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you.”
    “We’re praying, Father O’Shane.” Gladys giggled slightly.
    “Ah, prayer, the balm of heaven.” He clasped her hands, pulling her up off her knees and onto a nearby bench. “Oh, heavenly Father, Gladys and I pray”—he glanced at me to let me know I could move out of the circle of Gladys’s admiration—“for your continued love and guidance…”
    I moved over by a large stand of trees out of Gladys’s line of sight and let Dennis’s voice lull me into a state of calm. Minutes later, I peeked out of my hiding place to hear Gladys gushing over Dennis’s attention. Pleased, no doubt, with her own godliness, she floated away across the commons. Dennis found me leaning up against a sturdy oak, the horrors of the last forty minutes nearly buckling me at the knee.
    “Did you see it?” I asked, referring to the newspaper article, and he nodded. “Gladys will have it laminated into cafeteria place mats.
    Every right-winger will think I’m one of them.”
    “You’ve got to talk to that woman.” He obviously referred to Vivienne Wilde.
    “I intend to.”
    “Let me set it up. Just like a debate. Ground rules. No notes, no microphones. A neutral location.”
    “Have you been talking to Eleonor Washington?”
    Like a good priest, he remained silent, refusing to betray the confessor, so I continued my tirade.
    “You can’t set it up right now because I’m so mad I would stab her with a letter opener. What in hell possessed her to print that about me? It’s patently untrue and unfair.” I stormed off, furious with life in general and with my situation in particular. A priest couldn’t lash out even when lashing out was called for.
    * * *

    That night I sat on the porch of my farmhouse after tossing the horses some hay and drank half a bottle of red wine, pausing only to pet Ketch as I morosely contemplated what had been wrongly written.
    I kept the lights off so Sylvia wouldn’t know I was home. Though I was certain she’d only toyed with me in a drunken state, I didn’t need anything else pressworthy in my life. What could possibly have been Vivienne’s motive? To spread lies, create a sensational story where there was none, get back at Hightower through me? Should I ring her and demand a retraction? I’d like to snatch her golden hair right off her pretty little head. I must have inadvertently pulled on Ketch’s fur as I thought it because he let out a sharp squeak and quickly rose and moved away from me. I apologized profusely. All I seemed to be doing lately was denying or apologizing.
    Rather than confront Vivienne in my current state, I uncharacteristically chose avoidance, preferring to focus on something else—packing for the convention in Berkeley.
    I phoned my father just to hear his voice and he said he’d seen the newspaper and he was completely enraged, forgetting that he’d already called me about the article and had told me that he considered it a risky but brilliant strategy.
    “Who in hell does this Wilde woman think she is? People have been assassinated for less. In fact, I think that’s exactly what’s needed here.”
    I realized the days in which my father could be counted on for solace and applicable solutions were certainly waning, if not over. I suspected he became bombastic and outlandish to either entertain himself or simply to hear the energy of his own voice and know he was still alive. I quickly changed the subject.
    “Do you have a pen?” I asked.
    “Yes, do you want to borrow it?” he replied, and I grinned, thinking he was teasing me as he did when I was a child.
    “I want to give you my hotel number in Berkeley. Four, one, five…” I said, and listened as he scribbled.
    “Four, one, nine—” He butchered the area code.
    “ Five. ” I corrected him.
    “Five what?”
    “The hotel is four, one, five—”
    “Why would I need the number of a hotel?”
    “Because that’s where I’ll be?”
    “Are you there now?”
    “No—”
    “Then why do