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If the devil was alive and well in the world, and I had every reason to believe he was, then the most likely place for him
was the women’s bathroom at the Gospel Lighthouse, which you could only get to by leaving the building and going clear around
the side of the church where the Sunday-school classrooms met and where the preacher’s voice, as you sat trying to pee, sounded
like a yellow jacket smacking into stained glass. The bathroom floor was laid out in a pattern of cracked gray tile that sloped
toward a dram hole the size of a baby’s head. Somewhere under there, who knew how far down, the devil slept fitfully. I tiptoed
around that hole in my patent-leather shoes to the stall where the door creak sounded human, then to the sink to wash my hands.
I’d have skipped that last step in a hot minute if it weren’t for Granny, who always asked to sniff our palms after to see
if she could smell soap.

One Sunday when we were still living with Granny, the preacher was hollering, doing his usual mad–string puppet routine, and
Penny started hollering back. Within seconds, Teresa was crying too, and then I started in, all of us louder than the choir
that had been humming “Shall We Gather at the River?” as background. Granny fastened us with a look that said she was about
to drag us out by our ears and give us something to cry about, but then the preacher broke in with a “Praise the Lord!”

“Jesus is here,” he said, throwing both arms up and out as if to catch something bigger than himself. “Here in this cursed
room. It’s His little finger that’s reached out to touch these children, and with that touch they have been saved from a life
of eternal damnation.”

Granny started crying then, and people all around her in the pews reached out to pat her on the shoulder, saying how blessed
our lives were going to be now that salvation was in the bag. The sermon was called short because of the miracle, and we had
a party. Each of us got two frosted cupcakes, which we ate sitting on the church steps. Granny beamed and beamed, and it was
easy to believe her face: we were Saved. This was the big time, the big top, Jesus’ best hat trick. Our souls would be preserved,
put up like peaches in a Mason jar, stowed safe until we needed them, until happy was an actual thing, as sound and solid
as Granny’s two hands on her Bible, as King James doing Jesus in red, as the cupcake that dropped frosting in my lap — something
sweet for later.

B
UB
L
INDBERGH WAS RAISED
Protestant, Hilde was raised Catholic, but both converted to Mormonism soon after they were married. A team of missionaries
had come to their door wearing sharp navy suits and name tags, and Bub, always eager to learn more about anything at all,
had asked them in. The missionaries came every day for a week, giving their testimonies, and at the end of that time, Bub
and Hilde were convinced of some things — that Joseph Smith had been visited by an angel in the form of a great white salamander,
for one, and that he had somehow learned overnight to translate Hebrew, a shocking display of intelligence that was a sure
sign of divine intervention. They agreed to be baptized again and married again too, in snowy white garments (think: underwear)
in the Oakland Temple. By the time we came along, Bub was a deacon in the church, and Hilde ran the nursery on Sundays. They
tithed 10 percent of their income; fasted sunup to sundown on the appropriate days; drank the prescribed Pero, an uncoffee
that tasted like wheat germ; and filled their garage with barrels of flour and honey and lard for the scourge preceding the
Second Coming. Every Monday night was Family Home Evening, a time set aside for family fellowship, meaning we played Twister
or Spoon Golf after dinner instead of watching TV.

Hilde worked hard at being a good Mormon, though her faith was sprinkled with and confused by superstitions from her childhood
in postwar Germany. She believed in signs and portents, that the dead speak to the living through dreams and that the devil
knows us, each to each, all the way down to the sock lint between our toes.

“He will come to your window one night,” Hilde promised once. She had come into the bathroom while I was brushing my teeth
before bed, and moved around me as she talked, straightening the bath towel, closing the lid of the wicker hamper, rubbing
water spots from the faucet with a wad of toilet paper. Her toffee-colored hair was frizzled from a recent perm and sprung
out over her ears, looking as nervous as her hands. “He’ll come to ask you a question, and you’d better know the answer.”

“Why me?”

“Not just you. He comes to everyone at some point. You can’t escape. No one can.”

“Don’t be a fence-sitter,” Granny’s preacher used to say, talking about the great war in heaven and about the angels who wouldn’t
choose between Satan and Jesus because they wanted to see who would win first. Those rooting for Jesus got to stay angels,
those on Satan’s side were damned to hell for all eternity, and those on the fence were sent to Earth, removed from God, to
learn the wrongness of their ways. Here I was, the descendant of a fence-sitter, and here was the devil, no longer simply
in the mouth of the preacher or somewhere way down under the drain hole in the women’s bathroom at the Gospel Lighthouse,
but on his way to my window. He had a plan. He knew my name. Thinking about this made my elbows sweat and my tongue feel like
a tomato. It took real effort to ask Hilde, “What’s the question?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“What’s the answer?”

“You’ll just have to figure it out for yourself,” she huffed.

“What? Did you think you were extra bratwurst?”

To think you were extra bratwurst was to believe you were above it all, too big for your britches, a princess who wouldn’t
abide the pea. It must have been a German phrase. Hilde was a full-blooded German. She was born in Germany and lived there
until Bub brought her back in 1957 as his GI bride. Everything was so new to her — she had never been in the States before
— and he felt bad about leaving her home alone all day when he went off to work. So he started bringing her by his mother’s
in the morning and picking her up on his way home. They got along right away, Noreen and Hilde, cut from the same cloth, as
they say, a phrase that more than suited them because they made all their own clothes on Noreen’s rickety Singer using the
same Butterick patterns: tent blouses with V necks and square patch pockets, polyester pants with sewn-in seams down the front.

