Summary

In the introduction, Casey Gerald reflects on the night of December 21, 1999, when he attended his deceased grandfather’s church with his grandmother to await the Rapture. Young Casey had been abandoned by his mother and did not have a home of his own. As the clock approached midnight and the author prayed with the other congregants, he wondered whether he would be saved and what would happen to those who were not. When the Rapture failed to come, the author returned his maternal grandmother’s house, where he watched the anticlimactic news coverage of the New Year.

Casey begins chapter one by detailing a family photograph of himself, his parents, and his sister, taken when the author was four or five years old. Casey describes his father’s size and ostensible strength, his sister’s “portrait-perfect” demeanor, and his mother’s remarkable poise...