Keeping Silent

Keeping Silent

Sometime during the year before I turned seventeen, I became a bad Catholic. For the most part, I stopped going to church, but when I did manage to drag myself out of bed on lazy Sunday mornings, I’d pull on whatever paid of crumpled jeans were left lying on the floor and run a brush through my hair before going out the door with my mother. She’d give me one of those looks, her patented narrow-eyed Glare of Disapproval that soundlessly scolded my tennis shoes and t-shirt.

Just a few months before, I spent a lot of time dressing up for church. I’d iron my best knee-length skirts and lay out a cashmere sweater on Saturday night just to make sure it didn’t have any fold lines on it. I’d wear panty hose and two-inch Mary Janes that helped to keep me from getting too leggy. My hair would be curled, nails painted, lip gloss applied. Girl-next-door perfection.

Church itself was like a social activity. My mom started to get involved in the parish after my dad died, and she dragged me along to bake sales and flea markets to man the cash box and make sure we always had enough change. Because of this, I got to know so many of the parishioners, and walking down the center aisle of our church started to become more like taking a stroll down the red carpet.

All those bread-baking, junk-hording little old ladies came out of the woodwork at nine-thirty Mass, sticking their hands out of their pews to catch my arm. They wanted to know if I would be helping out at the donut sale after Mass (no, maybe next month, I told them), if I’d called to tell the rectory secretary to put the advertisement in the bulletin (just look on page four), and if I was feeling better since that Tuesday’s bereavement support group (and here, I’d just smile and nod). I only made it back to sit with my mother just before the first long organ note introduced the processional hymn.

The song lyrics and notes blurred in front of my eyes. It was hard to pay attention to them after being reminded of the support group meetings. My mom made me go when my straight A’s started to become B’s, when I would stay inside on Friday nights instead of going to the mall with my friends, when I would only pick at my food during dinner.

The next week, I found myself sitting in the long wooden pews of Saint Benedict’s church sanctuary with a handful of parishioners. Father Dave, the pastor, broke us off into groups to share a good memory of our lost loved one.

I ended up with a sixty-five year old woman named Henrietta who lost her husband of forty years, and a man in his thirties who refused to say who he’d lost.

“I’m not ready to talk about it yet,” he said, “so maybe you should count me out of this discussion.”

“But Chuck,” Henrietta argued, “you’re here to get help in your time of need.”

“Need? All I need right now is to sit here and listen to you fine people talk about death. And maybe a beer.”

Chuck wouldn’t hear too much from me, though. I still hadn’t managed to re-discover my voice and had fallen into a silent phase. When I tried to talk, the words would come out in a jumble of stutters and soundless final syllables, the ends of sentences disappearing into the air in front of me. There was no way I’d be able to say anything about my dad, especially not a good memory. All I was able to see was red-soaked sheets and a cold, sterile emergency room.

So, Henrietta talked while Chuck and I listened. She and her Henry (and yes, that really was her husband’s name; go figure) had gone on a cruise to Greece and Italy; they’d sailed down the streets of Venice and licked gelatos while waiting for the Pope to make his window appearance.

“And that was when John Paul II stuck his head out over the crowd. I almost dropped my ice cream on Henry’s foot!”

I hadn’t noticed then, but Father Dave had been standing nearby, listening to her story. He loomed there like a shadow, a tall, intimidating man with eyes so brown they seemed black. His hair was just as dark, sitting on his head like a thin, greasy cap that brushed the edges of his wire-framed glasses. He listened to Henrietta without expression, and when she was finished, he cut in.

“Catherine,” he said to me in a voice like dull, distant thunder, “why don’t you share something with us?”

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Closed it. Felt tears in the corners of my eyes.

I was sure he’d get upset with me for not being able to participate, and wished that he would have turned his attention to Chuck first. But he didn’t—instead, he sat in the pew next to me and told me it was okay to cry, that the words would come in time.

Then, we talked. “Your dad was a great man,” he said. “Strong. Brave. Someone you should feel endlessly proud of.”

And it made sense then, the way he said it. Soon, other people who had known my dad were talking, the ones who had sat by him at Mass or met him through various church functions. I remained silent and let them go over the happy memories for me, and it stayed that way for a month. But soon, Father Dave had started to change me, to shift the way I was seeing the world ever since my dad left it. Even if I wasn’t talking at meetings, the sharp, agonizing pain began to fade to a dull throb.

That was why I listened to his homilies with unblinking attention, why I made sure to show up to church dressed in my best every Sunday. He put in the effort to help, and he made everything seem better. The most I could do was show him that I cared, too, that I could put in the effort to try and make things in my life normal again.

When my mom and I left our pew after the recessional hymn, we always made sure to wait in line and shake Father Dave’s hand before going out into the sunlight.

“Hope everything’s going well, Rose,” he said to my mom, taking her hand in both of his own.

“They’re getting better,” she replied, with her well-we’re-coping half smile.

Usually, he’d tell me a joke before reminding me about the meeting on Tuesday. But one day, he offered me a job at the rectory instead. I never actually agreed to become his new employee. My mom beat me to the answer, probably because she knew that I was about to say no.

“Honestly, Cat, this will do you some good,” she told me as we walked toward our car. “It would help you get out of the house. And Father Dave will always be there—you know how willing he would be to talk if you needed it. With this job—you can do some homework there, maybe get your grades up…”

“Right,” I said, slumping in the passenger seat. “Whatever you say.”

“Your dad would want you to,” my mom said before putting the car into gear and taking us home. “It would make him proud.”

* * *

My dad was a police officer, the Top Cop, the Big Guy. He wasn’t chief, he didn’t lead any special teams, but everyone knew he was the best. On River Rescue, he was always the guy to get in the water after a report of a suicide attempt. On the S.W.A.T. team, he found a way to keep all of his partners safe every time they faced a crazed gunman or a hostage situation. He designed a bomb bunker for the bomb squad and helped to set off the city’s firework display every Fourth of July. On his days off, he worked as a security guard at the local supermarket.

“It gives me something to do,” he told me once. “I’d rather be working than reading the newspaper on the couch.”

People knew me because of him. I was Officer Louis Bradley’s daughter. I was his straight A student, his favorite color guard in Saint Benedict High School’s marching band. He looked forward to taking me to the bowling alley every Saturday afternoon, where we’d share cheese fries and frozen yogurt after I rolled my twenty-third consecutive gutter ball. He taught me how to dance the waltz and the tango, and we’d light up the parquet while everyone else was doing the chicken dance at the church’s bi-annual polka extravaganza. I was the girl he bragged about every day to the other guys at the police station. I broke the mold, he said. Everyone knows the worst kids belong to cops, firemen, and lawyers because they think they can get away with everything—but not me. He was blessed, but not for long.

