The parishioners looked dazed, but happy. The only thing good Catholics love more than God is a short service. Keep your organ music, your choir, keep your incense and processionals. Give us a priest with one eye on the Bible and the other on the clock, and we’ll pack the place like it’s a turkey raffle the week before Thanksgiving.
As the ushers worked backward through the pews with wicker donation baskets, Father McKendrick ripped through the offering of the gifts and the blessing of the host with a look on his face that told the two eleven-year-olds assisting him that this wasn’t JV, this was varsity, so step up your game, boys, and make it snappy.
Roughly three and a half minutes later, just after bolting through the Our Father, the Reverend McKendrick had us offer the sign of peace. He didn’t look too happy about it, but there were rules, I guess. I shook the hands of the husband and wife beside me, as well of those of the three old men in the pew behind me and the two old women in the pew ahead.
I managed to catch Angie’s eye as I did. She was up front, nine rows from the altar, and as she turned to shake the hand of the pudgy teenage boy behind her, she saw me. Something maybe a little surprised, a little happy, and a little hurt passed over her face, and then she dipped her chin slightly in recognition. I hadn’t seen her in six months, but I manfully resisted the urge to wave and let out a loud whoop. We were in church, after all, where loud displays of affection are frowned on. Further, we were in Father McKendrick’s church, and I had the feeling that if I whooped, he’d send me to hell.
Another seven minutes, and we were out of there. If it was all up to McKendrick, we would have hit the street in four, but several older parishioners slowed the line during Holy Communion and Father McKendrick watched them struggle to approach him on their walkers with a face that said, God might have all day, but I don’t.
On the sidewalk outside the church, I watched Angie exit and stop at the top of the stairs to speak to an older gentleman in a seersucker suit. She shook his trembling hand with both of hers, stooped as he said something to her, smiled broadly when he finished. I caught the pudgy thirteen-year-old craning his head out from behind his mother’s arm to peer at Angie’s cleavage while she was stooped over the man in the seersucker. The kid felt my eyes on him and turned to look at me, his face blooming red with good old-fashioned Catholic guilt around a minefield of acne. I shook a stern finger at him, and the kid blessed himself hurriedly and looked down at his shoes. Next Saturday, he’d be in the confessional, owning up to feelings of lust. At his age, probably a thousand counts of it.
That’ll be six hundred Hail Marys, my son.
Yes, Faddah.
You’ll go blind, son.
Yes, Faddah.
Angie worked her way down through the crowd milling on the stone steps. She used the backs of her fingers to move the bangs out of her eyes, though she could have solved the problem simply by raising her head. She kept it down, though, as she approached me, fearful perhaps that I’d see something in her face that would either make my day or break my heart.
She’d cut her hair. Cut it short. All those abundant tangles of rich cocoa, streaked with auburn during late spring and summer, rope-thick tresses that had flowed to her lower back and splayed completely across her pillow and onto mine, that could take an hour to brush if she were dressing up for the night-were gone, replaced by a chin-skimming bob that dropped in sweeps over her cheekbones and ended hard at the nape of her neck.
Bubba would weep if he knew. Well, maybe not weep. Shoot someone. Her hairdresser, for starters.
“Don’t say a word about the hair,” she said when she raised her head.
“What hair?”
“Thank you.”
“No, I meant it-what hair?”
Her caramel eyes were dark pools. “Why are you here?”
“I heard the sermons rocked.”
She shifted her weight from her right foot to the left. “Ha.”
“I can’t drop by?” I said. “See an old pal?”
Her lips tightened. “We agreed after the last drop-by that the phone would do. Didn’t we?”
Her eyes filled with hurt and embarrassment and damaged pride.
The last time was winter. We’d met for coffee. Had lunch. Moved on to drinks. Like pals do. Then we were suddenly on the living room rug in her new apartment, voices hoarse, clothes back in the dining room. It had been angry, mournful, violent, exhilarating, empty sex. And after, back in the dining room, picking up our clothes and feeling the room’s winter chill suck the heat from our flesh, Angie had said, “I’m with someone.”
“Someone?” I found my thermal sweatshirt under a chair, pulled it over my head.
“Someone else. We can’t do this. This ride has to end.”
“Come back to me, then. The hell with Someone.”
Naked from the waist up and pissed off about it, she looked at me, her fingers untangling the straps of the bra she’d found on the dining room table. As a guy, I had the better deal-I could dress quicker; find my boxers, jeans, and sweatshirt, and I was good to go.
Angie, untangling that bra, looked abandoned.
“We don’t work, Patrick.”
“Sure, we do.”
On went the bra with a hard sense of finality as she snapped the straps together in back and searched the chair seats for her sweater.
“No, we don’t. We want to, but we don’t. All the little things? We’re fine. But the crucial things? We’re a mess.”
“And you and Someone?” I said, and stepped into my shoes. “You’re all hunky-dory across the board, are you?”
“Could be, Patrick. Could be.”
I watched her pull the sweater over her head, then shrug that abundant hair out of the collar.
I picked my jacket up off the floor. “If Someone’s so simpatico with you, Ange, what was what we just did in the living room?”
“A dream,” she said.
I glanced across the foyer at the rug. “Nice dream.”
“Maybe,” she said in a monotone. “But I’m up now.”
It was a late afternoon in January when I left Angie’s. The city was stripped of color. I slipped on the ice and grabbed the trunk of a black tree to steady myself. I stood with my hand on the tree for a long time. I stood and waited for something to fill me up again.
Eventually, I moved on. It was getting dark and colder and I had no gloves. I had no gloves, and the wind was picking up.
“You heard about Karen Nichols,” I said as Angie and I walked under sun-mottled trees in Bay Village.