They’d come upon it thirty years ago—
        You were pregnant . . . 
        No—you think I wouldn’t remember if I was pregnant? 
        Certain, though, it was the mountains of Peloponnesus, two-lane main road hardly 
main, often single lane, shrines to dead drivers along the way. The place they stopped, 
that’s what stayed with them—a neglected chapel hardly bigger than a double bed, 
vaulted arches, the arches not stone but olive branches embedded in plaster, a window at 
the end of the nave looking out on the sea, a huge crucifix in front of the window, also 
olive—gnarled and gray, a Christ-figure so desiccated that for a moment they thought one 
of the local villagers must have willed his body to be lashed to that cross.
        The chapel was stone on the outside, whitewashed, and the nave whitewashed so 
thinly that the wood-grain of the walls bled through. Six people and one priest would 
have filled the place. More shrine than chapel, a table in front of the cross, two bare wood 
benches serving as pews.
         He and his wife were young then, and sat together that morning, alone.
        They stayed twenty minutes and no one came, and soon it was apparent the place 
was claimed by no one, by everyone, was always open, a wayfarer’s place to sit, kneel, 
look at the sea through the tangled cross, pray.
        They continued down the road, visited a war monument, each still talking of the 
chapel, the way it echoed their voices almost tentatively, of the contorted Christ—
forsaken, almost human, and then he said Let’s turn back—we can have dinner at that 
little town below it, and they did, and they drank ouzo, and though they were in no need 
of miracle and did not ask for one, they went back to the chapel and moved the pews and 
spread their sleeping bags on the stone floor, and all night the cold wind came and went, 
and the grotesque Christ did not come alive, and halfway through the night they were 
cold and zipped their sleeping bags together. 
        He reached for her and she said Not on your life, Buster—not with that guy 
looking down at us, and in the morning they set out, wordless and content, toward Sparta.