It was when he was working as a security guard that a man came in with a cloth ski-mask pulled over his face and a gun in his pocket. My dad was just getting back from his lunch break when the thief ran from the store with two bags full of money from the cash registers.

He didn’t even have a chance to grab his gun. The man shot him on the spot and kept going.

The paramedics did their best with him, but the bullet went through his heart and hit his spine. Even if he had made it, he would have been paralyzed.

They called my mom and me into the hospital right after it happened, but we didn’t get there until it was too late. The last time I saw him before the funeral, he was lying on an operating table in the tiled emergency room.

A nurse came out to tell us that he was gone and that my mom could see him one last time before they called the morgue. It would hard to take, she said.

“Cat, honey, you stay here, okay?” my mom told me as she stood up, letting go of my hand.

“No,” I told her, “I’m coming and there’s nothing you can do about it.” I had to know for sure that he was gone, had to see it for myself. I wasn’t going to take such an important word from this woman I didn’t even know, to let her be the one to tell me what had happened to my dad.

“Cat…”

“I said, no. I’m going.”

If cops’ kids were supposed to be the worst, I was prepared to prove it. But that was before I’d fallen silent, when I was still the girl who would say anything to anyone without thinking twice about it. The kinds of things that made my dad lean over and whisper in my ear, careful, honey, or someone might pull a gun on you some day.

After I saw him laying there, his gray shirt soaked through with red and the sheets around him stained the same way, I left wishing that seeing the truth myself hadn’t mattered so much. I wished I could have put some kind of faith in that nurse, in my mom, to tell me that I’d lost something.

* * *

Two days after Father Dave asked me if I wanted the job, I was officially a secretary-in-training. I walked to the rectory lobby after school was over and pushed through the heavy wooden door that separated it from the rest of the outside world and let it slide closed behind me.

The day time secretary, whose name was Vicki, was sitting on the other side of the half-pane of glass that separated the office from the lobby. She glanced up at me with narrowed eyes and said, in some kind of almost-Southern drawl, “You must be here to work.”

I nodded, and she reached below the glass pane. There was a buzzing noise that meant the office door was unlocked, and I pushed through it. It was a Catholic set-up, or so I’d been told.

What was on the other side was a shock the visual equivalent of running into a brick wall. It was…red. Very red. Wine-colored carpet, cherry wood desk and bookshelves. Red leather office chairs. The walls were white, but they picked up a pinkish tint from everything else. And there was Vicki, right in the middle of it, staring me down from head to toe.

She was a severe-looking woman with mousy blonde hair. Actually, everything about her was mousy, from her barely five-foot-tall frame to her petit facial features. She had a way of looking constantly pained, like there was a stick shoved in a place I probably shouldn’t mention.

For the next hour that she was there, I kept catching her staring at me while my trainer, Lisa, showed me around the office and told me how to do my job. It was like Vicki was evaluating me, trying to figure out if I was worthy enough to answer the Holy Telephones. I decided that when my betta fish died, I wouldn’t get another one—because suddenly, I knew what it felt like to be watched.

Lisa and I were alphabetizing enveloped when Father Dave made his first appearance. He was so quiet, like my old Maine Coon cat used to be before my mom bought him a collar with a bell on it, that I didn’t hear him coming.

“Catherine,” he said to me in his low, rumbling voice.

Let me say now that hearing my name said like that, then looking up to see him hovering over me was a little like how I’d imagined meeting my maker at an untimely moment would be. His eyes, which were so gentle every time I’d seen him at a bereavement meeting, were made darker by the redness of the room around us. It was a scary inner glow, one that didn’t fit with the Father Dave I already knew. I probably would have shrank away if I hadn’t trusted him so much.

“Hi, Father,” I said, flashing him a smile before diving back into the pile of envelopes on the desk.

“Lisa, will you excuse us for a second?”

The other girl nodded, got up, and left the room. Father Dave walked around behind my chair and put a hand on my shoulder.

“You need to understand something about this job,” he said, reaching over to pick up one of the green-and-white envelopes off of the table in front of me. I watched as his strong fingers turned it over. Across the room, Vicki was giving me another one of those stares.

“It’s the most important part,” Father Dave continued. “Do you have any idea what it could be?”

The paycheck? I wanted to say. And if I hadn’t still been looking for my voice, I probably would have. Instead, I shook my head.

“Well, it’s secrecy.”

“Right,” I said. Vicki had a sneer on her face like I was the dumb kid in class, and that answer should have been so obvious.

“There are a lot of things that go on in here that not every normal parishioner knows,” the priest went on with a quick narrowing of his eyes. “Conversations, financial matters—we have a lot of records of personal information, too, that you’re forbidden to give out or access unless I say you can. Understand?”

It was the power of that last word—understand?—that made me freeze, and wonder if I could truthfully answer that question.

* * *

Everyone knew I wasn’t so good at keeping things to myself. At least I hadn’t been, long before my dad died and I stopped being able to say anything at all. I told things the way they were. When underclassmen asked me how good of a geometry teacher Mr. DeLuca was, I didn’t refrain from telling them how awful he explained what an isosceles triangle was, and what it was for (which, to this day, I have yet to figure out). In art class, it didn’t matter to me that peer evaluations were supposed to be anonymous. I wrote about uneven lines and smeared colors and signed my name just as boldly, along with the invitation to talk to me if they had any questions. Once, I made a girl cry by doing that, but I just shook my head and called her a pansy as she ran across the hall to the bathroom. I got detention for that one.

I even lost my best friend over a complete inability to keep my mouth shut. Her name was Kelsey, and we met in kindergarten. Her mom had forgotten to put fifty cents in her lunch for milk the day I first saw her, looking down at her peanut butter sandwich in the cafeteria like she was about to cry. Me—I had a Supermom, the kind of mom who never forgot to do anything, especially not give me money for something at school. Actually, she’d put a whole dollar next to my Barbie thermos that morning and told me to get a candy bar.

Well, when I saw Kelsey crying, I made what I thought was a big gesture at the time and gave up my Snickers to get her some milk, too. We’d been best friends ever since—until, that is, she got a boyfriend. Worse, an unfaithful boyfriend.

I caught him making out in the stairwell with a girl in our Trigonometry class when we were sophomores. He was too busy letting his hands trail up her uniform shirt and across the flat, toned stomach that Kelsey lacked to notice me run up the stairs behind him.

At lunch that day, I told Kelsey what I saw.

She stared at me for a good fifteen seconds before saying, “You’re just jealous, Cat. Jason would never do anything like that to me.”

“Yeah, well, you must be thinking of an entirely different Jason,” I said.

After that, she never spoke to me again, not even after she caught her boyfriend necking with another girl in the hallway. She didn’t even say a word when she followed her mom into the funeral home after my dad died, and that was when I could finally guarantee her that I would never open my mouth again.

* * *

Father Dave moved in front of me and held my gaze as if he were trying to read my mind and figure out just what it was I thought about his need for silence.

