Shelter Me (3 page)

“Oh, I’m looking forward to that, let me tell you,” said her mother. “How are my babies?”

“Missing their Gram. Have you got a flight yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Mum, it’s May,” said Janie, stunned by her mother’s lack of attention to this task. Noreen Dwyer was nothing if not responsible.
Dutiful
was the word Janie had often thought described her best. She was never the last one to pick up her kids from school. She always volunteered to send in cupcakes for the Valentine’s Day parties and never forgot a conference or field trip. She was the sole provider for two children and she took this seriously. Dutifully.

But Janie always sensed somehow that her mother was only biding her time, waiting to sprout wings. Noreen had the heart
of a traveler; itineraries were her own personal poetry. She would have knit a bridge to Europe if only it would have held.

“Well, I’m not going back right away,” said Noreen. “Marcella—you know, the earth sciences teacher?—she asked me to spend some time with her family near Napoli, so I thought I’d wait on booking a flight to the States.”

Neither spoke for a moment. The silence was tempered only by the standard overseas call static, a sound that often reminded Janie of lapping water. She could almost hear the vast ocean, exposed to every kind of weather, that separated her from her mother.

“Naples?” Janie said finally. “You’re staying?”

“Just until August, Janie. I’ll be back for August.”

The call ended quickly. Janie had to get the lunch box to Dylan, and Noreen had to answer her door.
Her Italian door,
thought Janie.
In Italy.

The wind and rain had picked up. Janie got soaked as she ran holding Carly under her coat to the preschool entrance from the only available parking space on the far side of the lot. She dropped off the lunch box and dashed back to the car. As they neared the house again, Janie saw that Father Considerate had pulled into her single-lane driveway. If she pulled in behind him, she would have to move the car later so he could get out. He was just walking up to the front door of the house, and she rolled down her window to call to him to pull his car out so she could get in first. But a quick glance in the rearview informed her that Carly had dozed off, and the sound of her mother screaming out the car window was certain to wake the surly baby. Figuring she had provided more than enough provocation for Carly’s temper that morning, Janie parked on the street.

“Hi,” said Father Jake.

“Right,” said Janie, attempting to shelter the sleeping, rain-spattered baby as she fumbled for her keys.

“Can I take her?” he offered, holding out his hands, water dripping down his wire-frame glasses.

Janie snorted at him, twisted the key in the door, and lurched into the house. She dropped her purse and trod up the stairs to put the baby in her crib, her sneakers squeaking with water. When she came down to the kitchen, Father Jake had already filled the teakettle and set it on a burner. He was sitting at the table, Robby’s table, waiting with a quiet, understanding sort of patience that made Janie want to break things.

She sat down heavily into a chair across from him and proceeded to take off her wet shoes and socks. “So, Father,” she said flatly, without looking at him. “How’s it going up at the rectory?”

“Fine,” he said. “The roof’s got some leaks that apparently never bothered Father Lambrosini. But that’s what buckets are for, I guess.”

The teakettle began to sing, a hissing screech that went right up Janie’s spine. She stared at him, unmoving.

“Should I…?” he asked, tentatively.

“Make yourself at home, by all means.”

He moved the kettle to a cool burner and the sound deflated. Janie watched him pull his teabag from his pocket and carefully pour the scalding water, and her skin began to itch as if she were having an allergic reaction. When the hot water hit, Father Jake’s mug threw an aroma into the air that smelled to Janie like a combination of orange and cloves and dirt.

“How old
are
you?” she demanded.

“Thirty-eight. How old are you?”

“You are
not.
You are not thirty-eight.”

“No?” he said, pleasantly.

“Did my Aunt Jude tell you to say that?”

“No. She told me to say a lot of things, but not that.” He leaned against the counter, sipped his tea, and pushed a clump of brown hair off his forehead. He had the standard man’s haircut, but longer. Waves of hair rested on the curls of his ears.

“Oh, I have no doubt she has a whole script for you every time you show up.” Janie pitched the wet shoes toward the front door and slumped back down in her chair.

“Why would me being thirty-eight matter?”

“Because you don’t even look like an adult. And you sure as hell don’t look as old as me…”

He took another sip, and set the mug gently on the counter. “So. How’s it going here?”

“Kinda sucky,” she said. “But thanks for your concern.”

“What’s up?”

“What’s up?” she replied, her ice blue eyes widening in incredulity. “What’s up?” Janie shook her head, raising her hands as if to surrender. “Look. Father. I know this is all…I know you’re not…I mean, thanks for coming and everything…but this just isn’t working.”

“Oh?” he said. “Well, how could we make it work better? What would help?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just not…you don’t…You can’t possibly understand this.”

“So explain it to me.”

“That’s the whole point,” she said, putting her bare damp feet up on one of the chairs. “I can’t. First of all, you’re not married, maybe never even dated, for all I know. Marriage is like this…well, anyway, mine was like this huge surprise. I never knew I could ever be…you know, loved…like that. I never thought it would happen, that I would feel so…I mean, not like we never fought or anything. But even that was just…”

“I know what it’s like to feel loved,” he said, his expression darkening slightly.

“Yeah, okay, your parents loved you. Great. But it’s not like that. It’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced. I thought this was it.
He
was
It
. And I was never going to have to…” The ache behind her eyes, the constricting of her throat, infuriated her. She pointed an incriminating finger up at him. “You live alone. You’ll
always
live alone. That’s what you
chose.
”

Father Jake looked at her thoughtfully, surprisingly unscathed by this assessment. “Are there any other reasons?” he asked.