Hilde said that what she liked best about America those first years was white bread. It was soft and sweet, like cake, not
at all like German bread, which was brown and dense and bricklike. Hilde believed most American food was empty and fatty.
She’d hold up a hunk of Velveeta cheese in its rectangular box and say, “This isn’t cheese. It tastes like butter; it tastes
like nothing.” Real cheese, to Hilde, was Limburger, which Bub made her wrap in ten layers of Saran because he said it smelled
like shit. It did too, as if it had been buried under a legion of cows and the cows under a pyramid of their own dung. I couldn’t
believe she ate it, or the knuckle-colored, spongy meats and pickled fishes that came in small hourglass-shaped jars. After
the jars were empty, she washed them out and put them up on the windowsill above the sink. Some were filled with toothpicks
or bobby pins or crusty pennies, but most floated avocado seeds in various stages of germination, white roots like hair swimming
in slimy brown water, wormy shoots rising to poke the screen.

When Hilde wasn’t dieting, the fridge fairly oozed with gross German food; when she was, there wasn’t much but the prepackaged
dinners from Weight Watchers that looked like they wouldn’t satisfy a hamster. She always stuck to the diet at first, doing
exercises in the kitchen, lifting cans of cling peaches over her head, grabbing onto a chair back to do leg lifts. Then, invariably,
she’d fall off, forgetting to go to meetings or weigh-ins. It looked hard, losing weight, but my sisters and I had the opposite
problem. Bub decided we’d been starved in our last foster home, and he started a weight-gaining contest to right this wrong.
Whoever could gain ten pounds the fastest would get a new pair of pants. I don’t think any of us considered that gaining ten
pounds would probably mean we’d need a
bunch
of new clothes; we just started chowing in the spirit of competition. The morning the contest began, I ate a whole package
of link sausages and four hard-boiled eggs. Penny took a big forkful of butter and swallowed it without chewing. We didn’t
even get sick, just kept eating: hero sandwiches as big as footballs, whole pizzas, ice-cream floats in the huge plastic cups
they give you Coke in at 7-Eleven. The whole time, Bub looked on and smiled as if, when we were eating like that, he could
nearly see us as his daughters.

J
OSEPH
L
INDBERGH
HAD BEEN
called Bub ever since his little sister, Gloria, was learning to talk and couldn’t say
brother.
“Bubber,” she’d call out. “Bub.” He looked like a Bub too, barrel-shaped on top with a round face and short neck cooked red-brown
from long hot days digging ditches and fitting PVC pipe as a field foreman for Pacific Gas and Electric (PG & E). He earned
twenty dollars an hour and never went to college. “Who needs a diploma?” he’d say. “I get to be outside all day, and if I
get tired, I remind myself that in just three more minutes, I’ll have earned another dollar.”

Bub’s people hailed from Oklahoma. They were religious when it suited them, gossipy as magpies and disapproving of various
other relatives in a rigid and baffling system that resembled, to me, long division. The men wore overalls and chewed toothpicks
into mush. The older women called each other “Aunt Sis,” and anyone under thirty “missy” or “sister.” “The kids” could mean
anyone’s children or grandchildren, but “you kids” was always a warning, hissed out with hands on hips: “Messin’ and gommin’,
that’s all you kids ever do” or “If you kids let any more heat in this house, I’m gonna lock your pretty little butts outside.”

My sisters and I met Bub’s mother, Noreen, very soon after we arrived at the Lindberghs’, when she hosted a barbecue in our
honor. She greeted us at her screen door in pink pants, a daisy-print cotton smock and house slippers. She wore wire-rimmed
glasses and smelled of permanent solution.

“Well, now,” Noreen said, looking us over, “have you been starving these girls, Bubby?”

“Hell no,” he said, laughing. “They came that way.”

“We’ll fix that. Come on in, and don’t bring any flies with you.”

She ushered us past a dark front room and right back out again through a sliding glass door into the backyard, where other
relatives huddled, the men around a grill smoking with meat, the women around a saggy wooden picnic table. Bub’s sister, Gloria,
came right over and introduced herself, shaking our hands as if we were grown-ups. She was tiny and muscular, her sandy hair
cut in a Mrs. Partridge shag. Next to Bub and Hilde, she looked Lilliputian, as did her six-year-old daughter, Krista, who
was cute in every way I thought a girl should be. Her eyes were jewel blue, her nose was a button and her shiny blond hair
framed her heart-shaped face, flipping up at her shoulders. She wore a sassy tank top with shorts and flip-flops, all the
color of Orange Crush. Next we met Vicky, Gloria’s older daughter, who shuffled up in ground-dragging boys’ jeans and a flannel
shirt with the sleeves down and buttoned, even though it was eighty-some degrees. She must have been fourteen or fifteen,
and she looked as if she found the whole family thing quite intolerable. After meeting us, she slunk away into Noreen’s back
bedroom and spent the rest of the afternoon listening to
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
with the lights off.

For supper, the women had prepared peppery hamburgers with buns slathered in mayonnaise, toasted, then put into a paper grocery
sack so they wouldn’t dry out; there was corn bread baked thin and crispy as a cookie, seared mustard greens and a goulash
simmering on the stove, smelling up the house with okra and onion and green tomato. Everyone ate outside — adults at the picnic
table, kids hunkered down on the patio, our bare feet on the pricker-studded lawn. Every so often, Big Lenora or Uncle Jack
would peer over at my sisters and me as if we were chimps in a zoo, as if it was fascinating, instructive even, to watch us
eat potato chips and scratch our bug bites. At one point, Noreen’s hunchbacked sister, Birdie, leaned over and hissed, to
anyone at the table who was listening, “Imagine, Bub and Hilde taking those girls in just like they was their own.”