A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [41]
“I looked at the sheet music until the woman in the shop was busy with someone else, and then I charged through the door, to the back. I put my head down on that greasy counter and I couldn’t stop, I just sobbed; I sobbed, ‘Father, forgive me, for I have sinned.’ ”
“You did?” I said, unable to suppress my astonishment.
She shook her head back and forth, exhaling a tremendous blast, her bottom lip jutting out so that the smoke went up into her face. “Old habits die hard,” she said, “especially old Catholic habits. I’ll bet he hadn’t heard anyone call him ‘Father’ in ten years.”
“What did he do?”
“I could tell he didn’t know about Lizzy. I thought someone might have called him. He was sort of in shock, I guess, seeing me in the middle of his workplace. I was crying my head off, bawling him out, screaming like a madwoman, telling him the repair shop had no business hiring someone as inept as he was, that he should”—she hiccuped—“be corrupting youth with good books and leading young girls to the Holy Spirit.”
She doubled over and coughed into both hands, and I thought, although she was several feet from me, that I should go thump her on the back. When she stood up she walked toward me holding on to a branch as if it was a guard rail. “I could never tell Dan about it, or my sisters. They thought he was lecherous. You’re the only person who really knows about Albert.”
It was folly to take the compliment to heart, but I couldn’t help feeling pleasure for a minute, in the secret, in her trust.
“I swear,” she said, “that even among the instruments, under his bright ‘Albert’ shirt and his strained pants—he’s huge, I mean he’s absolutely enormous—I swear that in the midst of all the grease and glue his holiness shines through. He’s fat, he needs a haircut, but you can’t help knowing you are in the presence of the Holy Spirit.”
The light was growing dim and she was beginning to look like a specter herself. I was grateful she was talking to me instead of to the trees. “We went to the coffee shop down the road, and we sat across from each other with cherry sodas, the way we used to do in high school, on the sly. It could have been fifteen years ago; it was as if no time had passed. He made me do something I’d been afraid to do for myself. He insisted I tell him the story of Lizzy’s life, from the start to the finish. At first I panicked, thinking, I’m not going to be able to draw hers as a full life. I was terrified I’d find out—that her story would come up so very short, or I’d make her sound like a little saint when she is flesh in the best sense of the word. But I started, from nearly after conception … God, I can’t believe it—I could remember everything, back to nearly every doctor’s visit, and hearing her heartbeat on that stethoscope thing. I went through the birth—I spared him no details, including delivering the placenta. The nurse wanted to save it so she could bring it to a Lamaze class that night. I said absolutely not, I wasn’t going to have my placenta in a bucket for a group of scared parents to look at. Albert sat on the edge of the booth, like he couldn’t wait to hear about her first tooth, for the sleepless night to be over, for the I.V. to be put in—remember the time she got dehydrated? Last year?”
It seemed years ago, decades ago, and now Theresa was going to talk at high speeds through the seasons, through the rain and sleet and snow, until she was briny and then moss covered.
“He made me write down the words she knew—there are fifty-six. That’s pretty good for a two-year-old, isn’t it? It took me hours to tell her story. Albert took the longest coffee break in the history of the Industrial Society and he’ll probably get fired for it.