Small Difference

At his mother's burial, in front of two hundred and forty people, a land surveyor says the one thing a funeral has no procedure for: the truth, with its error written beside it. He says he believes she is with God. He says he does not know it.

He is not a doubter. He refuses only to claim more than he has. For that, a town closes around him - gently, warmly, completely. A fiancée does her arithmetic. An uncle asks for a floor to stand on. An atheist friend wants a brother in exile. And an old priest, forty years certain in public, makes an appointment to confess what he has carried since a woman in a doorway asked him the only question that matters.

A philosophical novel about the distance between believing and knowing, and what it costs to keep the two honest.