Solomon's Grave by Daniel G. Keohane

that many in town thought he was a bit daft because of it.
    Maybe he was. A man doesn’t isolate himself from the rest of the world, guarding something of such significance, and not get a little nutty. One night, a few years ago, he rented a popular movie called A Beautiful Mind . The concept of a man so lost in his own hallucinations—supported by the fact that this was a true story—had terrified him. Was this what he’d been doing all his life? Was there nothing in Solomon’s grave but a long dead body of a real man?
    That moment had been especially difficult. Until he’d fallen to his knees and asked God for some kind of clarity in his mind, praying until he could barely keep himself awake. He felt a little better after that.
    Then, as now, he understood the answer that God put into his heart. Since coming to Hillcrest decades before, hiding even from other people of faith, he’d not attended church services. He’d not sat among those who also believed with all their hearts and souls. The Sunday after watching the film, he drove aimlessly among the neighboring towns. He passed a small, non-denominational church tucked among the trees in the town of Boylston, when something settled on his heart. He turned the car around and pulled into the parking lot, joining the small crowd filing into the rows of seats. Many realized he was a newcomer and greeted him warmly. Vincent was skittish, as he always was whenever someone offered him too much attention. In the past, he’d never known whether they were being friendly or if he’d been discovered, if the smiling old woman offering her hand was ready to cut his throat for the relic buried under his adopted hometown.
    That first morning he had sat in the back of the church. By the time the service was over, he had felt the Spirit renewed within him, suddenly proud of his calling beyond words. He wasn’t crazy. Yes, his situation was like none other save that of his predecessors, but if he was nuts for following God so blindly, then so were all these fine people. None of them seemed daft to him . Though he continued to avoid the churches in his own town—he doubted anyone in Hillcrest even knew he was a Christian—since that first Sunday, he never missed a service in Boylston. This morning had been no exception; another inspiring service, another chance to remind himself that, though he worked and lived by himself, he was never alone.
    Lonely , yes, sometimes achingly so, but never alone.
    Prior to his arrival as caretaker, Vincent Tarretti had not been so lonely. As a child, he’d been dragged to church, sat listening to the ranting preacher talk about redemption. Mostly he concentrated on the raven-haired Melissa Alvaraz sitting with her family in the front pew.
    During his junior year of high school, Vincent, who at the time insisted on “either Vinnie or Mister Tarretti, there ain’t nothing in between,” learned to his delight that Melissa spent those same Sundays thinking about him. They were soon inseparable. The relationship was purely platonic at first, a mutual evangelical upbringing having at least some effect on their behavior. But after two years, they could no longer restrain their feelings for each other and broke away both from their celibacy and the church.
    They left home, sneaking away in the night, and found a tiny, roach-infested apartment thirty miles north, just outside of Hollywood. While she looked for a modeling job, Vinnie worked the grill of a diner two blocks from the Strip. He would have taken any job, as long as it paid the rent. They married. Not in the church, but in a small chapel in Las Vegas following a grueling day-long drive. A Justice of the Peace performed the ceremony. Melissa’s modeling career ended before it ever began, when she learned they were going to have a baby.
    Vinnie took a second job. They found a place slightly bigger and with smaller cockroaches. Even now, Vincent wondered what his son would have been like had he