He is so cold when he gets home but he wants to take care of his family. He wants to rub Rafe’s little feet until they’re warm and he laughs. He want to give him cocoa and he wants Sheridan to have tea, and he wants to get them both lunch, really make sure his men are taken care of. Only then does he go to the shower, stand under the hot water, now and again squirting the still cold lake water on him, rubbing it in with soap, the grit of the ancient sand, older than the world, older than religion, truly blessed, he thinks. Something Fenn would do, he thinks.
I have no idea why I had to go to the beach. Why I emptied out that holy water vial and then filled it with lake water. Except…
Sometimes it feels like the energy that goes into being a good and thoughtful free soul, an honest Catholic, a whole moral person inside the church, a free person inside that life, is like the energy one puts into finding out how to run, how to get a little exercise, without ever having to step outside. You can only jog in place so long. You can only spin on an exercise bike or crack the window open and stick your head out of the window.
Maybe, in the end, even goodness has nothing to do with it.
As the hot water runs down Brendan’s body he thinks.
Maybe it’s true. Maybe being a good Catholic has nothing to do with being a good. It actually seems to have a lot to do with being exhausted.
“We should go to the party,” Brendan says to Sheridan. “I feel like you’d already decided, but I’m just letting you know I’ve decided too. We should go. We need to go. We need to see… our friends.”
Brendan unloosed the towel from his waist, baring his body to Sheridan as he began to towel himself.
Maybe being a good Catholic has nothing to do with being a good. Maybe in fact, goodness has nothing to do with what is important. Maybe it is something else entirely that matters.
On the Third Sunday of Advent, a pink candle is lit, a little golden flame on the top of that rose colored pillar. Yesterday, just as small as golden flames, Brendan saw the first crystals of snow, white against the encroaching darkness. In Chicago it gets dark at four-thirty in the afternoon, and the city is pitched into darkness by five. There is a nip in the breeze and the nip is hope, as if the entropy of things, the freezing of things, the year winding down to a close after all the fast paced-ness of things means that something new must be born. Something wonderful is surely coming.
Last night he walked the streets alone and saw little yellow lights of house windows, winking lights draped from the porches on Oak Street. It is coming. Christmas is coming. Something is coming. The dullness he had been feeling passes. It is like this every year.
In church, on Sunday, the priest prays:
“O Almighty God, gracious provider and giver of life, we anxiously await the celebration of your birth. Like the people of long ago, our ancestors in faith, we, too, are in need of light, in need of direction, in need of your Word, to show us the way. Our busy lives and the consumerism that surrounds us make it difficult to recognize your kingdom and to hear your voice. Help us Lord, to focus on you. We pray that you hear our prayer in the name of Jesus. Amen.”
That afternoon they go to Dylan’s apartment. He is far more graceful, they all are, than Brendan ever was at that age. Dylan is so like Fenn. Sitting on the sofa, hosting them, Dylan says, “The roast will be ready in under an hour. There’s plenty to drink, but we won’t get you too drunk. After all, you’ve got a kid and you have to get home.”
“We’d love if you stayed the night,” Lance chimes in.
“That’s not even possible,” Elias says. “They’ve got to get Rafe to school.”
Elias is clasping hands with Rafe, playing a game of clap with the boy, and as always.
“Did you guys drive?” Dylan says.
“We did,” Sheridan tells him.
“If you had taken the El you could get as fucked up as you wanted to. We could walk you there, put you on the train and it would take you almost right to your door. You’d have to wait for the Purple Line a little bit, but…”
“I wonder that a couple with a son wants to wait on a platform for the Purple Line in early winter on a Sunday night,” Elias said.
“We’ve done it,” Dylan said.
“It’s different,” said Elias.
Looking around, Brendan sees the house altar Dylan always keeps caticorner to the long picture window overlooking Magnolia Street. It is accompanied, but not incongruous to a Nativity scene.
“Did Lance’s family send that?” Sheridan says.
“No,” Dylan shakes his head. “Dad. Fenn.”
“Yes! I have seen that,” Brendan remembers. Fenn has put that out every year. He’s seen it so often, so old, so well crafted, not like those plasticky, poor done crèches.
