deceiving Everett. She can’t imagine saying it in broad daylight.
“And if that’s not possible?”
“Then your priorities are wrong. Nothing is more important than your immortal soul.”
Rose struggles up from flattened knees, steadying herself on the walls of the confessional. She pulls the scarf closer. “Thank you, Father,” she says, but she is anything but thankful. She is on to his game. He wants to see her face so he can deny her Communion. On her way out she wonders why she thought to tell this man anything. If she tells anyone, it should be Everett.
Rose drives back through town to the Safeway market, accelerating through the yellow light at the new plaza. Confession is needless. If she had been born Protestant, she wouldn’t have to confess to anyone but God. Everett’s probably right about the Pope. God didn’t make him infallible, her mother did.
The plaza parking lot is full of people. Summer Saturdays are like this. Little Leaguers, Girl Scouts, Rotarians—all out raising funds. Rose checks the supply of quarters in her ashtray and tucks them in her pocket. She’s searching for a parking place and scanning the lot for Rob, when a toddler appears out of nowhere, in front of her car. Her brakes squeal. The car shimmies, skids. A woman shrieks. The tires grab. The car settles back into itself. The boy stands inches from her bumper, a wisp of blond hair visible over her hood. His mother stands in a puddle of groceries and torn bags, her face frozen in the scream. A broken bottle of apple juice is soaking the paper bag.
Rose slumps over her steering wheel. His mother steps from the rubble of groceries and snatches the child up. The child wails. Blessed, blessed sound. Rose exhales her anxiety. “Thank you, Jude, glorious apostle, faithful servant and friend of Jesus.” She pockets her hands in the opposite underarm to stop the prickling sensation. The mother is sobbing now. Rose watches her rock the boy, holding that precious head in her palm and kissing his hair, as Rose herself might have held Valley this morning if her daughter were younger.
The woman carries her son to a station wagon nearby. Rose parks. She fetches a coffee can that’s rolled under a fender and sets it near the jumble of groceries. She picks the boxes of macaroni and cheese from the puddle of apple juice and stacks them in a pile next to the instant oatmeal, the English muffins and the Peter Pan. She has to do something to make up for scaring them. If she had hit the child— But Rose refuses that thought. She’s told Valley never, ever to speed in a school zone. If Rose ever hit a child, she would never recover.
But why wasn’t the child up in the cart seat, where drivers could see him?
Rose heads for the store, breasts cradled in her arms as if she were cold. Inside she finds the cereal aisle and wanders up and down, her heart drubbing hard as she is alternately the driver and the mother of the crying child. She can’t find the Shredded Wheat. It’s always a maze, this aisle—the store brand’s look-alike boxes mixed in with the real thing—but today it’s impossible. The priest’s voice mingles with the woman’s shriek: Your priorities are wrong. Nothing is more important than your immortal soul. Rose takes down one box, puts it back and takes another, finally settling for Cheerios. On her way to the cashier she adds a package of pink, yellow and brown sugar wafers—the ones Valley reached for when she was a toddler in the cart seat—and a palm-size red-yellow-and-blue rubber ball for the toddling boy. She breezes through the express lane, forgetting that she needs coffee cream, and takes off with her bagged stash.
Rose is searching the parking lot for the mother’s station wagon when she’s caught by a singsong refrain rising and falling over the rattle of carts on the blacktop. She traces the chant to the end of the plaza where the band parents usually hold their bake sales and raffles. It’s some kind of auction. The auctioneer is gobbling away, badgering his crowd to bid higher. She hears him calling names. Sister Mary Theresa. That has to be a nun. Rose feels as though he has hollered her name. In a way, he has. Once upon a time, Theresa of the Little Flower was her favorite saint.
At the outer edge of the group she peers between heads. Steel bed frames stand in the back of a truck, bound into units—two metal end pieces with legs and a metal spring in each package—each labeled with the name of a nun. The auctioneer’s assistant steps through the crowd to hand Rose a flyer.
Buy a bed slept in by a Sister of Charity
to benefit
Dayton’s own
St. Agnes Women’s Shelter
The Sisters of Charity, the flyer says in small print, have donated their old beds to raise funds. The St. Agnes Shelter will provide home delivery to anyone donating over twenty dollars per bed.
Only five frames remain in the back of the pickup. The auctioneer begins the bidding on Sister Mary Theresa’s bed at twenty dollars. A woman in shorts and red canvas Keds raises her hand.
“Twenty, I hear twenty. Who’ll give me twenty-five?”
A woman in jeans and a Notre Dame T-shirt raises her hand.
There’s a hush and Rose feels the mounting excitement. Perhaps it’s a sign, she thinks, the direction she’d wanted from the priest, delivered by an alternate means. How else can she explain it? It’s not every day you find a nun’s bed at the grocery. Everett would call it coincidence, but then Everett believes the earth came about after an explosion, which makes as much sense to Rose as throwing calico squares up in the air and expecting them to land in a quilting pattern.
Rose rummages in her purse. She finds the plastic grain of her checkbook. Thanks to Rob’s appearance this morning, she knows just how much she has.
“Thirty,” says the woman in red Keds.
The auctioneer looks left. “Will you go thirty-five?”
Rose raises her hand high before the Notre Dame woman can answer, recalling the details of a bedtime story her mother read to her often—a story about St. Clare protecting herself and her convent by holding the blessed host before a band of marauding soldiers.
The auctioneer asks for forty. Notre Dame raises her hand.
Rose looks at the woman to get some idea how high she might go. Her jeans are clean but frayed. Her hair is flat against her head. She is not the beauty-parlor kind.
“Fifty,” Rose says defiantly.
The auctioneer turns right. “Will you go sixty?” Red Keds bows her head. Left. Notre Dame turns away. Rose has won. She puts her groceries down and fishes for her checkbook.
“Going once. Going twice. Sold to the lady in the flowered dress for fifty dollars,” the auctioneer proclaims. “God bless you, dear.”
Rose smiles at him. He is not a priest, but it will have to do.
CHAPTER 2
S ince last Thursday when the doctor named his intermittent symptoms multiple sclerosis, Everett dreads morning. Not the whole morning, just that moment when daylight jolts him from his dreams, as if he’s been cruising down the freeway in his Ford Fairlane—Rosie at his side and Valley, frozen in his mind at age eleven, prattling away in the back-seat—when the car slams into a tree. His stomach flies forward; his body remains belted to the car.
Everett closes his eyes, tries to meld with the warm water in the new mattress and opens his eyes a second time. His vision is fine, today at least. The edges of the room, where walls meet ceiling, are clear, not fuzzy. The wallpaper’s red and white stripes are as distinct as prison bars. He wiggles his toes and taps his fingers on the mattress, then flexes his knees and elbows. The mattress ripples beneath him. He reaches for Rosie.
Instead of her usual sleeping form—sprawled on her stomach, left hand beside her cheek—he finds a pillow. He smiles in spite of her absence. He loves her soft breasts, the curve of her hips, how her skin springs back to his touch like yeasty dough. She’s all woman, not a skinny stick like Helen—always working out and picking at her food as if it’s poison. But Rose isn’t strong like Helen, either. When he can no longer walk, how will she wrestle him