“You understand?” he repeated.

“Yeah, I do,” I said. Short, snappy monosyllables. Silent enough?

It was then that the lobby door opened and a woman came in, someone that I recognized very well from all of the church functions my mom dragged me to. Her name was Jerolyn, and her presence had all of the literal and figurative aspects of a beam of light, and ten times the amount of energy, from the white-gray of her hair and the pastel sweater sets she always wore, to the brightness of her smile and her white, white teeth. She had a huge Tupperware container in her hands and a pastel pink purse slung over her shoulder.

“Cat!” she said, and Father Dave and Vicki almost seemed to back away as if they’d just been caught doing something they shouldn’t. The priest was no longer next to my chair, and Vicki was fumbling for the buzzer button on the wall.

“I didn’t know you were working here!” Jerolyn said, breezing right past Father Dave on her way in to give me a hug and a quick kiss on the cheek. She smelled like rose petals, I noticed, and her face was soft like silk.

“I just started today,” I told her. The newest member of the God Squad, I wanted to add.

She turned to Father Dave. “For you.” She held out the container to him. “Chicken and dumplings. My great-grandmother’s recipe, just so you know.”

“Sounds edible,” Father Dave said, lifting up a corner of the clear plastic case. I laughed at him—but no one else did. After all, he’d said it with a hint of amusement in his voice, and that typically indicates a joke. By this time, Lisa had managed to shuffle back into the office, and her eyes were wide in acknowledgement of my apparent faux-pas.

“I’ll see you in the kitchen,” Father Dave said to Jerolyn, and he left the room.

Jerolyn’s eyes were still as bright and warm as they had been when she walked into the office. It was like Father Dave hadn’t said anything hurtful in the first place. “See you in a bit,” she said to me, waggling her fingers in a wave before she followed the priest.

* * *

Later on, after Vicki had finally left, after Lisa and I had finished our work for the day and moved on to silently doing our homework, the phone rang. A distraught soon-to-be husband who wanted to talk to Father Dave about his marriage counseling was on the other end. From the sound of it, his wife-to-be was more into Chihuahuas than Great Danes, and he seemed to think that would put a serious damper on their sustainability as a couple. Or at least, that’s what he told me. I put him on hold and Lisa told me to go and get Father Dave on the line.

“He’ll be in the back,” she said. And while I didn’t really know what she meant by ‘the back,’ I left the office and made my way through Father Dave’s labyrinth of a house. Living room, dining room, and finally, kitchen.

The green room. The VIP lounge. The Valhalla of Saint Benedict. All of those could have been appropriate descriptions for the dark, smoky place where Father Dave hung out with his select group of parishioners, but it was really just the rectory kitchen. I started to smell the cigarette smoke twenty feet before I walked through the door. Once inside, I could see the vellum-like strands curling up towards the ceiling to stick there like a haze.

There was another woman other than Jerolyn sitting there with him, a person I recognized from all of my hours of forced community service. Her name was Gloria Mason, and she wore giant glasses that took up the entire top half of her face. They sort of made her look like a fly.

Gloria and Father Dave were smoking at the kitchen table when I walked in. The Sony flat-screen perched on one of the countertops was turned to CNN and a pot of coffee was brewing off to the side. Jerolyn was standing in front of the window over the sink, getting mugs out of one of the cabinets.

“I’m telling you now, he’s got another family somewhere,” Gloria was saying when I walked in. She took a long, lazy drag from her cigarette before continuing. “When he’s scheduled as a lector, his eyes never leave a certain woman…and I can assure you, it’s not his wife.”

In the background, Jerolyn shook her head in disapproval.

Father Dave cleared his throat loudly, and the kitchen went silent except for the faint rumble of Christiane Amanpour’s voice and the faint shelling of some third-world nation.

“Can I help you?” he said to me.

“There’s someone on line one for you,” I said. “I think he’s the one you have marriage counseling with tonight?”

Father Dave rolled his eyes and said to Gloria, his voice low and harsh and annoyed, “That’s the tramp I was telling you about earlier. Her husband shouldn’t need to bring her in here to tell that she’s cheating on him. They’re a waste of my time.”

“Another one,” Gloria replied as she rolled her eyes, and Jerolyn clicked her tongue.

I went to leave, my job being done, the message passed on. Father Dave stopped me.

“Cat?” he said, his eyes darker than ever, meeting mine. “Next time, use the intercom.”

* * *

That night, my mom asked how my first day at work went. We were eating pork roast, mashed potatoes, steamed broccoli.

“Fine,” I told her, “except…” I paused and stared at the vanilla candles we always lit during dinner.

“Except for what?”

“Except I stained my favorite shirt,” I lied, holding out my pen-streaked, light-blue sleeve. I’d actually done that about a month ago, but the mark never faded.

“Oh, well, I’m sure that’ll come out in the wash.” She swallowed a forkful of potatoes before she continued. “You know, working with him is probably going to be one of the most valuable things you do in your high school career. The man knows so much. That, and you get paid to do your homework!” She laughed as if this were a joke.

“And alphabetize envelopes,” I muttered.

Then, silence, except the clink and scrape of forks and knives. I watched my mom across the table, the candlelight flickering across her silverware. She cut up her food into small bits, pushed it around, put a piece in her mouth, chewed. Repeat five times. Then, she put her utensils down in the four- and eight-o’clock positions, just like finishing school taught her.

“Cat,” she said. That’s never a good sign. “I wanted to let you know that we might have a guest for dinner on Friday night.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked. “Someone from work?”

“Well, no. I actually met him in the produce section at Wal-mart, believe it or not, but I think you’ll like him.”

Him? I thought. “‘Him?’”

She turned red. “Yes, him. His name’s Cliff, and he owns his own restaurant business—”

“And you ended up playing a game of ‘you’ve got some nice melons there’ in the produce aisle?”

“Catherine.” She looked shocked, hurt, angry. I couldn’t blame her. I was shocked at myself, especially since I’d taken a liking to sentences no longer than three syllables.

“Daddy’s been gone for a year and you’re going to bring a man into our house.”

“Just because he’s having dinner with us doesn’t mean it’s serious!” she said.

I speared a piece of broccoli and shoved it in my mouth, only to notice too late that I didn’t feel much like swallowing it.

We sat, silent. Clink, scrape. Chew, swallow. Flicker, flame.

“How about dessert?” she said after ten minutes of this. “I made strawberry shortcake.”

“No, Mom, I don’t think I’m very hungry anymore,” I said, and blew out one of the vanilla candles. I watched as it smoked until its scent faded away.

* * *

That Tuesday, I went to the bereavement meeting only to be paired, again, with Chuck and Henrietta. This time, we were supposed to be sharing why we felt angry with the person who left us behind.