“I wonder how he does it? How you do it?”
Dylan blinks. Then he says, “Well, now, Bren, I didn’t make the crèche. I just set it up.”
“No,” Brendan said. “Make peace with things. Find your own way. Deal with God.”
“I think,” Elias notes on his way to the kitchen, “Bren is referring to his struggle with Catholicism, with that thing that better Catholics than I have ever been talk about so much.”
“Well, I guess the answer to that is I was never much of a Catholic—or a Christian for that matter,” Dylan said. “If anything, growing up there was too much choice. No, I take that back. There’s no such thing as too much choice. Is that party Chay is having next week or what?”
“It’s Saturday,” Sheridan said.
“Do you need us to watch Chay?”
“Rob is, actually,” Brendan said.
“Rob is coming all the way from Rossford,” Elias stuck his head out of the kitchen, “when we are right here?”
“Right here with your own lives,” Sheridan said. “And Rob already offered, and it will be good for him to get out of town.”
“And Rossford is only an hour away,” Brendan added.
“Rob,” Lance pronounced, “is flaky as fuck.”
Rob Affren, aged seventeen, was the son of Milo and Dena Affren, and the great-nephew of Todd Meraden. This made him a sort of cousin to Dylan, who had said nothing when Lance called him “flaky as fuck.” For Lance, Rob was the best friend of his younger brother, and to Sheridan Rob simply was. As for Brendan, Rob was his godson, and a reminder of Kenny’s letter hidden away in the drawer. How could he not be, for his other godfather was Kenny McGrath.
“I’m in the city,” Rob called them around eleven o’clock. “I just went to the bathroom in the cultural center which is by far the nicest place in town to take a dump, and now I’m looking at the exhibits. I may go across the street to the art museum. I’m gonna bum around, but I’ll be up there by five.”
“That’s fine,” Brendan said.
“What time you guys need me?”
“We’re leaving at eight.”
“And I’ll stay with Rafe for the night.”
Put that way it sounded like a horrible idea, and Brendan thought, we should have left him with the boys.
“Yes,” was all Brendan said.
Rob arrived a little after five, and when he did arrive a little after five, Brendan had to remind himself that, yes, it did turn dark at four-thirty and no Rob was not really late. His nephew smelled like the cold and he pushed his dark red hair out of his olive complexioned face.
“What up, peeps?” he demanded. “You left pizza money, right?”
“Well, we’re not gone yet, Rob,” Brendan said.
“What time are you guys getting ready?”
“Brendan thought we should actually get there at eight,” Sheridan said in a voice that implied how naïve that was.
Brendan, sitting on the couch between Rafe and Rob looked up at Sheridan, aggrieved.
“I mean,” Sheridan continued, “this is going to be a serious party. Like, for real. Serious parties don’t start at eight. Which is why we are staying the night.”
“Let me guess,” Rob said, “Bren thought you all would turn around and leave at ten?”
“I really wanted to leave at ten,” Bren lamented.
“I told Bren that if he really hated things we could leave.”
But Bren despite his reservations, Brendan remembered Fenn’s words and was convinced he really needed to go, to do something different. He didn’t know how to say that to Sheridan, so he said nothing.
There was a knock on the door at seven, and when Sheridan opened it, Brendan, taking his shaving kit out in the bathroom, heard him say, “Elias, what are you doing here?”
There were a short back and forth Brendan didn’t hear, and then Elias came into the bathroom where, with only a towel wrapped about his slender waist, Brendan was shaving and said, “I thought you would feel better if an actual grown up stayed in the house with Rob and Rafe.”
“Thank God for you,” Brendan grinned at him. “I could kiss you but you’d be covered in shaving cream.”
Rob did not look as if he could kiss Elias. He looked distinctly deflated at being demoted to a assistant. Brendan and Sheridan headed to the train station around seven-thirty, but when they went down to Main and up the walk they did not catch the El, but the Metra.
“We get to be classy tonight,” Sheridan decided.
And so they rode in comparative style down into the city, to the party to end all parties on State Parkway, in the home of Casey Williams and Chay Lewis.
