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afraid. I believe he might have been trying to teach me something about solitude, though in a month’s time I would again barrel down the stairs and into his bed to fracture his sleep.
    He let me do this at two years old. At three, and five, and eight.
    And once at nine.
    April first, the rectory buttoned up, our small town cloaked with the quiet of a late spring snowfall. At one point the plow made its lumbering rounds through our parking lot. The muffled night had been filled with shadows, and because I had come to him in a state of terror, not once but many times, he lay sound asleep, exhausted, when Mrs. Hanson opened the unlocked kitchen door. Normally, Father Mike would be up, coffee made, the paper open on the table; I would be drowsing down from my bed, waiting for Mrs. Hanson’s mushy pancakes or soupy eggs.
    But she was early that day, and Father Mike was late. His bedroom door was open, as it always was. He had not moved me in the night.
    In my memory the doorway fills with her face, mouth turned down like a hound’s, cheeks enflamed, eyes watery and shocked under her magnified glasses. I sat up, mortified, certain that her coiled face was a reaction to my childishness, a nine-year-old having come crying downstairs in the night. Nine years old! A big girl like that!
    How ashamed I must have looked. How caught.
    The rest she filled in herself.

    Very slowly, with the patience of an uncoiling snake, an ugly story began to take shape in our town. Spring to summer to fall, it wound its way in near silence through the parish, an unseenpresence that finally struck—with no warning and no mercy—at the end of November. Father Mike guided me into his office after supper, looking glum and vacant. I took one of the stiff visitor chairs and gazed across at him. of course I was in love, the way all nine-year-old girls love their fathers. In his cassock and collar, with his swatch of red, untidy hair, he was handsome-man, perfect-man, daddy-man, mine-mine-mine. Women brought him apples and brownies; men fell out of their way to greet him on the street. Middle-aged millwrights came to him for spiritual advice, young parents asked him to bless their babies, the Daughters of Isabella cajoled him into singing “Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder” at the church bazaar.
    Up until that fraught season, that is, when the rectory’s front door stuck in its frame, logy from disuse. There was an undercurrent in the parish, an emotional imbalance that I had no way of understanding.
    “I couldn’t love you any more if you were my own child,” he told me that evening, sitting at his desk. His back straightened, and his fingers—nails bitten to tatters—rested lightly on the desk. Normally his declarations reached me like an umbrella opening inside my chest, but not on this night. He kept brushing back his lovely hair as if the very fact of it wounded him.
    “I love you too, Father,” I said. And though I had said these words numberless times, I detected a change in my own voice, a foreknowledge that frightened me.
    “I have to go the Chancery tomorrow, Lizzy. I might be gone all day.”
    “I can’t come?”
    “Not this time. You can stay with Mrs. Blanchard.”
    “But it’s Buddy’s birthday. You said we could make a coconut cake.”
    “I have to go, though. It’s a very important meeting.”
    “With who?”
    “Father Jack, you remember him.”
    I nodded. When Father Jack visited I lay awake well into the night, in thrall to their loud stories and rips of laughter and clinking glasses.
    “And Monsignor Frank, and maybe Bishop Byrnes.”
    “What’s the meeting about?”
    “Just Church business. Nothing to worry about”
    “All right,” I said, worrying already.
    He got out of his chair and onto his knees. “Pray with me, Lizzy?” he asked, and my first memory came back to me then, my uncle melting in his chair after unspeakable news, asking was it all right to cry. I scrambled to my knees, overcome by maternal fervor. He