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but they weren’t about Mr. Blanchard. They were about the cats running away, or the rectory burning down, or Father Mike vanishing in a blizzard. It takes children a long time to understand what they have lost.
    “He’d better not,” my uncle said, taking my chunk of fudge and wrapping it in wax paper, then wrapping, pointedly, two more pieces for the boys. “Come on. I’ll walk you over there.”
    First he made me brush my teeth and hair. Mrs. Blanchard had her hands full with Buddy and Bernard, and Father Mike was a stickler for good hygiene.
    We took the shortcut, the suggestive scent of early summer emanating from the thickety woods. Father Mike still wore his cassock from the evening Mass—Saturdays tended to be breathless affairs, with nursing-home rounds all afternoon and Mass at five and six-thirty, followed by supper and fudge. Father Mike was holding the cake; I kept my hand on his forearm as we steadied through the approaching dusk and its accompanying rustles, expecting to arrive at the Blanchards’ back door and find their dog, who knew us, ready to let us in.
    But that evening the dog did not let us in; he nosed at the screen door, which had been locked from the inside—an unheard-of custom in Hinton back then, almost an insult to your fellow man. Poor, slow-witted Major butted his head against the door and then gave up, looking mournfully up at us. “Hello?” Father Mike called, peering through the screen.
    Mrs. Blanchard appeared then, emerging from the depths of the house into the ill-lighted foyer, holding a package of frozen peas over one eye. Mariette trailed her, crying, Buddy and Bernard draggling behind, Buddy’s pee-heavy shorts grazing his knees.
    Mrs. Blanchard unlatched the door.
    “What happened?” Father Mike demanded, setting down the cake and prying her fingers from her face. She looked like a child being inspected after a fall off a bike.
    “It was Papa!” Mariette blubbered. Major raised his tragic muzzle, then scuttled into the next room to search out some quiet.
    “Les p’tits,” was all Mrs. Blanchard could choke out. “Father, they saw everything.” She was one of those rare women who look beautiful crying, and despite the peas hunked against her eye, she reminded me of the Weeping Mary statues the nuns at St. Catherine’s gave out for very special rewards.
    “That son of a bitch” Father Mike whispered, and did not take it back. Then, remembering the children, added, “Don’t be afraid, Vivienne. It’s just us now. Don’t cry.” I was struck by the word us as he ministered to this family. He gave the boys a square of fudge and the promise of cake; he calmed Mariette by asking innocuous questions that required only a “yes,” “yes,” “yes” he eased Mrs. Blanchard into one of the kitchen chairs. Us. He seemed to have entered a place that had heretofore been barred from him.
    He did not look like a priest just then, despite his cassock and collar. Neither did he look like my uncle, the one who wore flip-flops and a porkpie hat and embarrassing plaid swim trunks to the beach. Since the age of two I had accompanied him to hospitals and nursing homes, to farmhouses with badly hung doors, to sickrooms ablaze with votives. I had witnessed his kindness, his inclining ways, his bone-deep sweetness. I had seen spits of anger, moments of grief, worshipful bursts of laughter. He was my uncle. He was a priest. This was, I believed, the full repertoire of his responsibility and endeavor.
    Until now. Tenderly, he traced the bruised socket of Mrs. Blanchard’s eye, and she stared straight at him, emitting a raw, womanly rip of pain. His neck reddened from the Roman collar upwards. All at once, he looked—there is no other way to say this—like a man.
    The boys twined themselves mutely around his legs; Mariette squashed her soaked, gummy face against the immaculate folds of his cassock; and I sat down, hard, clobbered by the weight of my jealousy, trying, like a