Saints for All Occasions

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  He wanted to ask her about her sister. But he knew she wouldn’t want to discuss it, not with a house full of people.

  There was a voice in the doorway. “Brian?”

  Ashley.

  He hadn’t given her the address. The last thing he wanted was to introduce her to his mother, especially now. He had succeeded at keeping them apart at the funeral home, a small miracle.

  Brian went to her, tried to guide her toward the food in the other room.

  “Hungry?” he said.

  But Ashley pushed her way into the kitchen.

  “Ashley Conroy,” she said, hand outstretched to Nora. “I didn’t get to say it back there, but I’m so sorry about Patrick.”

  “Thank you,” Nora said softly.

  “We all loved him. He made so many people so happy.”

  “You knew him,” Nora said.

  “Yes. It’s terrible what happened. Could have happened to half the people I know if I’m being honest. I cried all day at work just thinking of it. Of him.”

  It was too much. Ashley never knew when to shut up, just said exactly what she was thinking. But Nora looked grateful. She squeezed Ashley’s hand. He hadn’t expected that.

  “Go on and get some dinner before it’s all cold,” Nora said after a minute. “It was nice to meet you, Ashley.”

  For the next few hours, people stood shoulder to shoulder, the house too warm from the heat of so many bodies packed inside. Brian rotated through them, not paying attention, with Ashley forever at his heels.

  At one point, he excused himself to go to the bathroom, and when he came out, she was standing there laughing with Bridget and Maeve and Julia and Natalie. He could almost see it. A girl who would be his, connected to him on days like this one, and on good days too. Someone you wanted to keep around.

  Eventually, they reached the point in the night when people had had so much to drink that they set their beer bottles down, three-quarters full, and then forgot them, opened another. The conversations grew louder. In the crowded living room, John held court at the center of a circle of work colleagues, talking about the upcoming inauguration. Eileen Delaney whispered something to the neighborhood ladies in the corner.

  Lots of nights since his father died, the doorbell rang after dinner. His mother would turn to him as they watched TV, frown deeply, and say, “Eileen.”

  But soon after, he’d hear them laughing in the kitchen. They’d stay down there all night.

  The Rafferty cousins were having a family reunion in the hall, telling stories as they balanced plates of food on their laps, the chairs dragged out from the kitchen or the dining room. On the back porch, old-timers smoked cigarettes. Years ago, they would have smoked them in the house. The memory of this seemed to keep them tethered to the door—they would travel no farther—as if at any moment the rules might be reversed again.

  It was a Tuesday evening. Right now, Nora should be listening to the radio in the kitchen as she made dinner. Brian might be in his room playing a video game before his evening shift, or else doing something around the house for her. There would be that pleasant silence between them. Enough to know the other one was somewhere nearby.

  Instead, the rooms were full of people. He kept expecting Patrick to come around a corner. Brian found himself wandering, then realized he was looking for his brother.

  He told Ashley she should go home before the bars closed and it became impossible to find street parking, but she said, “Don’t be silly, you need me here.”

  Just after eleven, he entered the dining room, where the table now looked like a battle had been fought on it. Cheese congealed on what remained of the lasagna. The ham was sliced clear down to the bone. A glob of tomato sauce stained the white tablecloth, a ring of grease at the edge. The salads were mostly gone. The sandwiches no longer in their tiers but picked over, put back. The roast beef and turkey had gone quickly. Now there was just the odd tuna salad, mayonnaise breeding bacteria between neat triangles of white bread.

  As he reached for one of the last intact crackers on the tray, the chatter in the other rooms came to a sudden halt.

  Brian heard his mother saying something, her voice too loud. A toast? A speech? It wasn’t like her. He followed the sound.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m very tired,” Nora said. “You all need to go home now.”

  Their faces registered surprise, embarrassment, regret, offense. They gathered their coats and left faster than he would have thought possible. His cousin Matty offered to drive Aunt Kitty. Ashley said she would see Brian tomorrow. She kissed him on the cheek.

