He looked into the face on the crucifix. People shifted in the pews and an odd snort or gagging sound lingered in the silence. He didn’t know where he stood in the eyes of God.
He wasn’t, he knew, even sure God was present at times. Where did somebody who wasn’t even sure stand?
His mother rose as if in response and padded to the confessional curtain, pausing before slipping in. He was next, and his thoughts crowded against one another with urgency: he was basically good, he felt. He rarely willfully hurt anyone. He did what people said. He broke a minimum of commandments. So why was he not happy? The simplicity of it shook him. If he was good, why was he so unhappy? Why was he only sure of God on Christmas, if then? Why couldn’t he do more with Louis? Why did he always aggravate his parents?
His mother emerged from behind the curtain and passed silently into the nave for her penance. He hesitated until he heard the people behind him shifting expectantly, and then he got up and moved past the curtain into the dark.
He knelt on the wooden bench in front of the screen as his eyes adjusted. Father Rubino was picking at his eyebrow with his thumb and forefinger, looking off to his right.
“Bless me Father for I have sinned,” he said. “I haven’t been to Confession in three weeks.” He spoke in a whisper and Father Rubino wasn’t supposed to know who he was, but that was a fiction. He steadied himself on the partition. “I don’t know, Father. I was going to tell you all these things like lying and swearing. But that’s not right.” The boards beneath his knees groaned.
“What?” Father said. “What’s wrong with you?”
He was close to tears and felt foolish because of it. “I don’t know,” he repeated, and started to cry and hold it back at the same time. “I don’t think about God except at Christmas, I don’t help my sister at all, and sometimes I don’t like to be around my friend Louis and I know that’s wrong. I make my parents unhappy all the time.” He stopped, still not having heard any sort of response at all, having taken a chance and still not certain how to proceed.
Father was silent. Then he said, “Biddy, we all have those kinds of feelings. We all think maybe we could do more for other people. All we can do is try.”
Biddy knelt in the dark, wiping an eye with his hand.
“We can’t torture ourselves about it. All we can do is resolve to be better, to try harder.” Father paused. “Now tell yourself you’re going to work harder at it and try to live those words.” He moved around, apparently waiting for some response. “And Christ should certainly live in you always, not just at Christmas.”
Biddy looked down. “He doesn’t,” he whispered.
There was an awful silence. He waited for expulsion, public exposure, shouts, flashing lights. For the roof to lift off and God to pluck him away.
He could feel Father looking at him and he swallowed, ready to absorb whatever he deserved.
“Say twenty-five Our Fathers and twenty-five Hail Marys,” Father said. He absolved him in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
He stumbled to the altar, the air cool on his cheeks and ears, alternating the prayers while his mother waited at the back of the church. He was going to get out of here, he thought. He was going to change things or get out of here, because he was inadequate and everything around him was inadequate and no one seemed to care one way or the other. What was his penance? Did God expect only fifty prayers, as well? He finished his penance in the car on the way home, the houses reeling past as he avoided his mother’s gaze, feeling spiritually fraudulent beside her.
Ronnie sat across the table from him, his hat still on, losing at War. Something was bothering him and he was flipping the cards on his turns with irritation.
“Your turn, sport.” He tapped the table impatiently.
Biddy pulled a jack. Ronnie turned his card face up. A jack as well. Biddy laid three face down off the jack and turned over a two, sagging, trying to build up the foundations for some sort of drama. Ronnie was playing as if he were waiting for a train.
Ronnie flipped over his card after three face down: two as well. Biddy spread three more and turned over a nine. Ronnie did the same.
“Whoa,” Louis said. The rows of stalemated cards reached almost to the end of the table. Biddy was grateful for the extraordinary, and anxious to acknowledge it. He wanted an outside observer to lean over them and ask Ronnie if he realized the odds against what had just happened. But there was only Louis watching, attentive to everything and reacting to almost nothing. They sat around the Lirianos’ kitchen table, Ronnie waiting for Cindy, Biddy for Mickey.
Ronnie was drinking dark beer. They had themselves a little standoff here, he said. He laid three more out and edged the tip of his next card off the top of the pile and dropped it back, teasing. He put a head on his beer.
“C’mon,” Biddy said.
He smiled and flipped his card, looking at Biddy as he drank. It was a queen.
Biddy turned his over slowly, and then with a yelp as the image leaped at him: queen.
The door banged open, cold air filling the room.
“Don’t even ask,” Cindy said, sweeping into the kitchen. “I don’t even want to talk about it.” Her nose was red and her pants wet from the knees down, and she went right to the stove and put a kettle on. She pulled a mug out of the cabinet and dropped a tea bag into it.
“Have trouble with the car?” Ronnie asked.
She pulled at her scarf. “I’d like to push it off a cliff.” She piled her coat, hat, and scarf on the hamper in the hallway. “My legs are soaked. I’m gonna take a shower. Get the water when it boils, all right?”
The bathroom door shut and they heard the thump of her empty boots on the tile floor. After a few moments the shower went on.
Ronnie finished his beer and set the glass down carefully. The two queens still lay face to face atop the table-long lines of cards. “Whose turn is it?” he asked. He started a new line of three face down and turned over a seven. He seemed to be listening to something in the sound of the shower.
Biddy waited, not for the sake of dramatic tension, but for Ronnie’s attention to refocus on the game. He turned over the fourth card off his deck. It was a three of clubs.
“Three,” Louis said. “Ronnie wins.”
Biddy waited, and then pushed the long rows together into a pile in front of them. “I quit. I don’t feel like playing anymore.”
Ronnie looked at him. “No, let’s play. I win, right? My turn.” He turned over another card. Biddy watched him for a moment before continuing.
The teapot was whistling. Ronnie concentrated on the cards and they sat listening to it until Louis got up and turned off the heat and poured the water into the mug.
He won three or four in a row before the shower stopped. Ronnie’s concentration on it had affected Biddy and Louis as well, and they too were waiting, ready, as if Cindy’s emergence from the shower had a special significance.
The bathroom door opened and she appeared wrapped in a bath-sized white towel. A big orange cat on it looked at Biddy sideways. MOMCAT was written over its head, the large letters running down Cindy’s left side. She shuffled into the kitchen in her father’s slippers, big maroon things, and sat down at the table, hair dripping.
Ronnie’s eyes were on the cards. “You gonna sit here like that?”