Chuck still refused to say anything about his deceased, but he was contributing to the group meeting now instead of sitting back and pretending like he wasn’t there. His favorite thing to do was make comments that he thought were witty, but were actually pretty insulting.

“I wish my Henry hadn’t gone without me,” Henrietta said. “When we were younger, I always told him we would go together. I says to him on our wedding day, ‘Henry, we’re making a commitment right now, you hear? I don’t care if that man says til death do you part, we are going through this together all the way.’ But I guess he didn’t hear, after all.”

“If you’re gonna put it that way, I wouldn’t want to be with you, either,” Chuck said.

Henrietta, bless her, had started to ignore these comments instead of fighting back. I think all of us have been much happier since then. Still, Father Dave would wander over to our group when he’d hear something questionable coming from Chuck’s mouth just to avoid a potential scream-fest.

“Catherine, I haven’t heard much from you tonight,” the pastor said in his lazy voice.

“That’s probably because she’s not angry,” Henrietta said. “Good thing, too. Most sixteen year olds are angrier than those raccoons that chew through my garbage every night.”

“Oh, no,” Father Dave said, “anger like this usually stays hidden. It’s something most people never try to show, that they keep bottled up, silenced. Sometimes, it’s best dispelled by non-verbal communication—writing, dancing, even driving. Maybe if you tried one of those things, Cat, it would be more…cathartic. It could help to make things normal again.”

He stood there and watched me for a moment, his eyes expecting a nod at the least. Maybe there’d be a breakthrough and I’d even say something marvelous, like “okay.” But the moment passed, and he moved on.

At the end of the meeting, I thought I would be free to go home and steam just like I had been for the past few nights, but Father Dave took me by the arm, stopped me at the door. He took me to a pew and made me sit.

“Cat, I’m concerned about the progress you’ve been making,” he told me.

“You mean at work?” I asked. “I can do better—I mean, I’ve only been there a few days—”

“No, it’s not about that,” he interrupted. “You’re doing fine…so far.” He paused, cleared his throat. “It’s about the meetings. It’s been months now, and you still haven’t been able to speak at any session.”

“I’ve spoken,” I argued, but even I could tell how weak those words sounded.

“You’ve heard the Serenity Prayer, I’m sure? ‘Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference,’” he quoted.

I nodded.

“Your father’s death—it’s one of those things you can’t change. One of those things you have to accept, and be made stronger by it. And sooner or later, you have to realize that you need to let go.”

* * *

That Friday, I stood in front of my bedroom mirror to part and re-part my hair. I brushed it over my right shoulder and then switched it to the other. I changed my shirt three times. Downstairs, my mom was carefully assembling her prize-winning lasagna—or, at least, that’s what my dad had always called it.

A half hour earlier, my mom told me to come upstairs and get ready. She wanted me to look pretty, but I wanted exactly the opposite. I tore through my closet three times before settling on her least favorite sweater—a red one so old that it had little balls of fuzz permanently attached to it no matter how many times she’d taken it to the dry cleaner.

“Cat, honey, can you come down and set the table?” she called from the bottom of the steps. My hair was still in disarray, so I scooped it up into a ponytail at the base of my neck, just the way she always told me not to wear it.

I avoided the kitchen, going straight to the dining room to pull out the fancy dishes and the flatware that we kept in the antique china cabinet—the ones that had been a wedding present to my mom and dad from Aunt Samantha, her sister. I set them down on the placemats my paternal grandmother sewed three Christmases ago, and put two new tapers in the crystal candlesticks.

My mom came into the dining room just as I was lighting them.

“Oh, look how pretty,” she cooed, straightening the plate at the head of the table. All of the memories embedded in everything I’d put out didn’t even seem to faze her. Instead, she said, “Are you sure you want to wear that sweater? And maybe you should put your hair down—it looks so nice that way.”

Before I could even open my mouth to protest, there was a knock at the front door. We both turned to look at it like it would open itself.

“I’m not opening it,” I said.

That was the remark she seemed to expect, since she was already halfway out of the dining room when I finished the sentence. I stood between the birch table and the lighted glass china cabinet and listened to her heels pad across the rug, then click on the hardwood before she got to the door. The latch came undone and in stepped Cliff with a bottle of dark red wine.

I peered around the wall to get a good look at him. He wasn’t very tall, and he had light brown hair and a close-cut beard. He looked sturdy under his Armani suit, wide and wall-like. He gave my mother a hug and I felt like I could choke him.

“Thank you so much for inviting me,” Cliff greeted, handing over the wine. “I’ve been looking forward to this all week.”

“Oh, so have we,” my mom told him. “We’re both so glad you could make it. Hey—Cat? Why don’t you come here a minute?”

No, I thought, but my feet moved anyway. I willed them to stop, but they wouldn’t listen.

“You must be the famous Cat,” he said when I came into view, extending his hand. His fingers were firm when I took it, and he gave a businesslike shake. “It’s great to finally meet you.”

He beamed down at me, showing two rows of straight, white teeth. I stared at him, not saying anything. We stood there awkwardly for a few moments, Cliff still shaking my hand. I could hear the drip-drip-drip of the coffee pot in the kitchen and the low, subtle clicks our old oven made when it was turned above three hundred degrees.

“Well,” my mom finally said, “why don’t we move into the dining room?”

“Sounds like a great idea.” Cliff straightened his tie. “Why don’t you lead the way, Cat?”

I pointed behind me.

“Aha, she’s a mime,” he said, amused. My mother, however, wasn’t, and she glared at me over his shoulder.

When Cliff walked into the dining room, she grabbed me by the arm and hissed, “Would you stop this?”

“Stop what?” I asked, shrugging her off before following her boyfriend.

We sat down to the lasagna and listened to Cliff go on and on about his life, which also happened to be his job. He was a businessman, pure and simple, the head of an up-and-coming fine dining conglomerate.

“We’ve already got the two restaurants up and running,” he told us—rather, me, since my mom already knew all of this junk—proudly. “You’ve got your classy Italian dining at Mariano’s; I’m sure you’ve been there, it’s downtown. And then there’s the Burger Shack over on the north side, which is really popular after baseball games. The casual diner’s opening next month—Cliffhangers. Catchy, huh?”

On and on it went, a nonstop torrent gushing from this guy’s mouth. It was the Johnstown Flood all over again, this time in word form. What really got to me was the way my mom sat there and drooled all over the table listening to this as if it were interesting, her head propped up by her delicate fist, her body leaning toward him. I wanted to give her a little shove to see if it would send her face-first into the lasagna.

I opted for asking a question instead. “Do you cook?” Three of the ten words I spoke so far that night.

He laughed. “No, I let someone else get their hands dirty.”

I looked at my mom over the vanilla candles. She was still staring at Cliff, offering him more to eat. That was the kind of look she’d only given to my dad before, after he’d washed off the grime from whatever river he’d pulled someone out of that day and finally got to sit down at a nice, hot meal.

