More Than Enough by John Fulton Page B

can’t get to know someone you can’t have a conversation with, can you?”
    She seemed to expect an answer from me, so I gave her one. “Not really.”
    â€œHe just muttered all the time. A lot of the elderly at Oak Groves are like that. The other nurses tell me I’m going to get used to that. But I’m not used to it, and I don’t want to get used to it. He couldn’t hear you, either. When you’d say his name, you had to yell it right in his face as if you were calling to someone across a parking lot. It felt cruel. Even then he hardly knew to look at you. You can’t get to know someone like that, can you?”
    â€œI guess not,” I said.
    She didn’t say anything for a moment. “I don’t mean to be telling you all of this. But I haven’t been able to talk to anybody yet.” She looked at her watch. “It only happened a few hours ago. Afterwards, I took the others to lunch as if it were just any other day and none of it affected me at all. But it did. It really did. I don’t think I can do this anymore.”
    We drove through the intersection of 100 South and 200 East, exactly one block south and two blocks east of the Temple, I knew, because the grid system in Salt Lake was built around Temple Square. Every address told you where you were in relation to that silly-looking holy site. The City of Zion really was built around God. At a red light on Main Street, we stopped in front of the high stucco walls of Temple Square, behind which rose the Disney-like spires of the Temple itself with the golden statue of the Angel Moroni blowing a trumpet atop the highest central spire. Pedestrians hurried in and out of the Temple Square gates, huddled beneath umbrellas and newspapers and squinting into the wet air.
    â€œWhen God returns,” Jenny said, “the Angel Moroni will come to life and really blow his trumpet. That could happen at any time. It could happen now. That’s when everybody will come back to life.” She was peering out the window at the angel and trying to distract us so that she wouldn’t have to hear about Mr. Warner anymore. I saw her plan and I didn’t want to hear any more about the old man, either, but I didn’t much like what Jenny was saying. I didn’t like having to picture, as I did then, everyone digging free of their graves and walking around in the afternoon sun, trailing black earth behind them, as golden Moroni blasted at his trumpet.
    â€œWho told you that?” I asked, knowing what the answer would be.
    â€œJanet Spencer,” she said. Janet Spencer was Mormon, as all the popular girls at Billmore were. She just happened to live up the street from us and wore the sort of trendy clothes that Jenny had to have ever since they had become friends. After school, Jenny spent hours over at Janet’s place, where she had been learning not only what sort of clothes she should be wearing, but also what she should believe. On the last two Sundays, the Spencers had picked up Jenny in their Mercedes station wagon and driven her down the hill to their ward, where she prayed and read from the Bible and did whatever else Mormons do for the better part of the day. When our father questioned her, she said she didn’t really believe in God or Mormonism. “I look forward to it. I’m meeting people, and I like it,” she said. But on those two Sundays she had come back happy, humming and singing songs I’d never heard. And the fact that Janet Spencer had been brainwashing my sister with Mormon renditions of the end of the world worried me. Despite her denials, Jenny tended to believe things. She wanted to believe things. She should have been spending her time after school and on Sundays learning geometry and not hokey stories about Kingdom Come.
    â€œDon’t believe everything Janet Spencer says,” I said.
    â€œI don’t believe everything ,” she said. All the same,