Ralph

All of a sudden, walking around, I had a scary thought: What if the Pope already opened the third message? What if he already read it but didn’t tell anyone because of what it said, because it said we’re all going to get blown to smithereens. We didn’t pray for Russia like Mary told us to, so in two more years—meaning now—there’s going to be World War Three, that’s our punishment, the whole world going up in a mushroom cloud, and the Pope didn’t have the heart to tell us. He’s such a nice old man—you could see from the picture, his face, how nice—he just didn’t have the heart.

I explained all of this to Lou.

She was still working on her veil in front of the mirror, using bobby pins to make it stay. “Okay,” she said, “but what about the Jesus rock? Where does that fit in?”

I told her, “That’s the question.”

“And what’s your answer, Ralph?”

“I don’t know. Let me think about it.”

“Go ahead.”

I walked around some more.