  Only Eileen protested.

  “Let me stay and help you clean up,” she said.

  “No,” Nora said firmly. “Thank you.”

  Then it was just the family, standing in the hallway, looking at her. She had never brought a wake to a close.

  “Mom?” Bridget said.

  Nora surveyed the rooms, walking from one to the next with all of them behind her. Half-empty beer cans and glasses of wine sat on every table, and on the floor. In the rush to leave, people had abandoned their dirty plates on chairs, or under them.

  Brian expected his mother to sigh and pull a garbage bag from the cupboard. But instead she said, “I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  They watched her climb the stairs.

  The rest of them started picking up. In silence, Maeve loaded the dishwasher, and John soaked the pans in the sink. Brian and Julia filled three black garbage bags. Bridget and Natalie brought in everything from the dining room.

  “This feels weird,” Julia said. “Nora letting us do this. She wouldn’t even let me fold the napkins at Thanksgiving until we’d been married ten years.”

  They were all silent, until Natalie said, “Should someone go talk to her?”

  “I will,” Bridget said.

  She came back down a few minutes later.

  “How is she?” Julia asked.

  “She’s all right. I think it just got to be too much for her.”

  Brian opened the back door to put the trash bags on the porch, the cold air a welcome shock. He picked up a can of beer. It had some weight to it. He looked down at his hand, rimmed in black ash. They’d been putting cigarette butts inside.

  He wiped his hand on the side of his pants, reopened a bag, and tossed the can in.

  He remembered a time when wakes were fun. When he was a kid and someone his parents didn’t know all that well died, they’d sometimes bring him to the funeral home. Brian would wait in the car, and if he behaved, they’d go for ice cream after.

  Family wakes, hosted by his mother, were even better. Especially when Nora had yet to bury anyone her own age, let alone anyone younger. Only old people, about whom everyone could say with assurance, “He had a good long life.” The house would be full of revelers, boisterous laughter, his father and uncles singing Irish songs in the kitchen, two or three of them playing the bodhran, tapping out a rhythm in time with the rest. The accents got stronger when they were together.

  Brian would be sent to bed at some point, but soon after he’d creep out into the hall, looking down at them through the railings under the banister, until someone spotted him and beckoned him to come back down. He’d join the crowd, bouncing merrily around, his mother taking note of him, shaking her head in disapproval, but with a smile that let him know she didn’t really mind.

  The next morning, he would creep downstairs in his pajamas and survey the scene. Adults asleep in their clothes on couches and carpets, their mouths hanging open. The smell of stale beer in the air. There would be bowls of potato chips and honey-roasted peanuts still out on the coffee table, and he’d swipe a handful, delighted by the small rebellion. Brian would pretend he was the lone survivor of a shipwreck, bodies strewn all around, until someone opened an eye and whispered, “Hey, kiddo. Good morning.”

  —

  Three hours later, John, Bridget, and Brian sat at the kitchen table, all of them hammered. The over
fed dog snored under Bridget’s chair. Around midnight, Julia had taken Maeve up to bed in John’s old room and never come back down. Natalie went up soon after.

  They spoke of various people they had seen earlier. When Bridget started talking about the nun, her voice was louder than she realized. John shushed her, pointing upward. Nora’s room.

  “Did you see how Mom just ignored her?” she said, quieter now. “She didn’t even invite her to come to the house. Her own sister.”

  Brian had been surprised when the woman stepped into the room at O’Dell’s. When he was a child, he was terrified of nuns in their habits the way some kids were scared of clowns. “It’s only an outfit,” Nora would whisper. “Underneath they’re just regular ladies.” But even now, he thought that seeing a nun in habit did something to a person. You saw her, and a whole host of connotations sprang up in your head, having nothing to do with the actual woman. Just the sight of her made you feel safe or scared or angry or blessed, depending.

