The Prayers in Rossford
Heaven
“Baby,” Todd said, kissing his chest, “you’re not even here. How’m I supposed to fuck the life out of you if you’re not even here?” He put his chin on Fenn’s shoulder.
“I was just thinking about that girl. And the money. And things. I mean… If we tell her the whole truth….”
“If you tell her the whole truth that’s Lee Philips in jail for manslaughter.”
“You don’t know that.”
Todd straightened himself and reclined on one elbow.
“Do you trust the law to do the right thing?”
“No.”
“I trust us to do the right thing.”
“And what’s the right thing? Hand over the money and everything to this Meg girl?”
“No,” Todd shook his head and sat up, running his hands over his hairy chest. “Fuck no.”
Fenn looked at him, waiting for his lover’s solution.
“The right thing is to find a way to leave her the old guy’s ATM card and maybe the PIN number so she can get his funds and stuff and report them, and… all of that.”
“She’ll have to go to court for all that. I think we should let her into the secret or something.”
“No. No. No!”Todd said.
“Listen to you. At first you were the one who said we shouldn’t have anything to do with this money, but now—”
“But now we do, and now we’ve got to find a good way to give this gal something. But, everything? And an everything she wouldn’t know what to do with? The police and FBI would probably take all this shit away from her. No.”
“Fenn, what did you tell her. About her father being dead?”
“I said we had seen him. He had come to town. I even said he was looking for Noah. I said we were sure he was dead.”
“Tell her you’ve got the wallet. Give her the card.”
“What about all the work Brian did? The houses? The secret money?”
“This is above us right now,” Todd said. “All I know is we should give her the card and the money left in the account—which isn’t much of what it was, but more than enough to make a girl happy.”
“And the houses?”
“Like I said. That’s sort of above me. We need the master mind of a criminal.”
In bed, beside him, Fenn nodded. “We need Barb Affren.”
“Oh, dear,” Barb Affren said in her living room. “By which I mean, oh shit. This is not good.”
“What do we do about the houses, about all the hidden assets?” Brian said.
“She ought to have those things.”
“She ought to have a lot of things. This was her father’s money,” Noah said.
“Except,” Barb Affren said in her old wheedling voice, “that she will ask, how did you know about all of these houses, and you’ll have to say, because we broke into your father’s bank account. And then she’ll ask, ‘But how did you break into it?’ And you’ll say by using his ATM card. And then her eyes will get very big and she will say, ‘Oh deeear, how did you get the ATM card!’ And you will say: by robbing his dead body my dear.
“This,” Barb said tapping one bony finger on the table beside her, “will be when she asks how you got the ATM card from said dead body and, from then on, the answers get very, very bad for us. And bad for Lee. Because he shot the son of a bitch.”
“Well, we’ve got to find a way to do right by her,” Noah said.
“When did this kid have to start doing right by folks?” Barb shot her thumb at Noah. “We can do right by her, but we’ve gotta do right by us too! Namely by me. We’ve got to keep us and me and Lee, the hell out of jail!”
And then they all heard Milo Affren behind them, Dena beside him, say, “Why are you going to jail?”
“Okay,” Dena said, walking around the room, “this is what we do. Firstly, don’t give her the damn card.”
“What?”
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Barb murmured.
“Look,” Dena said. “She isn’t putting out an investigation for him. She isn’t looking for his money. The only way she’ll get it is if you all—-and I can’t BELIEVE you never told me—tell her about it. Don’t tell her damn thing!”
“I have to go meet Claire,” Noah said.
Dena nodded.
“But I want to make sure we don’t do the wrong thing. I need to say this, all right? She’s really nice—” Noah began.
“Noah,” Dena said. “You listen to me. You repeat this after me.”
Noah nodded.
“FUCK,” Dena said.
“Fuck?”
“THAT.”
“That?”
“SHIT. Fuck that shit! Get over your Johnny come lately conscious. She might not send you all to jail, but she kind of could.”
“What I would do,” Milo said, “if I was you, is do with the rest of that money what you did with the first money you found.”
Dena nodded, “Then what I would do,” she added, “after you laundered the money—”
Brian nodded with fascination.
“—is just leave the houses and all alone. You never knew what to do with all that other stuff. And just suggest… just strongly, fucking suggest she try to find out about them.”
“But then that just makes everything hard for her,” Noah said, still a little unconvinced.
“Yeah, Noah, it does,” said Milo. “And it also keeps you out of prison. So that makes it all right.”
“Still she might need a good lawyer to work with the system and get everything coming to her,” Brian said.
“Everything we leave her,” Noah said.
“Bill’s a lawyer,” Barb said with matriarchal certainty. “He’ll be her lawyer.”
“But what about all the money in his account?” Noah said.
“We could take only some of the money,” Brian suggested.
“I don’t even feel right about that. She should have all the money. We gotta let go of the cards. We gotta let ‘em go,” Noah insisted.
“What if we just leave her all of the money?” Dena said. “Would you like that?”
Noah looked at her, unable to discern if she was serious or not. But he said, “Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what I want.”
“Then we’ll do it,” Dena said, while Brian’s mouth hung in open wonder and Barbara cocked her head. “We will do it.”
Noah nodded, looking relieved.
“And now you can meet Claire in peace.”
Noah nodded again, and then he said, “Thanks guys. I’ll see you all later.”He headed for the door. “Dena, I’ll tell Claire you said hi.”
