I got ready to leave for college on a full Catholic ride obtained by the oblivious monsignor after his rectory housemate, the sly, crooked, shifty monsignor, our pastor, had assaulted me, a secret I kept as a service to the whole world so it wouldn’t blow up the way my mind had blown up. Mom made sure I had a new pair of twin sheets and a matching mattress pad. She checked these off her mental to-do list while flashing her lighter at the Chesterfield between her lips, then sucking in slowly, maybe tamping down a faint buzz, a hazy tick that something was off.
A year or two after I’d hit the road for college, she took a job as his secretary because that way she could walk to work, Dad having driven off years before. Decades later, when the abusing cleric died, she told me, looking right at me, that he had suffered at the end, relaying this last bit of news as if it were important punctuation. I looked away, not wanting her to know even if she did. Then she told me that she did not think Monsignor was an honest man. “Well, that’s for sure,” I could have said, but in my mother’s apartment the silence about trouble had always been thicker than Jell-O, cloudier than dish water, darker than the insides of our shoes.
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