by M. O. Walsh
* * *
—
Look, Father, this ain’t easy to talk about. But I go to a lot of websites, you understand. Websites for adults. They’ve got all sorts of stuff out there, I’m telling you. American ones and European ones and Mexican ones. A lot of stuff out of Prague, it seems. I mean, I feel like I’ve visited most of Prague at this point. And I’m married, you know, and so I steer clear of all that stuff that’s trying to get you to meet up with local women and the like. I don’t mess with all those horny-local-MILF-type things. I mean, I have boundaries. I just look at those ones with videos of people I’ll never meet. It’s all on the up and up, is what I’m saying. I don’t do anything wrong. There’s nothing illegal about it, is what I’m saying. But what I’m trying to communicate here is that I go to these websites a lot. Hell, you can get them on your phone if you want. Now, I don’t really want to put a number on how many times I’ve gone to these various sites but I’d be willing to bet that it is pretty surprising. I’ll be at work sometimes. Or I’ll go into the kitchen when my wife’s asleep. Anytime she leaves me alone at the house, really. And I think it’s been a good thing, in the big picture. I think it’s helped me to stay faithful, you know, to be able to sort of relieve myself when I need to. Because God knows my wife doesn’t always want to stop her life every time I get a notion, and I understand that. I’m not mad about it. I probably wouldn’t want to sleep with me, either. So, it’s not about her at all, really. The problem, though, is that I’m forty-eight years old and I’ve been doing this awhile and I think I’ve finally seen every single video out there that interests me. I’ll just go from site to site now, sort of aimless, and there isn’t anything I haven’t already clicked on. I can’t find anything I like that I haven’t already seen, is what I’m saying. It’s all just the same body parts over and over doing the same up-and-down motions and it makes me sort of scared, Father. Does that make sense? I guess it’s got me thinking: Well, now what?
* * *
—
Forgive me, Father, but I don’t know how much I should say. I mean, there are definitely some things that went down a few months ago with the team that nobody is really talking about. Some pretty terrible things that I saw and was sort of involved in, I guess, but I didn’t think it would go that far. They were like, I guess, we, were sort of like animals now that I think about it. It started off fun enough, but you could tell that she, I don’t know. I feel terrible about it, honestly. And then he died that night, though, so everybody was kind of distracted for a while, I guess. But it keeps coming back to me. I’m sort of worried that she’ll try to get us back, somehow. No. No. I’m not like filing any report or anything. I thought this was a sort of safe space. No. I don’t want to give any specifics. I mean, I think, at some level, it’s probably a legal matter. That’s why I can’t say too much. We took a sort of oath. But I guess what I’m really wanting to ask you about is forgiveness, Father. For a person who did something. Is that a real thing?
* * *
—
Forgive me, Father, for I have committed the sin of lying. I have faked no less than fourteen orgasms with my boyfriend since my last confession. But, you know, that was a while ago so I’m not sure if that’s a lot or, maybe, like, right in the middle.
* * *
—
Forgive me, Father, but I got this readout. Just the other day, and do you know what it said? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to cry. But do you know what it said? It said Ballerina, Father. Ballerina! Just when I’d almost forgotten. I’m sorry. It’s just that when I was a little girl and all through high school, if you only knew how hard I worked. How hard I trained. The money my parents spent. I guess it just reminded me. I’m sorry. I’ll stop. I promise. But I guess it just reminded me, you know, of how I never wanted children. We were so young and stupid and this has never been my life, really. I’m sorry, Father. But all of these years, you know? So many years. My own children. It made me remember. I’ve never wanted them.
* * *
—
Forgive me, Father. I skipped in line. I’m in a rush. Anyway, I heard a rumor that Principal Pat is retiring. Is that true? If so, you have got to talk her out of it. It’s the middle of the semester, for goodness’ sake. The kids have PSATs coming up and district playoffs and the silent auction and the prom. And as a volunteer member, and I should stress volunteer member, of the DCH Mother’s Club, I’ve got to tell you that we just can’t handle any more work. We’ve already been worked to death with this bicentennial business. And so you just need to tell her please, if you will, to cool her jets. She just needs to wait until the end of the term, is all. Thank you. I should also mention that I now have thirty-three thousand dollars in credit card debt. No. No. He still doesn’t know about it.
* * *
—
Forgive me, Father, but I am ridiculously hungover. What makes it worse, of course, is that I got drunk with a priest last night. Now, I’ve always heard the Catholic church was pretty loosey-goosey when it came to alcohol, but you should have seen the shots this guy put away. I mean, yowza. Do they teach that in seminary, Father? Me and the mayor couldn’t hardly keep up with him. Yes, he was corrupting our town mayor, too, if you can believe it. But this priest was pretty good at telling jokes, I have to admit, and seems like a nice person, so it was a good time. But, anyway, this priest, maybe you know him, he had to hitch a ride home, he’d had so many. He didn’t even have his truck there, now that I think about it. Maybe we drank it? I’m not sure. Anyway, I’m just realizing, Father, that it was rude of me to not offer him a ride to school when Tipsy dropped me off. We were going to the same place, after all, but I was just so hungover and sort of lost in my thoughts that I didn’t even consider it. It was rude and I apologize. But, anyway, it’s three-fifteen now, Father. It’s quitting time. And I guess what I’m wondering is: Do you need a ride somewhere?
