The Long Faithful: RV, Grandkids, or a Pew

Forty-six years of marriage. Two thousand miles of Route 66. One road trip neither Walt nor Carol Dunn saw coming.Walt and Carol are what researchers are now calling "the Dones" - lifelong, faithful churchgoers who've quietly stopped attending, not out of anger, but because the church that shaped their whole adult lives never quite figured out what to do with them once they got old. When their two weeks with the grandkids ends in Chicago, their longtime pastor and his wife peel off for an open-ended loop of the Great Lakes - and Walt and Carol, instead of heading home, turn the RV south onto the old road.Their destination: Los Angeles, and an Army friend Walt hasn't seen in fifty years, who has spent his life studying the revival that started in a converted livery stable a few blocks from where they'll finally meet again.Along the way, the Dunns meet a whole country's worth of people carrying the same quiet weight in different shapes - a Baptist deacon who's never once trusted his own salvation enough to stop re-earning it; a Catholic couple who kept their devotion and lost their church in the same breath; a young deconstructing family who still pray in secret, ashamed of their own hunger; a woman running a diner at the literal geographic middle of the country who built an entire, solid ethic without ever needing an institution's permission to do it.Nobody gets a tidy answer. Nobody needs one.THE LONG FAITHFUL is a novel for anyone who has ever loved an institution that stopped knowing what to do with them - and for anyone who has ever found, on the emptiest stretch of highway, that the ground was there long before they thought to look for it.What Readers Can Expect● A slow, character-driven road-trip novel in the tradition of great American travel fiction - more interested in people than plot twists● An unflinching but deeply compassionate look at institutional faith, aging, grief, and what it means to keep believing when the building stops making room for you● A sprawling, warmly drawn cast - Baptist, Catholic, Pentecostal, post-evangelical, secular, and everything in between - treated with equal dignity and equal honesty● A forty-six-year marriage rendered with rare tenderness: not a love story that needs saving, just two people still discovering each other after a lifetime together● A story that trusts its reader - no easy answers, no villains, no one fixed by the end, and no one worse for the journey either