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mother turned me away in ridicule.
    “Thank you. Thank you.”
    Perhaps I would make it home after all.

Reverend Fox

    Reverend Fox bit his upper lip, then motioned for me to sit down on the leather couch in his study. He was reluctant to speak, but I could tell he wanted to answer my question if only the right words would come.
    On the Monday after the funeral, I felt very unsettled about what had transpired. Mom hadn’t spoken a word to me since she stormed out of the church after saying that inflammatory word. It didn’t make sense, so I decided to visit Reverend Fox to see if he could enlighten me. I also wanted to thank him for his kind gestures during the funeral. In fact, my mother’s blow-up was the only hitch of the entire funeral service. Not bad at all.
    And so I sat staring back, waiting for a reply from Reverend Fox. He must have been in his early seventies, and he had a very kind, sincere face.
    “Martin, some things in life can never be erased, at least not completely. They can’t be undone, and they can never be forgotten. However, they also aren’t meant to cripple you. They aren’t meant to hold you back or stop you from moving forward. And so as you grow and change and hopefully learn some lessons along the way, you become a better person who isn’t quite as likely to make the same mistakes you did as a youth. That’s the theory at least. And while I believe all of what I said is true, sometimes the pain you have caused – even long ago – is still there.”
    I wasn’t quite sure I followed. I was the least theoretical person I knew. One has no time to ponder theories when living in the midst of a hurricane. But I nodded out of politeness.
    “Okay. Thank you, Reverend for all of your help with the funeral. You’ve been very nice to us, and I’m sorry that my mother acted the way she did.”
    I stood up and turned toward the door when Reverend Fox cleared his throat.
    “It’s true. Your mother was talking about me. When I was the young assistant pastor here, before she married your father, I had an intimate relationship with her.”
    “What? With who?”
    “With your mother.”
    I gazed back, a frozen sculpture unable to think or move. Reverend Fox added to the silence perhaps not knowing what else to say. He said enough for a simple minded person like me to spend a lifetime thinking about all the ramifications of his revelation.
    “You had a relationship with my mother?”
    “Yes.”
    This certainly explained a lot, and I was sure that it explained things that I could not even comprehend.
    “Martin, please sit down.”
    I sat and remained quiet. If I was a true Kinney, I would be yelling obscenities right about now. I might have even hit him. But sitting was all I could do. I could sit and be quiet like the best of them. I could endure any torrent of abuse, any gale of ill weather, any ridiculous situation by just sitting and remaining quiet.
    “Martin, I’m sorry. I never intentioned to burden you with this knowledge, but after meeting you and seeing the relationship you have with your mother, I – .”
    He stopped and rubbed his eyes.
    “Martin, you’re a good son. I can see the goodness in you. I believe you endured a lot, but all you had on your mind when you came to me the first time was to honor your father, someone who was difficult to love. Someone who was embittered by the past. I was part of that past, your mother’s and father’s past. What I’m about to tell you has long since passed from my consciousness. I’ve paid for my sins, and I know that I’ve been forgiven. So I made it a point of not going around the rest of my life beating myself up for the mistakes I made in my youth. But this funeral brought home another important point; the consequences of one’s actions may never fully be realized. Some people can’t forgive, can’t get over the bitterness and it eats them alive turning them into something much less than they were intended to be. So I feel