THE GIRLS HAVING decided to come later with friends, I drove home alone in the old clunker of a Pontiac for which Drew foresaw a great future. It was a vintage model, he said, the ’74 Firebird, a real muscle car; fixed up they were fetching fifteen gee. Not fixed up, in the meantime, it had that sound old cars make in high gear on city streets, as if their underbellies were loosely wired on, liable to drop out on any dip in the road, not so much without shocks as without even the memory of springs.

It wasn’t far through the Lake Shore section of town from the Heart of Texas Fairgrounds to the parsonage: down Loch View to Lago Vista, then up Laguna Vista to Lake View, our street. Our neighborhood of family homes, primary schools, playgrounds and churches sat, as did Waco proper, between two rivers—to the east, the wide Brazos, which alternately watered and flooded the countryside, and to the west, the forking Bosque with its white chalky cliffs—on a faultline that ran from San Antonio to Dallas and attracted weather the way a magnet attracts iron filings.

The faultline dividing the city divided also the loamy farmlands to the east and the grassy prairies to the west, and, more recently, served as a line of demarcation between the past and its cotton and the future with its particle physics. (It was a sign of the times that the nearby community of China Spring, originally named for its stand of chinaberry trees, was now home to Chinese researchers who were building a science corridor connecting the supercomputers to the south of us with the supercollider to the north.)

On a more daily level, the faultline divided the rice belt from the potato belt. Waco was essentially a rice-eating town, what with the old Deep South boiled white rice, the Mexican rice-bean dishes, the Pacific Rim influx of brown rice, plus a touch of Cajun dirty rice. I had, for some reason, sided with the potato people, mostly Germans and Czechs, a minority in the church, and through the decade I’d been here in service to Grace Presbyterian, I’d developed a small repertoire of dishes: potato soup for the family on weekends, potato dumplings with company turkey, potato fritters and casserole potatoes for congregational meals. There was even Cile Tait’s Potato Bake in the new church cookbook.

Pulling the dragging Pontiac into the driveway, I reckoned how much I would miss the house, if not the marriage, despite the fact that it had always been, being a parsonage, only on loan to us. It was an authentic 1920s ranch house, in a city of a hundred thousand ranchstyles, and had (small tidy world of the faithful) once belonged to Drew’s mother’s parents. Across the front ran a large, spacious gallery room, divided into dining and sitting space. We had half a dozen cane-bottomed chairs and a cane-backed sofa whose cushion held the original horsehair. These could be arranged in a circle for company, or the chairs pulled up to the old trestle table for meals. Or, when needed, pushed out of the way to make a fine polished meeting room. The girls’ bedroom and bath opened off a long hallway as did a small former nursery with desk and phone which each of us used when in need of a bit of privacy. At the end of the hall was the room Eben and I shared, and our small bath fashioned from what had once been a second linen closet.

The only restriction on the house was that nothing could be hung on the walls; the plaster was not puncture-friendly. When we moved in, the one exception had been two heavy gilt-framed mirrors that had hung by guy wires set in the molding at the ceiling. I hadn’t been able to live with that—seeing myself going in all directions, serving plates and tea glasses, making guileless smiles, seeing Eben’s too attentive, too hopeful stance. I’d packed the mirrors away in the back of the remaining walk-in linen closet in the hall, and hung cow pictures instead. One, by a local artist, was a stand of black and white Holstein with soulful eyes and doglike ears, gazing out in front of a milking shed. The other was a nineteenth-century primitive (a gift from Drew’s mother) of a flat orangy Guernsey, broad-backed and small-headed, who possessed both a jutting horn and sagging udders.

It wasn’t only the parsonage I was thinking about missing, of course; it was my big, beautiful daughters. I tried to tell myself, I had to believe, that they were so grown-up now, so responsible, so independent, that they would have no trouble with their father and me living in different locations. That they’d quickly expand into the extended space, flourish, even, at the change.

I’d take it a step at a time. Let them get used to the idea of my leaving until school was out; then, when I really packed to go, they’d be free to help me, to come with me, to get me settled. To make a place for themselves that they felt was home at the old farmhouse. Choose a bed; argue about the bath. Get to know the land, the grassy blackland acres. We’d have long hot lazy months to make our gradual transition. They could come into town on the weekends to help Eben at the church, he’d expect that; come back to the farm on Mondays. Have the best of both worlds.

Then, by September, we’d have a surer footing, a comfortable routine to continue in reverse, for trying out our school-day separations. I’d be in and out of town; we could have a Dr. Pepper in the afternoons, catch up. I could run errands with them; teach them to drive my old beat-up Pontiac.

(Although what I was going to do about sharing them with Grace Presbyterian when I moved, I couldn’t think about now. They could not be asked to absent themselves from the heart of Eben’s life; my moving would be disruption enough.)

Right now, I ached at the prospect of not seeing their faces on a daily basis come fall, at the idea of not being able to reach up and brush a young cheek with my hand in passing, a mother sort of touch. But it would all work out fine, I told myself. They’d be fine. I had to believe that: they’d be fine, and I’d be fine, too.

Tying an apron on over my shorts, I put pared potatoes, sliced leeks, chicken fat and skim milk on the stove to simmer. Turning the burner on low, I took off my Reeboks and checked the clock. Plenty of time to move a bit. I put Willie Nelson on the record player that dated back to university days—time stood still in parsonages—letting him sing his gospel numbers: “Shall We Gather at the River,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder,” “Whispering Hope.”

Thinking of the potato, going through the reflex and comforting work of changing its raw starch into our meal, I considered that the church might retain my recipe but it would soon no longer have the taste of my potato bake. Because like most cooks, I’d left out the one ingredient which gave it that special flavor. I’d listed the potatoes, the leeks, the heavy cream, the black pepper, the hot oven, but had made no mention of the tablespoon of anchovy paste. Just as, in giving out freely my recipe for the German potato fritters—grated raw Idahos and raw onions, raw apple, egg, baking powder, nutmeg—I’d never mentioned that I cooked each batch of six in a stick of creamery butter. Old cookbooks were rife with similar omissions. The ancient granny did not reveal that her dark rich giblet gravy contained half a cup of strong black coffee; the bride, that her chocolate pie which tasted like Hershey’s kisses had two teaspoons of real vanilla.

This exclusion was an instance of the oldest fight between Eben and me. He found my secrecy grudging and withholding; I found his scrutiny invasive, intrusive. He accused: You hold back. I accused: You usurp. I suppose it stood to reason that the basic discord of a marriage should spill over even into such a minor matter as a recipe in a church cookbook.

As I added a tablespoon of Parmesan cheese to the bubbling soup, I wondered how he would handle the more serious secret of another man.