23
The Yield Went Around, and Around, and Around
After Confession, the men hatched a plan.
Douglas would drive Pete over to Geoffrey’s place so he could make his lesson at four o’clock. Then Pete could take Douglas’s car, which was, of course, actually Cherilyn’s car, out to Lanny’s to check on Trina, who they’d never found at school. He could be back in an hour, Pete told him, no problem. It was just something he needed to do.
“You ever get one bad feeling about something?” Pete asked him. “And then you look around and it seems like there’s just bad feelings all around you? Like they’re multiplying?”
“I get that feeling every time my seventh period Civics class walks into the room.”
“Look,” Pete said. “I’ve been sitting in the booth all day so, you know, I’m sort of in the mood to confess something myself. After the bar last night, when Tipsy was driving us home, when you were whistling, which was beautiful, by the way, I think I saw Trina outside somebody’s house. I saw her crawling through a window.”
“You think she’s got a boyfriend?”
“No, it didn’t look like that. I’m afraid she might have been robbing the place.”
“Uh-oh,” Douglas said, and hit his brake. They’d reached a four-way stop outside of the square and the traffic was at a standstill. He’d never seen so many cars in Deerfield, delivery trucks and pickups loaded with tent poles and folding chairs, and, as he sat there, Douglas realized that he couldn’t wait for this whole thing to be over. He looked at the car to his right and saw the person in it look to their right, and that person look to theirs, not merely out of politeness, as it might have on any previous day in Deerfield, but rather because none of the cars had anywhere to go. Deerfield, it seemed, was completely full.
“I just want to go see her, is all,” Pete said. “I just want to talk to her.”
“You sure?” Douglas said. “Shouldn’t this be more of a police matter? Or maybe something for you to tell Lanny
about?”
“I know,” Pete said. “I just want to give her a chance to explain first. She doesn’t have many people in her corner, including her dad. He’s in his own corner, I believe.”
Douglas finally got a chance to pull up and then immediately stopped again on the other side of the intersection. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, and then regretted it, realizing he’d lackadaisically broken one of the Ten Commandments right there in front of a priest.
Pete didn’t mention it, though, and the reason for this was soon obvious. He was looking out of the window and trying not to cry in the passenger seat. Douglas could feel it. There was a different energy in the car now, a sort of dark electricity. When Pete finally did speak, he had to clear his throat first and had a little hitch in his voice. “I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, I read these things about her on the restroom walls and it hurts.” He pressed his fingers to his eyes.
Douglas cut a right and went through a parking lot to break free of the traffic. He looked over at Pete and then back to the road. “I understand,” Douglas said, but what he meant by this was that he understood that Pete was crying over there now, and that the thing one man does when another is crying is to sort of open space for them, to not interrupt, to not offer any advice. To watch a man cry in front of another is a rare thing, like seeing the place where lightning begins, and it doesn’t need comment.
“I’m sorry,” Pete said, and took a sharp breath through his nose. “But Reconciliation weighs on me. It always has. Especially with these kids. It’s like I hear their voices in there one week and they’re a kid and the next week they’ve done something and suddenly they’re a grown-up. It happens so fast and I can hear it. It makes me sad. I feel like we had this whole stretch of sort of in-between time when we were coming up, you know? And now I hear it in their voices so quickly. It’s regret, I guess. These kids do something they regret and then it’s over. Boom. All of a sudden, they’re just like the rest of us.”
Douglas drove without speaking as the two of them, although they did not acknowledge it, began to do what many men do when presented with enormous and unsolvable problems. They tried to solve them. What would they do if they were parents? they wondered. How would they fix this issue? Maybe they could be stern, or honest, or maybe give their kids a little more understanding, a little more forgiveness. Whatever they did would work. Or else, of course, it would fail. Those were the odds of good intentions.
“I sometimes think that my being a teacher would help,” Douglas said. “Being around kids so much. It would help me understand them. But, in some ways, I think it does the opposite.”
Pete breathed in through his nose. He straightened his posture in the car as if trying to change the subject. “Did y’all not ever want kids?” he asked. “You and Cherilyn.”
“No, we did,” Douglas said. “Tried for a few years. Got tested and everything checked out. My boys can swim, as they say, and everything is in working order for her, as well. But then you reach that point where it’s either spend all your life savings chasing after it, sort of make your whole life about it, or else you let it go.”
“Some things aren’t that easy to let go of,” Pete said.
“I know,” Douglas said. “We saw couples like that at the doctor, doing all these treatments, young couples like we were then, giving each other shots and making all sorts of schedules and we saw the fear in their eyes when it wasn’t working. It was like you could see them thinking, Why am I even with this person? I know Cherilyn would be a great mother. She’s the kindest person I know. But I never wanted us to be like that, planning everything around some dream that may never come true. Always thinking of what we don’t have instead of what we do.”
