HERE’S WHAT I THINK: people should not do irrevocable painful things on holidays. Because then the holidays are never just holidays anymore. From then on they’re also anniversaries of awful events. Like for Boone and me, Halloween is now the anniversary of when we first realized that Ray had turned away from us. And now, as long as I live, even when I’m grown up with kids of my own, even when I’m old, I won’t be able to think about Christmas the way I did once, when I was really young. For me, it will always be an anniversary.

We were all sitting in the living room, Boone and me on the blue plaid couch, the one about which Boone had said that he’d rather sit alone on a pumpkin, and Ray in the matching blue plaid easy chair. Outside it was snowing. What people called spitting snow. Just a few flakes every now and then falling down from a thick steel-colored sky. Everything was cold and gray. Nobody much was out except a couple of little kids down the street who were trying to make a snowman, but the snow didn’t stick together very well, so then they just started chasing each other around. Everybody else was inside staying close to their woodstoves. The birds at the bird feeder were just sitting there with their feathers all fluffed up, trying to keep warm.

“I want you to know that this is really hard for me,” Ray said.

Boone didn’t say anything. I felt cold all the way through to my bones.

Ray took a deep breath and turned toward me.

“I’ve already talked to your father about this, Octavia,” she said. “I’m giving up my law practice. I’ve already told them at the office, and they’ve been very understanding. I’ll be leaving as of the first of the year.”

Ray started twisting her hair, so I knew there was more.

Then she said, all in a rush, “And I’m moving over to Wolverton, where I’m going to share a house with a couple of friends. I signed the lease early last week.”

Boone looked shocked, like this was new to him too.

I felt like somebody had stabbed me in the stomach with an icicle.

“What friends?” I said. My voice sounded funny, like it was making words out of wires. “From the Redeemers?”

“Yes,” Ray said. “I’ve made a commitment to the Redeemers. I’ll be doing legal work for the church and helping with fund-raising campaigns. Eventually I’ll be teaching. I think it’s going to be a way of helping other people, and of helping myself at the same time.”

I thought about my beans.

I’d planted them and they were sitting in a row on my bedroom windowsill, so far looking pretty much alike. They all had tiny little curved sprouts that looked like somebody had buried a pale-green paper clip.

I’d expanded the experiment by giving Mr. and Mrs. Peacock and Andrew Wochak’s parents eight pots of beans too. Andrew’s father, who was a Buddhist, was meditating for four of their beans, and Andrew’s mother had tied red ribbons around the pots and was subjecting them to protective feng shui. Mrs. Peacock was offering Baptist prayers for four of their beans, but Mr. Peacock wasn’t, since he said he wasn’t about to hassle the Almighty over some tomfool vegetable.

What if I’m wrong? I thought. What if the prayed-for beans grow like maniacs and the not-prayed-for beans stay pitiful stunted twigs?

“You might have given us a chance to talk before just dropping it on me like this,” Boone said.

“I’ve tried,” Ray said. She had started to cry. Tears welled up behind her horn-rimmed glasses and rolled down her cheeks. “I’ve been trying to tell you for weeks. But you wouldn’t listen to me.”

“Ray, this is all a mistake,” Boone said. He didn’t sound angry, just sad. He talked soft and quiet, like people do when they’re talking to an animal that’s spooked and might take off running at any minute. “Why don’t you give it a little more time? Why don’t we go away for a weekend somewhere and talk? We can work this out. You know I love you.”

Ray shook her head.

“It’s different now, Simon,” she said.

I’d always thought that Ray was a crisp white name, like cool clean sheets on summer nights or those old-fashioned starched nurse’s caps with the curly brims. Now I thought maybe it was just cold, like ice and snow.

“What about Octavia?” Boone said.

Ray took off her glasses and mopped her eyes with her sleeve.

“I’ll only be fifteen miles away,” she said. “I want Octavia with me. As soon as I’m settled, we’ll work out a schedule so that she can come on weekends to stay.” She turned to me. “Then on Sundays I can take you to the Fellowship for your class.”

“I don’t want to go there anymore,” I said.

I didn’t add that they probably wouldn’t have me, seeing as I’d tried to kill Marjean.

“Well, we’ll see about that,” Ray said.

Boone’s face had gone stiff.

“You might have given me a little more notice, Rachel,” he said again. “All these decisions you’ve been making have an impact, you know. It’s not all about you.”

“I’m sorry,” Ray said. “I’m sorry it worked out this way. But I’ve thought about this a lot, and I know this is something I have to do.”

It wasn’t until later that it dawned on me what Ray had really said. With Ray working for the Redeemers and not her law office anymore, she wouldn’t be making much money. And without Ray making money, nobody would be paying for our house and groceries and clothes and Boone’s oil paints and all the other stuff we buy. So Boone wouldn’t be able to work on his masterpiece anymore. He’d have to come out of his shed and get a job.

It only took Ray a couple of days to move out, so it was pretty clear she’d been planning this for a while. She didn’t take much stuff with her to the Redeemers’ house. She already had a lot of things packed up to give away, first because it’s harder for a camel to go through a needle’s eye than for a rich person to get into heaven, and second because the Redeemers do not believe in stuff like summer dresses with skinny shoulder straps and music that doesn’t have Christian themes and DVDs that are rated anything over PG-13. She took some books and the rocking chair and a painting that Boone had made for her before they got married and the photo albums with all the pictures of me as a baby. It wasn’t that much, but even so it made the house feel empty. There was nothing left in her closet when I looked in it but some dust bunnies and a bent hanger on the floor.

Boone and I went and cut the Christmas tree by ourselves, but it wasn’t much fun without Ray, and Boone wasn’t even making any of his feeble jokes, which I actually missed. We hiked through the crunchy snow in our boots, all muffled up with our heads down, and every once in a while one of us would look up and point at a tree and say, “What about that one?” and the other one of us would say, “No, crooked,” or “No, too squatty.” Then finally I said, “What about that one?” and Boone said, “Yeah, okay.” It wasn’t what you’d call festive.

Jean-Claude Chevalier’s uncle Al gave us the tree for free, because he felt sorry for us, because as I said, this is a small town and everybody always knows everybody else’s business. By then there wasn’t a single kid at Winton Falls Elementary and Middle School K–8 who didn’t know that Rachel Boone had quit her job, left home, and moved to Wolverton to live with the Jesus freaks.

I knew Andrew felt bad for me, but how he showed it was to talk a lot more than usual in order to distract me. It did distract me some, but not all that much.

Boone and I decorated our tree alone. I made a paper chain with red and green shiny paper, but we didn’t string popcorn, because Ray was always best at that, and Boone had forgotten to get any cranberries. Then we hung the ornaments, but when we came to what used to be Ray’s special box, with the Santa and the angel and the little sled that said RAY, Boone just sat down all of a sudden in the blue plaid chair and put his face in his hands.

I’d never seen Boone cry.

I wondered what it was like for Ray over in Wolverton without any Christmas tree at all.

In Winton Falls, it was a terrible Christmas.