children are members of our church. They’re in our stake. Why would I need to get approval for them to attend an activity?” Gwen asked, her face red.
     As Shannon Carpenter considered an answer, I noticed Tom and Verity deRyke stepping out quietly, heading toward the parking lot with a couple of boxes.
      “We should always remember the line of authority that God Himself has put in place for the good of all concerned. I have special charge over the children of this ward, and that means that I will be accountable before God for all that happens to them,” Shannon said.
     Gwen’s face reddened. “If I’d brought some neighborhood kids who weren’t Mormons, you’d have been fine with that as a missionary effort. But since they’re Hispanic, it’s all about protecting the children of this ward. Do you realize you’re being racist?”
     Kurt made a cautious humming sound next to me, but he didn’t intervene.
     Shannon looked past Gwen instead of directly at her when she said, “I don’t appreciate you throwing words like that around when there might be children to overhear them.”
     As if the word had been a curse, instead of an everyday part of the English language.
     Gwen glanced around the room, now clearly empty of children. “Well, maybe if you’re so concerned about the children of our ward, you might consider teaching them to look beyond their own comfortable lives and see those in need. You could have done reverse trick-or-treating at one of the apartment buildings where most of the Spanish ward members live. Show our children how to act when we have so much and those who live next door to us don’t. To aspire to be more like in the Book of Mormon, when everyone lived in complete equality instead of being rich or poor.”
     Shannon gave a dismissive wave of her hand, a gesture with no casualness to it. “We do plenty of other service projects. This activity was for fun. I think our overstressed children deserve that much one day a year.”
     I cringed at her condescending tone, and Kurt put a steadying arm on Brad’s shoulder as he stared at the two women.
      “Overstressed?” Gwen balked. “These are the most privileged kids on the planet. They have everything handed to them!”
      “They need to know they matter to God, to learn to listen to the Spirit and become leaders. And they need to have good memories of church activities in their childhood, or we’re going to lose them in those difficult teen years,” Shannon said with an undertone of urgency. “More than a third of the millennial generation are leaving the church, and that’s even among the most active families.”
     Frankly, I was surprised she knew these dismal statistics. Most Mormons didn’t know about the Pew research group’s statistics on millennials and decline in church activity. They thought it could happen to other religions, but not to “the one true church.”
      “So we’re going to teach them to keep taking and taking? Because we’re afraid they’ll start looking for another organization that will give them more than we do? That will bolster their overweening egos even more?” Gwen said. Her hands were clenched, and her voice was hard and angry.
     Kurt cleared his throat and was about to say something, but Shannon got there first. “You may think they’re privileged, but there are so many moral dangers out there that they can’t see because they’re too young. That’s why we have to keep them sheltered from the world. But you wouldn’t understand that, because you don’t have any children.”
     That was the second time Shannon had hit that particular button. It was too much for Gwen. She let out a sob of embarrassment and frustration and ran out.