  “Mom told Julia they had a falling-out,” John said.

  “But what did they fall out over?” Bridget said. “You’re not even curious? I mean, what if the nun was in love with Dad or something.”

  “Because he was so irresistible,” John said.

  Bridget grinned.

  “I generally assume all nuns are lesbians,” John said.

  “Thank God all lesbians aren’t nuns,” Bridget said.

  John raised his beer bottle in agreement.

  This was something new. A shift. Of course they all knew Bridget was gay, but it had rarely been spoken about. Even in recent years, when she brought Natalie home. Tonight at the wake, Brian had seen her take Natalie’s hand in front of them all. He wondered why Bridget had chosen that moment. He looked to his mother, hoped she hadn’t noticed.

  John said, “Have you heard the one about the cloistered nun who took a vow of silence?”

  “Yes,” Bridget said, her tone discouraging.

  It was an old, bad joke of their father’s.

  But John went on, undaunted. “She was allowed to say only two words once every five years. After the first five, she said, ‘Bed hard.’ After ten, she said, ‘Food bad.’ After fifteen, ‘Room cold.’ On her twentieth anniversary at the convent, she announced to the mother superior that she wanted to go home. The mother superior replied, ‘Good riddance! You’ve done nothing but complain since you got here.’ ”

  They laughed, even though it wasn’t funny, John with that heaving sound he made, as if he were coughing something up.

  For a long time, John had this voice he’d put on for work. Serious, kind of schlocky, deeper than he was naturally inclined to be. The family made fun of him for it until Patrick pointed out that John now spoke in that voice all the time. There were only rare glimpses of the old him, but he had appeared here tonight.

  Bridget and John went on for a while, trying to top each other’s bad jokes.

  “Three-legged dog walks into a saloon,” Bridget said. “He hobbles up to the bartender and says, ‘I’m looking for the man who shot my paw.’ ”

  The two of them erupted in laughter.

  “How many Republicans does it take to change a lightbulb?” she said.

  John raised up his hands. “Nope. Not going down that path with you tonight.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  As he often did when he was small, Brian sat listening, not adding anything, no real stake in it, content to follow the sound of their voices. In a family where everyone had been fighting to get a word in since before you were born, you could jump into the fray or step back and let the rest of them do the talking.

  Bridget and John, as different as they were, still shared an ease with each other that stretched back to the early days, something Brian didn’t have with either one of them. Only with Patrick. He wondered if all families were like this, divided into teams.

  When he was born, Bridget and John were ten and eleven. They were often left in charge of him, which made them eager to escape him the rest of the time. Patrick carried Brian around on his shoulders. He took him to the beach, just the two of them. When Patrick moved back to Dorchester, Brian was five. The distance only served to make Brian idolize him more. The big thrill of his week was Sunday afternoon, when Pat came to dinner and paid him to sit by the TV and turn the dial, giving him a quarter each time he changed the channel from one football game to another.

  Brian was the outsider when alone with John and Bridget. In a room with just the two of them, he was always waiting for Patrick to come in and even the score. That would never happen again.

  Bridget reached for a plate of sliced soda bread. The plate was covered in green plastic wrap, the holiday kind, pulled tight, one sheet over the next over the next over the next. Bridget didn’t even try to unwrap it, just jammed her thumb straight through all those layers and pulled out a piece.

  There was always so much soda bread at these things—dry and bland, dense and white, choking you when you took a bite, which you would anyway, hoping somehow they had found a way to improve the stuff since the last time you tried it.

  Bridget bit off one small corner, then put the rest down on the table.

  “What else is there?”

  She tried the fridge, pulled out a baking dish. Chicken Parmesan. She ate it cold, standing up, straight from the pan.

  “Are those two trays with the clear plastic lids still in there?” John said.

  “Yup.”

  “Can you do me a favor and eat one of those instead, so Julia won’t be pissed in the morning?”