It was at that moment that I began to hate the man who was sitting in my dad’s chair in my dad’s dining room in my dad’s house. I wanted him to go back to his McMansion in whatever generically-named housing development he lived in over on the nice side of town.

“So, Cliff,” I said. “Do you do any…I don’t know…charity work?”

“Oh, all the time,” he told me. “I’m always over at my niece’s school for some reason or another. Just last week I was handing out water-bottles at their annual Walk-a-thon.” He shrugged. “That’s what happens when you don’t have kids of your own, you know—”

“Hm. Well, we’re having a spaghetti dinner at the church next Monday. Maybe you should stop by and help out.”

My mom raised her eyebrows at me.

“Monday?” He pulled a palm pilot out of his back pocket. “Well, I’ve got to be at the Burger Shack for the plumber at three, but after that, it looks like I’m free!”

Bingo, I thought. Now Father Dave, Jerolyn, everyone else would see what it was that my mom was doing to me. Maybe the pastor would take it into his priestly heart to show her, since she couldn’t see it herself.

* * *

That Saturday, I was reading Macbeth for my English class when Father Dave came into the office. Ever since that week’s bereavement group, he seemed to take my lack of voice as a personal challenge. Whenever there was no one sitting back in the kitchen with him, he’d come out in the office and try to strike up some kind of conversation. It usually only took about a minute and a half of blank stares and two-word answers to get him to leave. Then, he started to stick around. The conversations became thrilling, one-sided parishioner-bashing parties.

“This woman,” he said, holding up a piece of mail, “keeps trying to get me to baptize her daughter’s baby.” He paused, his head cocked toward me, waiting for me to sneer, to roll my eyes, to say well, why not?—or maybe he was going for dramatic effect. Either way, my eyes stayed on Macbeth.

“The mother doesn’t go to church—the kid’ll never go to church,” he continued, crinkling the letter into a ball and throwing it in the wastebasket. “What’s the point?”

Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter blurred on the page as I listened to him. I knew that when I started to read again, these antiquated words would start to make a lot more sense to me.

“Are you doing anything important?” he asked, throwing me off guard.

“Not really.” I pushed Shakespeare away. Old Bill would have to wait.

Father Dave didn’t tell me what he wanted me to do right away. He was bent over the avocado green safe that stood in the back corner of the office, the one that was so big that I could probably fit into it if I curled into a ball. It had a black number dial the size of a softball on the front, but no one ever turned it to lock the safe. Lisa, my trainer, told me once about the unfortunate girl who bumped the dial when she was trying to grab a stack of file folders. It took the Vicki and Father Dave a week to find the ten-number combination and another week to figure out how to enter it.

“But it only took five minutes to fire the girl,” Lisa said, her clear eyes wide. “I’m pretty sure it was a setup. Father Dave always used to tell me what a moron she was.”

I watched as he dug a red vinyl zipper case from the back of the safe. Across the front of the envelope in thick black marker the words candle money were scrawled. He unzipped it, took a few bills, and tossed it back from where he got it with a dull thud.

“Go down to the corner store and get me a pack of Marlboro’s,” he said, holding out the money.

I blinked. “I’m sixteen,” I said.

Father Dave sighed and dropped his arm to his side like a teenager whose parents just told him he had to be back in the house by ten or he’d be grounded. I half expected him to start cursing the government.

“I guess I’ll go, then,” he said. “If anyone calls for me—I don’t care who—tell them it’s my day off.”

It just so happened that later on that day, long after Father Dave got back from his cigarette run, one of the second graders practicing to be an altar server tried to put out the Easter candle—a thick pillar that’s about four feet tall, stuck into a three-foot-high gold base—and ended up dumping hot wax all over his face. One of his teachers ran into the rectory, practically hyperventilating, wanting to see Father Dave.

He was sitting in the kitchen with Gloria. He took a drag from his cigarette as I told him the story, then calmly put it in the ashtray when I finished. He looked from it to me, eyes like dark holes, face void of expression, and said, “I told you. It’s my day off.”

I took a step backward and clenched my fists, letting my nails sink into my palms. So much for that priestly heart I was depending on. I nodded and headed for the office, going through the myriad of excuses running through my brain and wondering which one I could tell the second-grade teacher. Anything but the truth.

* * *

“Bread, check. Pasta…check. Plastic knives, plates, and forks…” Jerolyn ticked off the ingredients on her list and pointed to them as she walked past. “Check. Sauce.”

“No sauce,” I told her from inside the industrial refrigerator.

“No sauce?” she repeated, confused. She stuck her pencil behind her ear and double-checked the fridge. “Has anyone seen the Ragu?” she yelled.

There was a chorus of mumbles from the volunteers scattered around in the darkened cafeteria. It was one of those places that never seemed to be bright enough no matter how many fluorescent lights they had jam-packed across the ceiling. Every now and then, a quick burst of light would rain down on us whenever someone opened the outside door, which was at the very top of a steep staircase in the corner.

“No sauce!” she said again, distressed. “How are we supposed to have a spaghetti dinner without spaghetti sauce?”

“We could always send someone out to get some,” Gloria suggested, appearing out of nowhere. I couldn’t help but notice Jerolyn scowling briefly, but she covered it with her normally bright smile. Ladies and gentlemen, let the games begin.

* * *

In this corner, we have reigning champion Gloria Mason, right-hand woman and confident of Father Dave since before I became an altar server in second grade, and remaining that way long after I quit. Known best for her ability to slink through the crowd undetected, a mere fly on the wall.

Opposite her is Jerolyn, perpetually fighting on the side of all that is Good and Holy, sticking up for the underdogs and constantly baring her teeth like Smiling Bob of Enzyte fame. No matter how many left hooks she throws or how many casseroles she bakes, she always seems to be one step behind Gloria.

All it takes to notice this is one volunteer run through any church function. At the first donut breakfast I worked—about two weeks after my dad died—I was manning the blueberry bagels when the two women stopped in front of me.

I had been in my own world, getting used to using smiles and nods to communicate since my mouth seemed otherwise incapable of opening. The line had been moving quickly and efficiently through my station and most of the crowd was happily munching on their food at the long folding tables. Then, two boys ran past and knocked over the cinnamon butter so that it splattered all over my brand-new Converse high-tops.

If I had still been the old me, I probably would have tackled those jerks. Instead, I got down on my hands and knees and started to mop up the mess. I was clear under the table, shoved between the mini fridge full of cream cheese and the icy metal table legs, when I saw two pairs of shoes—one dark and shiny leather, the other pastel and canvas—stop.

“Who’s supposed to be re-filling this station?” Gloria demanded. “Look—the cinnamon butter is gone.”

“I think it’s Cat—you know, Rose’s girl?” Jerolyn said. “I bet she just ran off to the bathroom. I can take over until she gets back.” Her feet shifted, but Gloria’s moved faster and blocked her way around the table.

