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“I’ll go after it, Father,” Tony said.
“Are you kidding? This is the third time this has happened this week. Time to take cover,” the priest said.
Moments later, the priest hid the two gloves in a flower bed, furtively looking around the corner of the building. His face was bright and sweaty in the shade, his eyes wide with apprehension.
“You’re really a minister?” Tony said.
“Well, I’m sure not Derek Jeter.”
“I think the ball hit the car window.”
“I know. That’s why I’m here and not on the street looking for it. Come on, I have a couple of cold sodas in my cooler.”
He squatted down on the grass and popped off the top of a small ice chest. He lifted out a can of Pepsi, ripped the tab, and handed it up to Tony. “Were you worried about something out there?” he said.
“Me? No, not really.”
“You a Catholic?”
“No.”
“If you want to tell me about something, it won’t go any farther than this garden.”
Had all this been a ruse? Tony wondered. Another do-gooder with an agenda? The priest lifted up his T-shirt and wiped his face with it, staring out at the traffic on the street.
“My girlfriend killed herself. She was stoned out of her head and maybe went to bed with several men before she did it. I might be arrested tomorrow for the death of a homeless man. I think maybe I’m a coward. I may commit a terrible act of betrayal and send one of my parents to prison.”
The priest’s mouth parted silently. His face was still flushed from play, the hair on his arms speckled with dirt from his work in the garden. His eyes glistened. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Sorry about what? Yvonne’s death? Sorry he had nothing to offer? What was he saying?
But the priest’s gaze had drifted toward the street, where Slim Bruxal’s SUV had just pulled behind Tony’s Lexus. The SUV was loaded with kids from the fraternity house. At least two of them were wearing T-shirts imprinted with the faces of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, which had been one of several ways the fraternity signaled its feelings on the question of race.
“I have to go,” Tony said.
“Who are those guys?” the priest said.
“My friends.”
The priest looked again at the kids getting out of Slim’s vehicle. “You didn’t tell me your name.”
“I don’t know who I am, Father. I don’t know anything anymore.”
“Stay,” the priest said.
But Tony had already fitted a crooked smile on his face and directed his steps toward his friends, who waited for him by the curb. The speckled shade under the St. John Oak seemed to slip off his skin like water sliding off stone.
IT WAS HOT AND DRY that evening, and heat lightning flickered against a black sky in the south. Molly and I ate a late dinner of cold cuts and potato salad and iced tea on the picnic table in the backyard with Snuggs and Tripod. The air was thick with birds, the bayou coated with a pall of smoke from meat fires in the park.
“I think it’s going to storm,” Molly said. “You can feel the barometer dropping.”
Just as she spoke, the wind touched the leaves over our heads and I felt a breath of cool air against my cheek, smelled a hint of distant rain. The phone rang in the kitchen. Molly got up to answer it.
“Let the machine take it,” I said.
She sat back down. Then she tapped herself on the forehead with the heel of her hand. “I forgot.”
“Forgot what?”
