I enjoyed this story as well. Jack is a gifted writer full of restraint and humility: two qualities I lack in my own fiction.

As always I'm struck by how totalizing Mormonism is as opposed to other faith traditions:

"This strain is depicted thoughtfully in the subtle details of the story as the mother must game plan how to not let this religious difference break their relationship."

I can't imagine this interority, if that's the word, happening in a even a devout Catholic or what I know of a conservative (non-orthodox) Jewish household. (Maybe James could weigh in on the latter). The notion that one year in to a marriage you know you're marriage is likely to end, either "in this world or the next" and yet you continue to have children is very Mormon...and very troubling to me (perhaps even incomprehensible to an outsider?)

That Jack gently moves the lunatic math about coupling in the Mormon hereafter to some other more abstract iteration is something I applaud. If I had to say what the moral of this story is to me it's a reaffirmation of how terrible Mormons are at individuating from the glueball of individual/family/institutional church.

Frankly, we suck at it to the peril of all.

Maybe we should be more Episcopalian about parenting: your children are not yours; they are God's. They are simply on loan to you for a discrete amount of time.

Inentionally rendered by the gifted Jack or not, that's my takeaway.