“No,” she said, “Father Dave put me in charge of picking up the slack.”

“Surely you’re too busy making sure there aren’t any other slackers, then?”

“I’ve got enough on my hands dealing with Rose’s girl,” Gloria mumbled, “and the only reason I haven’t told her to leave is because Father Dave seems interested in her for one reason or another. God only knows why; her father was trash and she doesn’t seem to be much better.”

“Louis was a wonderful man,” Jerolyn defended, “and you only say he’s not since he arrested your brother all those years ago.” Under the table, I saw Gloria grind her heel in to the linoleum tiles, and there was a tense moment of silence. “Oh, I’m sorry—does that black spot on the family name still pain you?”

Gloria started to say something, but Jerolyn was on a roll. “Oh, I’m sorry—I have to go attend to that table over there before I’m caught slacking.” Ding ding, end of round one.

Gloria’s shoes slid over the floor and a hand grabbed the edge of the plastic table cloth. She whipped it up over the table and reached into the mini-fridge only to find me huddled with my knees almost in my mouth and butter on my shoes. We were face-to-face, her huge, buglike glasses right in front of my eyes.

She paused, her eyes nothing but a question. Had I heard anything? How long had I been there? What was I doing hiding under a table, anyway? Trash, I could see her thinking, just like her father.

“Well,” she spat, “get out from under there and get back to work.”

I shook my head, my tongue glued to the roof of my mouth and the edges of my eyes wet. I pushed aside the other flap of tablecloth and squeezed between a pair of legs that had stopped to grab another blueberry bagel. My own legs took me straight to Jerolyn, and we cleared off tables for the rest of the morning together. On the other side of the room, Gloria was mopping up the rest of the cinnamon butter from the floor tiles.

* * *

Now that they were faced with another dilemma, Jerolyn and Gloria were staring each other down. You could practically see smoke coming out of their ears, they were thinking so hard.

“My husband just bought a brand-new Jeep,” Gloria said. “I can run to Sam’s Club and pick up a few cases of sauce. I’m sure Father Dave will have no problems with reimbursements.”

“No,” Jerolyn said, stepping in front of her, “I can go.”

“What’s the problem here, ladies?” Father Dave asked, leaving behind a group of men who were setting up tables.

“We have no sauce,” Jerolyn told him, “so I was going to run out and get some…”

And then, like heaven had decided to open at that very minute, there was a flash of light from the tall stairwell in the corner and the silhouette of a man appeared there. Under his arms were two huge somethings that he was holding close to him. When the door closed, we could all see that it was tomato sauce, and the man was Cliff.

Jerolyn’s mouth dropped open. “Who’s that?” she asked.

“It’s Cliff,” I muttered.

“Oh—right,” Gloria said, “I called him when we found out about this little sauce dilemma that Jerolyn forgot to check on, and he came to the rescue for us.” A lie to Father Dave. Then, to Cliff, “Oh, thank heavens, I’m so glad you could make it with that!”

“Well, there’s three more in the car,” Cliff said. He seemed surprised to get so warm and quick of a welcome. “You can never have enough of it at one of these things!”

Gloria showed Cliff back to the table where we’d been counting off ingredients earlier. Behind me, I heard Father Dave say to Jerolyn, “Next time, make sure you know what you’re doing.”

The rest of the evening, for the most part, went just as smooth as most parish functions—except, of course, for the plain fact that everyone seemed to like Cliff perfectly fine.

“Oh, he’s so wonderful,” I overheard two older women saying, “and he seems so perfect for Rose, doesn’t he?”

“Yes. She finally seems to have that glow back in her, doesn’t she?”

And she did, especially when Cliff would walk past her and brush his hand against hers, or come up from behind her and drape his meaty arm around her shoulders. She would reach up with her thin fingers and clasp his wrist, giving it a squeeze, and turning to give him a smile to show that she appreciated his touches, that she wanted more of them. It made all the little old ladies sigh romantically and whisper to each other, but I wanted to gag.

To get away from them, I joined Jerolyn in the back room of the kitchen. Gloria had appointed her to this isolated spot, far away from the public clamor of a spaghetti dinner, and she’d been stowed away there almost all evening. She smiled when she saw me and handed over a pile of zucchini. Ever since, I’d been chopping with a newfound fury that even Emeril would have been jealous of.

However, it was Cliff who was making periodic stops to grab the mountains of veggies we were butchering.

“Wow, Cat,” he said on his second trip, “I could really use someone like you at the Burger Shack!”

I slammed the knife into the cutting board so hard that I was left with big, thick chunks of green-and-white zucchini flesh rather than small, thin slices.

“Oh, I don’t think she’s a fast-food type of gal,” Jerolyn answered for me. “Cat’s got potential.”

“You never know—you might like welding knives a lot better than answering phones,” he said, winking at me before he left.

I grabbed for a head of broccoli, but Jerolyn put a gentle hand on my shoulder.

“Your mom was going to start dating again sooner or later,” she said. “She just picked sooner, that’s all.”

“She gave me no warning.” I started to chop up the big, green stalk.

“Sometimes, things happen that we really have no control over, and we have to put on a smile and keep going.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not going to let this turn into the way Father Dave treats you,” I said.

Jerolyn’s hands stopped moving. She put the knife down, her motions slow and soft.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” she told me. All traces of her usual smile were gone, and her eyes burned with a fiery pastel glow. On anyone else, the look wouldn’t have been threatening, but on her, it was enough to make me want to recoil. Maybe I would have, if I wasn’t so mad at Cliff.

“I think I do,” I said, “because I’m always there when you are, and all you do is let him and Gloria push you into a corner where no one can see. They’re the jerks out there getting all the credit while you slave on everything, for nothing.”

“And I guess sitting back with your mouth shut all the time makes you much better,” Jerolyn said, “finding passive ways to make other people do the hard stuff, like telling your mom how you feel—then hiding when it all backfires.”

I shoved the broccoli away from me and grabbed a red pepper. The two of us stood in silent, sharp fury, surrounded in a pool of edible color.

“He’s trying to become a bishop,” Jerolyn said through her teeth after five minutes of quiet. Her voice sounded rougher than usual, like she was struggling to hold back what she was saying.

“He is?” I asked.

She nodded. “And if he steps on a couple people on the way up, it doesn’t matter to him.”

“And you let him?”

“Like I said, you have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Behind us, someone cleared their throat. We turned around and there was Gloria, her bugeye glasses perched on her nose, her arms folded across her chest, her black leather shoe tapping on the linoleum tiles. Jerolyn’s face dropped, and I had a sinking feeling that her smile was gone for good.

* * *

After the spaghetti dinner was over, Father Dave asked me if I could stay behind in the rectory office until they were done counting the money we’d earned that night. I was going to say no until he said I could write down a few extra hours on my time card.