As soon as the door closed, Brian Babcock turned around and said, “I am not giving all of that money to some girl who just rolled into town—”
“Of course you’re not,” Dena put up a hand. “But there was really no other way I could see to shut Noah up.”
Barb looked at her, appreciatively, and then while she and Milo began whispering to each other, she said, “The two of you remind me of your grandfather and me in our younger days.”
“When you guys were criminals?” said Milo.
Barb put a hand to her chest and said, “We were not criminals.
“We were just Catholics. It was different then.”
“Oh, oh God. Oh, shi—”
He puts a hand over her mouth, and her legs come up like scissors, and then trap him like a vice. It’s so good that now all he can do is moan and fuck, and moan and fuck, and her hands are pulling him down, his back is sweaty. They are in the dark forgotten part of the basement, behind a pile of boxes, on blankets, secure, but tingling with the fear they just might get caught.
“Oh, my—Oh, my—Ah—” Milo gasps. His body trembles violently. It trembles through her, inside her. He feels so good inside of her.
“Ohhhhh,” she begins moaning. “Fucccck.”
They fuck together, their bodies cast on the last of the orgasm.
It’s good and hot and sticky, and he kind of stinks, and she kind of likes it, and she must smell too. This must be that famous sex smell. Yes, she remembers it with Brendan. But she doesn’t really remember Brendan, not that way. She doesn’t remember. She knows, she feels, the slick, quick cooling sweat on Milo’s broad, brown back, the curve of his back, the impossible tight roundness of his ass. The thick stiffness of him inside her. How is it that someone can be inside of you, that you can squeeze and both of you moan with the pleasure of him inside of you?
“That was amazing,” Milo murmurs, slowly disentangling his body from hers and sitting up. “That was super duper fucking fantastic amazing.”
And then they both stop. Dena pulls the sheet tight around her, leaving Milo beautiful and naked, squatting on his hams. She points up, above them, the floor boards moving.
“People are here,” Dena says.
Lots of people have just come into the house.
Claire got up from her seat beside Julian and ran to Noah.
“We never see each other anymore!”she said, grasping his wrists and dragging him toward them.
“You were back home for the summer.”
“Home is only like fifty miles away.”
“Seventy five, actually,” Noah said. “Hey, Julian.”
Julian, from his seat, nodded and said, “You coming to the wedding on Saturday?”
“Wouldn’t miss it?”
“And Fenn’s birthday party?”
“I don’t think I could miss that either.”
Noah said to Claire, “What was I supposed to do? Just drive down and invite myself to your mom’s house?”
“You know she would have been glad to see you.”
“Did you all decide what to do with the money?” Julian said. “And does part of it have something to do with giving it to me?”
“Giving it to us,” Claire said, wrapping an arm around him. “I’m practically family, I gotta get a piece of the pie.”
“About that pie…”Noah began.
“Whaddo you mean, about that pie?”
“Well, I convinced everyone to leave the money alone, and turn it and the houses over to Meg Callan.”
“Are you nuts!”Claire said, immediately, the same time Julian said, “What!”
“It is hers.”
“I think it’s ours,” Claire said.
“Danny, or Mom or someone is going to suggest, strongly, that Meg check to see if her dad had any money, any accounts, and Barb Affren’s son—”
“The funny looking guy seeing Nell Reardon?” Julian interrupted.
“He’s not funny looking,” said Noah. “I’d have sex with him. At least in the old days.”
“Noah’s attracted by differences,” Claire explained.
“Anything once,” he shrugged. “Anyway, that’s how she’ll just find everything, and… well, we’ve got enough anyway. Right? It helped us out the way we needed it too.”
“It didn’t help me out,” said Julian.
There was a knock on the door of the sacristy.
“You can’t come in! You can’t see the bride yet, Simon!”Lula shouted.
“Its not Simon,” Dan Malloy’s voice came through the door.
“Dan, c’mon in,” Adele said, gathering her skirts around her while Layla lifted off her mother’s veil.
“You’ll wear that one day,” her grandmother said.
“I have something wonderful for you,” Dan handed Adele her envelope.
She opened it and her mouth shut.
“It’s my annulment.”
“The marriage is officially on.”
“So,” Lula said, letting the dress fall, “we wouldn’t have had a wedding? Help me out, how does this work?”
“Well,” Dan shrugged, “I would have had to give you a wedding.”
He looked to Adele.
“She would have slugged me if I’d said no.”
“I have a question,” Layla put up her hand.
Dan nodded to her.
“Does this make me a bastard?”
“Layla,” her mother said. But Lulu murmured, “Some of my best friends have been bastards.”
“No, Layla,” said Dan. “Not quite.”
“Actually in the medieval church it did,” Simon entered the room
“Simon!”Adele shouted and pulled the veil over her face, more upset over the breach of etiquette than her daughter’s sudden bastardy.
“That’s one of the reasons Eleanor of Aquitaine and other queens resisted annulments so strongly. They didn’t want their kids to be declared illegitimate. That whole King Henry the Eighth thing? Anne Boleyn, Catherine of Aragon… That’s what that was all about.”
They just all kept looking at him. Adele stared fiercely through her veil.
“Simon!”
“But eventually, if you paid the Church off enough, they would religitimize you. So it could be done.”
“Well nowadays you don’t pay the Church. We just do it out of Christian kindness,” Dan said smoothly.
“Ah, yes,” Simon murmured while Dan frowned.
Anne looked at her daughter and said, “You had to marry a history teacher?”