  “What are they?”

  “One’s Brie with dates. And the other is shrimp shumai.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Dumplings.”

  Bridget made a face. “No can do, my friend.”

  “Fine. Give me the dumplings.”

  She handed him the tray and John sucked down five of the things.

  “You like your dumplings,” Bridget said.

  “I like keeping the peace.”

  Bridget took a can of Bud Light from the cooler for each of them and set them down. The ice had melted. The cooler was a tub of water now. The cans dripped onto the table. Nora would have rushed to clean it up. But Bridget didn’t even seem to notice.

  “What’s up with your girlfriend?” John asked.

  For a second, Brian thought he was asking Bridget. But John was looking at him.

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” Brian said.

  “I like her,” Bridget said. “She’s nice.”

  “She’s cute,” John said. “How old is she?”

  “Twenty-seven, I think.”

  “You’re thirty-three. You’re gonna have to settle down eventually. I know this is a family of late bloomers, but—”

  “Speaking of,” Bridget said. “I have an announcement. Natalie and I are going to have a baby.”

  She was trying to sound breezy, light, but Brian could tell it was a big deal for her, saying those words.

  He felt stunned. He had never considered the possibility.

  “Holy shit. Natalie’s pregnant?” John said.

  “No. She’s going to be. Soon.”

  “So she’s planning a pregnancy.”

  “Yes, John. Gay women don’t tend to get pregnant by accident.”

  “Will you get married?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

  “When are you going to tell Mom?”

  “Soon. Definitely by the time the kid is in high school.” She sighed. “I’m planning to tell her before we leave.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah. But don’t get too excited. I’ve already tried twice and failed. You two were my practice round. It didn’t go so bad, right? Now. To get my mind off of that terrifying prospect, can we please go back to the nun? I don’t remember ever going to a convent when we were kids. Do you, John?”

  “No.”

  “I wonder if.” She put a hand over her mouth. “Oh.”


  “What?”

  “I almost said, I wonder if Patrick remembers. How does Mom keep a secret like this from us, all this time? We don’t even know that woman, I swear.”

  “She tried to guilt me about how siblings shouldn’t be estranged, it isn’t natural, every time Pat and I stopped speaking,” John said. “How’s that for hypocrisy?”

  Brian thought that maybe it had nothing to do with hypocrisy. Maybe it had cost their mother more than they knew, being apart from her sister for so long. Maybe she was just speaking from experience.

  It didn’t bother him that his mother hadn’t told them about her sister. The family was built on things that went unsaid. There might be hints, whispers from another room that fell to silence when he entered. There were stories he simply accepted that he didn’t know the whole of, and others he didn’t even know he didn’t know the whole of.

  Who wanted to know everything about his own mother?

  He thought about the girls he’d hung around with in college, and the ones he met in his baseball days. Dropping F bombs, wearing red thongs that stuck out above their jeans, having threesomes and then joking about it later. Lots of them were mothers now. Could their children sense it on them, this past that was anything but motherly?

  He wondered what Bridget meant to get out of possessing every fact. It would never answer the questions of how or why the worst things happened. She had said they didn’t know their mother. Brian knew the shape and color of Nora’s underthings hanging on the drying rack in the laundry room. He knew exactly how much milk to add to her Red Rose tea in the morning, the precise shade of the liquid—still dark with a hint of sunset pink. Not too cloudy or she’d sigh. He knew that every December when White Christmas came on television, she’d say that Holiday Inn was far superior to this bit of treacle. But then she’d keep watching, forget herself and sing along.

  She loved gory paperback thrillers. He had once picked up the book his mother was in the middle of, turned to a random page, and found himself reading the details of a horrific rape. Shocking to think that that’s how this sweet smiling lady spent her downtime, though he supposed it was what everyone did. They read about murder and rape and scandal, or else they watched it on TV, to distract themselves from whatever was wrong with their own lives.