I was sitting there in the impossibly red office, now a dim ruby color in the sunset, when I heard something back in the church sacristy.

It wasn’t a place I went very often. It was at the end of a set of pale perpendicular hallways and was actually an antechamber of the church sanctuary that connected it to the rectory. One hallway was right outside the rectory office, and the second one was just at the end of it. That hall was longer than the other one and only had one thick, white door—the one that led to the sacristy.

I’d never heard anything strange coming from there before, not on a night when there was no one in the church. I got out of the leather chair and walked down the first hall. My feet padded soundlessly across the plush red carpet, and the yelling got louder.

It was Father Dave’s voice, no question about it, but it was too hard to make out what the priest was saying. His voice was rumbling like the bass on a stereo set, and I could only catch a few clear words.

I resisted the temptation to slide down the hallway and press my ear up against the door. What would happen if it opened? Still, I couldn’t stop my curiosity and found myself creeping closer, closer to the door of the inner sanctum like some kind of secret agent.

“Look at your pastor when he’s speaking to you!”

Father Dave, loud and low and terrible. Jerolyn crying beneath his yells, something that sounded like I didn’t mean to, and you can’t do this.

“After all that I’ve done for you,” Father Dave’s voice echoed, “I’ve given you a prominent place in the community. I’ve let you into my home. I put you in a position where you can benefit from being a close, personal friend of a future bishop, and this is how you repay me? By defaming me to the girl working in my office? To the future of my parish?”

My heart was crashing against my ribs—never before had I tried to eavesdrop on someone, not like this. I’d heard people talking about stupid stuff at school, like stealing from their parents’ stash of Miller Lite or cheating on a boyfriend, but this…this was serious.

“If you think you’re setting a good foundation in the future of your parish, you might want to re-think how you act around her, then!”

Father Dave laughed. “A girl like Cat? No. She’s got brains, yes. But no spine. She’s going to go through life letting others tell her what to do, how to act, how to work.” He paused, and all I could feel was ice hardening my veins. “At bereavement meetings, the girl never opens her mouth! That, Jerolyn, is not the kind of person who will bring down the foundation I’ve laid. She’s the kind of person who can be trusted to uphold it, no matter how naively—unlike you.”

For the next five minutes, all I could hear was the vibrations of the pastor’s voice, the crying, an outburst here or there. I forced myself to walk away from the door and hide at the intersection of the two hallways, or else risk being caught, a girl undoubtedly about to be fired, to be yanked from the inner circle that I, no matter how much I didn’t want it, inhabited, too.

When the door finally opened and Father Dave came rushing out, I had never run so fast in my life. In five steps I crashed backwards into the office chair, which rolled until it collided with the cherry wood desk. Under any other circumstance it would have taken twenty. My heart stayed in my throat until he stormed past the office and back into the kitchen.

I had to stay until almost eleven o’clock, waiting for the phone to ring or someone to walk into the office. Neither of these things happened. After three hours of twiddling my thumbs and watching cars drive by, I went back into the kitchen to ask the priest if I could leave.

He was sitting around the table with Gloria and a few other regular members of the Inner Circle—though I couldn’t help but notice Jerolyn’s absence. The smoke hung thicker in the air than usual.

When Father Dave saw me coming toward him, he said, “What are you still doing here?”

I shrugged, unable to say anything, and stood there until he told me to leave.

Later that night, my mom asked me how everything went. Fine, I told her. Smooth. Everyone seemed to really enjoy it.

The whole time, Father Dave’s warning about secrecy echoed through my head.

* * *

After the scene with Jerolyn in the Sacristy, I started to notice the flaws in Father Dave’s Masses. Watching them unfold was like watching a play, only this time I had the script in my hands. I wasn’t just another member of the audience; I was the stage manager, and Father Dave was the star that people had paid hundreds—no, thousands—to see.

Enter stage right, through the fog of incense that he always wanted weaving through the church. He’d come down the center aisle, head held high, singing along in his awful voice like he had never forgotten praising God was his job. He’d get up to the altar and listen to the first and second readings with his head cocked to the side, nodding along with certain passages and dropping his head to his chest with others. Then he’d read the gospel like he’d written it himself and this was his breakout public reading, and all the little old ladies would stare up at him, lulled by the low rumble of his voice.

It was the homily, though, that captivated everyone in the church. Every week he started off with a story that he told with emphasis in all the right places: he yelled into the microphone as he talked about God and helping your neighbor and the pearly gates of heaven, and whisper when it was time for the Big Message to slide through the microphone. He paused at the end and gazed out over his congregation, then walked slowly, dramatically, back to his seat on the other side of the sanctuary. The whole church would sit in silence, looking at him or their hands or their hymnals, but all of them lost in his message. Even crying babies realized that something important had just been said, and their wails faded into the quiet.

Then, at the end of Mass, he would go back down the center aisle to the strains of the recessional hymn and wait at the door, as usual, to shake hands with the parishioners. I followed my mom to the back of the church, wringing my hands the whole way. Right in front of us was the woman who kept sending pleas to Father Dave to baptize her new grandchild—the pleas he kept throwing in the garbage. When she reached the priest, he took her hands in his own.

“Did you get my letter?” she asked him.

“Letter?” he asked, his voice thick with fake innocence. “No, I haven’t seen anything come in the mail from you lately.”

“Oh—well, maybe we can set up an appointment sometime this week…?”

“Sure, just call the office sometime; I’m sure we can set something up,” he told her, and moved her along the line.

Bullshit, I thought.

This was his real acting, the hard-core stuff. The parishioners flocked to the back of the church to shake hands with the good father, the man who had met the Pope and learned from the Cardinals, who they all wanted to see as a bishop some day. The man so many looked up to, but so few were close to. The man that they never got an opportunity to see at work behind closed doors.

* * *

My mom had invited Cliff over for brunch after church that day and was standing in the kitchen, frying up a batch of her secret-recipe French toast and a package of maple sausage when Cliff knocked on the door.

“Honey, can you please get that,” my mom begged, “unless you want to be eating a burnt breakfast.”

There wasn’t much to debate on. Her French toast is one of those things I would die to eat, and burning it is a sin. Opening the door for Cliff was the lesser of two evils, regrettably.

I dragged my feet to the front of the house to greet Cliff. He was standing on the porch with a huge bouquet of lilies and orchids, and their sweet smell gently wafted toward me.

“Hey, Cat,” he said, flashing a smile.

“My mom’s in the kitchen,” I said, not bothering to say ‘hi’ back.

“I’ll go see her in a second—I wanted to show you something first.”

“I’m not interested.”

“You never know. You might be.” He motioned for me to follow him out to his car, and I went.

He drove a black Volvo. There was a thin scrapbook sitting on the leather-covered passenger seat, and he picked it up and handed it to me. The white cover was blank, so I opened it.

