Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [1]
Some things remained. Ruby’s Market and the pharmacy were still dark by six. Alice still left her keys in the car at all times. She never locked the house either—no one up here did. The beach had stayed untouched, and every one of the massive pine trees dotting the road from her door to the church looked as if it had been there for centuries.
The church itself was a constant. St. Michael’s was an old-fashioned country chapel made of stone, with red velvet cushions in the pews and brilliant stained-glass windows that burst with color in the morning sun. It had been built at the top of a hill off Shore Road so that its rooftop cross might be visible to sailors at sea.
Alice always sat in the third row to the right of the altar. She tried to remember the best bits of wisdom from Father Donnelly’s sermons to pass along to the child or grandchild who needed them most, not that they paid her any attention. She listened intently, singing out the familiar hymns, reciting the prayers she had recited since she was a girl. She closed her eyes and asked God for the same things she had asked for all those years ago: to help her be good, to make her do better. For the most part, she believed He heard.
After Mass on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the St. Michael’s Legion of Mary met in the church basement and said the rosary for ailing members of the parish, for the hungry and needy around the world, for the sanctity of life in all its stages. They recited Hail Holy Queen and drank decaf and chatted. Mary Fallon reminded them whose turn it was to bring muffins next time and who would accompany Father Donnelly on his weekly trip to the homes of the infirm, where he prayed for a recovery that usually never came. Though it was terribly sad, watching strangers her own age dying, Alice enjoyed her afternoons with Father Donnelly. He brought such comfort to everyone he visited. He was a young man, only thirty-four, with dark hair and a warm smile that reminded her of crooners from the fifties. He had chosen a vocation from another era, and he was thoughtful in a way she didn’t know young people could be anymore.
Alice felt a sense of deep dedication watching him pray over his parishioners. Most priests today didn’t make time for house calls. When they were done, Father Donnelly would take her to lunch, which she knew for a fact he did not do with the other gals from the Legion. He had done so much for her. He even helped her around the house now and then—changing the high-up lightbulb on the porch, hauling away tree branches after a storm. Perhaps this special treatment was only a result of the little arrangement they had made, but she hardly cared.
Father Donnelly and the seven members of the Legion of Mary (no fewer than five of them actually named Mary) were the only people Alice interacted with on a regular basis at this time of year. She was the lone summer person in the group, their foreign exchange student, she called herself as a joke. The year-rounders were suspicious of outsiders. But they had agreed to let her join just for the season after the archdiocese shut down St. Agnes two years back.
St. Agnes was her church at home in Canton, the church where Alice’s children were baptized, where her husband, Daniel, was eulogized, where she had gone to Mass every day for the past six decades and run both the Sunday school program, when her children were small, and the Legion of Mary once they had grown. She had co-chaired the campaign to save the church with a young mother of four named Abigail Curley, who had translucent skin and a soft, childlike voice. Together, they gathered five hundred signatures; they wrote dozens of letters; they petitioned the cardinal himself.
At the final Mass, Alice cried quietly into her handkerchief. These closures