“You know what they say,” Pete said. “There’s only one way to make God laugh.”
“What’s that?” Douglas asked.
“Make a plan,” Pete said.
Douglas smiled at the saying, but this idea immediately made him consider his own plan from that morning. Sitting Cherilyn down to destroy her newfound desire. Is that really what he wanted to do? What kind of person would that make him? he wondered. Would he still be a husband, or even a friend, if that was his tactic? Or would that make him, too, like Trina, some sort of thief? He turned on to Willow Street and headed toward Geoffrey’s.
“What about you?” Douglas asked. “I’m assuming you never wanted any since you’re not allowed to, you know.”
Pete looked at him.
“Not allowed to what?” he said. “Do the hokeypokey?”
“I was going to say ‘marry.’”
“Well,” Pete said. “I was married. A long time ago. Before seminary.”
“Did I know that?”
Pete smiled. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s not really something I broadcast.”
Douglas thought of the possibilities of a once-married man becoming a priest and none of the ways through which this could happen were good. He had a feeling that a priest couldn’t be divorced, and that knowledge limited the unfortunate options to one.
“I’m sorry,” Douglas said. “I didn’t know.”
“That’s the reason I got into this business, to be honest with you,” he said. “If I can be honest with you.”
“Would you prefer I put a little screen up between us?” Douglas asked. “Make you feel more at home?”
“No,” Pete said. “I’m good. It’s just that we thought she was pregnant. I don’t tell many people this, but we wanted to have kids, too, you know. And we thought she was. She was gaining weight and all, and we were excited. But it turned out it wasn’t a baby. The whole thing happened pretty fast after that.”
“Jesus,” Douglas said.
Pete looked over at him. “That was my thought, too,” he said. “It was either Jesus all the way or become the type of person I couldn’t recover from.”
“Can I ask her name?” Douglas said.
“Anna,” Pete said, and leaned his back on the seat. “Her name is Anna.”
“Okay,” Douglas said.
“Anna,” Pete said again.
“Anna,” Douglas said, and was overcome with a feeling of respect for Pete at that moment. It was a feeling he did not know the reason for. Was it his faith? His honesty? His choice to do something positive in the wake of a horror that Douglas could not even bring himself to consider: the loss of Cherilyn. What would it do to him? He already felt like an emotional train wreck and he and Cherilyn hadn’t even spoken about their readouts. They’d not even had an argument. How could Pete survive something like Anna’s death? The idea awed him.
They drove in silence until they pulled into Geoffrey’s apartment complex. “You know,” Douglas said. “The more I talk to you, the more I realize I have like a thousand different questions to ask a priest. I mean, not like spiritual questions, although I have some of those, too, but more like day-to-day questions.”
“Anytime,” Pete said. “Shoot.”
“Okay,” Douglas said. “For starters, does the collar hurt? Is it kind of like a necktie? I can’t stand to wear a tie.”
“Nah,” Pete said. “I forget it’s there sometimes.”
“Okay, then. Since you do Mass so often, do you ever just, like, totally space out and forget what passage you’re reading?”
“No,” Pete said. “It’s the Holy Sacraments. I consider it pretty important to stay tuned in.”
“Fair enough,” Douglas said. “So, what about God? Does He ever talk directly to you? Like, do you have some sort of special link?”
“Yes,” Pete said. “But it’s probably not any different than the way He speaks directly to you.”
Douglas parked.
“Last one,” he said. “My favorite part of Mass, ever since I was a kid, is when the priest holds up the wafers.”
Pete smiled. “The Body of Christ?” he said.
“Yes, sorry. When he holds up the Body of Christ and the bells are ringing and he sort of sings that line, ‘The myssssterrryyyy offfff faaiiiiitthhhhh.’”
“Yep,” Pete said. “That’s a good one.”
“The priest before you did it differently, you know. His was sort of low and yours is sort of wistful, which I prefer. I love the way you do it, actually. It’s like this little one-line song I find myself whistling sometimes. And so, my question is: Can a priest just sort of decide how they want to do that? I mean, is that something you practice?”
Pete smiled again. “Maybe,” he said.
Douglas looked at him. “So, all over the world, there are, like, hundreds of up-and-coming priests just standing in front of the mirror and singing? There’s like this whole choir of them practicing, all alone, ‘the mystery of faith’?”
“That’s a nice way to think of it,” Pete said. “You want to hear it?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Try it with me,” he said.
Pete pulled down the visor of the Outback and flipped open the mirror. “It feels good,” he said.
And so Douglas did the same, pulling down the visor of his wife’s car to take a look at himself. And then the two of them, together, in the parking lot of the Scenic Wetlands Apartments and Balconies complex, sang, “The mysssterrrrrryyy off faiiiiith.”
24
We’ll Record It Live, That’s No Jive
Douglas heard them before he was halfway up the stairs.