Even though the book was thin, the inside was full of newspaper clippings. Some of them were yellow and crumbling at the edges, while others were fairly new and still that same dull gray color of a fresh-printed paper. They were all different shapes and sizes, but they all had one thing in common, and that was the man staring up from the pictures scattered through the book.

Local Officer Pulls Man out of Icy River, one of headlines read. Robbery Results in Shootout; Officer Makes Arrest. Hostages Recovered by S.W.A.T. Team Hero.

On and on it went, so many of them sounding brave and daring and impressive, all of them about my dad.

“Your mom found them the other night, cleaning out her closet,” he explained. “I had them all laminated—see?—so they’ll stay preserved for you. My niece put it all together…but only after I promised to have twelve dozen cannoli and three whole tiramisu made for her bake sale next Wednesday.”

I could feel tears trying to press their way into my eyes as I flipped through the pages. Some of these stories I remembered, some of them happened before I was even born. I could still see the one about the hostages as it played out live on the six o’clock news that night. My mom and I sat on the couch, her arms wrapped around my shoulders as I asked her if Daddy was going to be home that night.

“I know how much he meant to you,” Cliff said, “and I want you to know that I’d never try to replace that. Ever.”

How dare he, I thought. These were my memories, things from my life that neither Cliff nor his grimy, demanding little niece had any right to touch.

I closed the book and gave it back to him. “I don’t want it,” I lied. Because really, I would love to have every page, each one brimming with all of his highest points, all of his hardest work. Everything that showed he really was a hero to me, and not just because he was my dad. Of course I wanted the book. Just not from Cliff. “Take it back,” I told him.

He looked hurt. “Really? I thought maybe you’d—”

“Well, I don’t,” I interrupted, not really caring about what he had to say. I turned to go back inside.

“Look, Cat,” he called after me, just before I opened the door, “things can’t be the way they used to. You just have to try and find a new kind of normal.”

* * *

Soon, I started to feel like I was working behind the scenes on a season of Survivor. No one, not even me, really knew who was going to be favored, or who was going to get voted off the island next. And me—I imagined myself to be one of the cameramen, forced to stand there and watch people waste into emaciation and eat dirt while I have a nice trailer somewhere in the woods, complete with an overflowing mini fridge. Forced to be a silent participant.

The next day that I was scheduled to work after the spaghetti dinner, Father Dave was waiting for me in the rectory office.

“Do not let Jerolyn come inside anymore, you hear me?” he ordered.

I nodded mechanically as he turned on his heel and stormed back to the kitchen. Jerolyn’s car pulled into the parking lot shortly after, and my heart froze when I saw her walking toward the rectory through the wide-paned front window. Any other day I would have been thrilled to see her, to talk about books or recipes or whatever kind of funny thing her grandchildren did at their regular Sunday dinners. Now, I wondered if she’d heard the news of her ex-communication and dreaded the prospect of telling her about it myself.

She was smiling, like always, as she came closer, and the excuses started to run through my brain: Father Dave isn’t here. They’re painting in the living room and no one’s allowed to go back. He’s having a meeting and said not to let anyone in. I wondered if I would even have to tell her any of that, or if she’d know.

It was obvious as soon as Jerolyn came into the lobby that all of that planning, any excuse, was completely unnecessary. Her thin hands were clutched around a tall Tupperware container, her hair swept away from her face like a bird’s wings, and her expression so not Jerolyn that suddenly, I knew I wouldn’t have to say anything at all.

“Hi, Sweetie,” she said, a trace of her old smile crossing her face, but it never reached her eyes. “I brought dinner for Father Dave, if you want to take it back to him for me.”

“Sure,” I said, and got up to meet her at the side door to take the pasta-filled container. A peace offering. The best Jerolyn could offer.

With a sad smile, Jerolyn waved and left the lobby. I took the container back to Father Dave, who was sitting at the table—like always—smoking a cigarette and reading the paper, CNN quietly playing the background. It was one of the rare times I’d seen him alone.

“Jerolyn brought dinner for you,” I said, opening the fridge to put her food on the bottom shelf, like I always did when she didn’t have time to go back and visit.

“Wait a second,” he said. “Give me that.”

I let the refrigerator fall closed behind me with a cold woosh as I handed him the Tupperware. He peered through the clear plastic with narrowed eyes, took the top off and smelled it. Made a face. Covered it up again.

“Put it down the disposal,” he said.

“What?”

“The disposal,” he repeated, slowly, as if I were incapable of understanding. “Dump it in the sink and get rid of it.”

I had no words at that moment. All I could do was nod. I took the pasta to the sink, flipped off the lid, and dumped it in. I let it sit there for a minute, bright green against the stainless steel sink, before I pushed it down the drain. The smells of basil and onion and something wonderful that I couldn’t identify filled the kitchen, and I knew Father Dave must have smelled it, too. I grabbed a wooden spoon, pushed the noodles into the disposal, and let it roar to life, let it scream and growl the way I wanted to.

* * *

I returned to the office, sat in the computer chair, and stared at the wall. The sun streamed in through the windows, tinted scarlet from the curtains. I was stuck in that color, drowning, just one tiny corner of a giant stained-glass window that someone should have broken a long time ago.

The phone rang. I watched the red light next to line three blink. I wondered if it was the woman he’d told to call the rectory office to set up a meeting. I had a wild impulse to do something horrible, to answer the phone and tell whatever parishioner happened to be on the other end what a terrible human being their priest was, to get out while they still could.

I was so sick of it, the silence, the secrecy, the demand that I keep my mouth shut. What made it all worse was that I was playing right into Father Dave’s game, just another rung on the ladder he was stepping all over.

Maybe since he kept me around because I wouldn’t speak, and I couldn’t make myself do it, I could try that nonverbal communication thing he’d mentioned in the last bereavement meeting—to try and make things normal. And, well, maybe it was time Father Dave saw the normal Cat.

The phone rang again, and I thought of Cliff. He was actually trying hard to put good into the world, not once thinking about himself—trying to make other people comfortable before himself. Yet he was the one who saw the side of me Father Dave deserved. It rang again.

I could have answered it, could have followed my impulse. I could have told another lie, made another excuse for why Father Dave wasn’t going to come to the phone.

What I reached for, though, wasn’t the phone. It was my bag, my car keys, my books. I didn’t even bother to put them in the bag, but carried them out in a haphazard pile. Just before the heavy lobby door slid shut behind me, I saw my copy of the rectory keys dangling on the edge of the cherry wood desk.

Father Dave saw me drive past the kitchen window, sunroof open to the blue sky over my head, music pounding through the subwoofer in the trunk. His expressionless face finally twisted into some kind of emotion—maybe anger or surprise, or a little bit of both.

I smiled, waved—almost gave him the finger. But that didn’t seem like something you should do to a priest.