Is there a heaven? No. There are, instead, many heavens, each of them populated exclusively by people from your state or province or canton or . . . well, Lawrence Welk doesn’t know all the names for state in the many places of the world. All he knows was that he was born in North Dakota in 1903, and when he died in 1992 and went to heaven, it was filled with other people from North Dakota.
Alicia Dorman folded the candy packet over three times, stuffed it back into the box upside down and pushed it toward Casey: “Put that away where I can’t see it. If I can’t see it, I won’t remember we have it. If I don’t remember it, I won’t want it.”