Janie wanted to hit him. She needed to silence him, to deliver a blow so fatal he would never return. “The other reason,” she said. And she almost smiled, her tone matching his. “The other reason is that I
see
you. Father Friendly, Pastor Perfect. Everyone likes you, but no one can say exactly why. You glide through Mass and church suppers leaving everyone feeling pleased. They don’t realize that they haven’t affected you in any way. The main reason, Father, that this little arrangement is a sham is because you’re just as locked up as I am. You have a secret life of misery just like me.”

He didn’t move. His face remained relaxed and thoughtful. He looked down at his somber black sport shoes, then placed his mug courteously in the sink. “We’ll talk next week,” he said, and only his rapid, shallow breathing belied him. A direct hit.

I
T TOOK ABOUT TWENTY
minutes of sitting in the silent house, with the rain slapping the shingles, for Janie to start feeling badly. And sorry. Self-disgust grew in her like a blush that wouldn’t subside. She tried to recapture the righteous rage that had made her feel justified—even obligated—to knock him down a peg.
No sale,
said her conscience.

When she couldn’t rationalize it away, she tried to stop thinking about it altogether. She busied herself with tidying the house. She spoke for a few extra moments with Dylan’s teacher when she went to pick him up. Uncle Charlie came by to get her trash to take to the dump. She made him stay for coffee, and thawed one of the many banana breads that neighbors had delivered in prior months. She called Shelly and asked detailed questions about her daughter’s play.

Yet Father Jake, the mild-mannered boy-priest, bland, bespectacled, and benign, loomed large in her brain. The sickening feeling of having bullied a weakling would not leave her, and the longer it lingered the more she began to sense the truth and weight of her words. The more she began to wonder what his
“misery” might be. By 2:00 a.m., she was talking to Robby about it, explaining, rationalizing, confessing. In her mind, he remained very, very disappointed in her.

W
HEN SHE GOT UP
the next morning, Janie knew what she had to do. First she dropped the kids off at Aunt Jude’s for their usual Saturday visit. Then she went to the bakery. She prayed that her cousin Cormac would not be there, but of course he was.
The guy’s going to be buried with flour in his hair and frosting under his nails
, she thought.

“Hey, what’s up?” he said too casually. Janie knew he was checking her for signs of deterioration.

“Hey, nothing,” she said, searching for something nonchalant to say. Cormac’s girlfriend of the moment was a safe subject, a nonsubject, really. She was a tall, attractive former blonde who had tried to perk up her now flat tan hair with an overabundance of honey-colored highlights. She wore “outfits,” even to work at the bakery.

“How’s Barbie?” said Janie.
Casual right back atcha.

“It’s Barb, you snob.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll believe that when I see her in flat shoes.”

Cormac laughed a real laugh, and Janie felt okay for a minute. “She thinks she’s too short,” Cormac confided, still chuckling.

“Compared to what? You, ya buffalo?”

“Hey, that’s bison to you, chickie.”

This patter went on for a few minutes, and then Cormac went in for the kill. “So, what’s up?”

“Nothing much,” Janie said, perusing the huge glass display case. “What’ve you got for cakes?” There were at least ten different kinds, from basic to exotic, elegantly plain to elaborately decorated.

Cormac’s face went motionless for a second too long. “For who?”

He knows,
thought Janie.
No details, not why, but he gets the gist.
She made one last-ditch effort. “None o’ your beeswax, nosey,”
and she shoved him. There was something intensely satisfying about shoving such a big man. And Cormac knew it. He staggered back a step, letting her feel powerful for a moment. Then he shoved her back, not hard, but enough to throw her off balance, enough to make her feel that she was a worthy opponent. Which she was, but not physically.

“How bad was it?” he asked as he shoved.

“Bad enough.” Shove.

“Who?” Shove.

Janie groaned and shook her head.

“Come on,” he threw a huge, floury arm around her. “Tell ol’ cousin Cormac what you did to warrant Pology Cake.” After she told him, all he said was, “Wow.” Then she knew he was worried about her, even more than before.

“He provoked me,” she insisted.

“Still…” he said, and squinted at her. “I think you gotta go homemade on this one, chickie.”

“Come on, Cormac,” she whined. “It’s not like I ran over his cat. Besides, I don’t have time.”

“Boo-hoo. Make time.”

“I’ll owe you big.”

“You already owe me big. Besides, you’re the founding mother of Pology Cake. You know how it works. It has to be a sacrifice.”

“He doesn’t know that,” she said.

“Father Jake’s a smart guy, he’ll figure it out.”

Janie sighed, bested. “Any thoughts?”

“Hmmm,” said Cormac, unwittingly scratching flour into the stubble on his chin. “Something sweet, but not gooey…” He went on for a while in recipe rapture, finally deciding on some ginger concoction the name of which Janie couldn’t even pronounce.

She slunk home and reviewed the ingredients he had written out for her on the back of an order sheet. She was missing a few and finally decided she didn’t even agree with his prescription.
It wasn’t the type of cake that mattered, anyway. What mattered was the sacrifice—that the transgressor offered a symbol of his or her remorse in a form that best suited the injured party. And since she was the patron sinner of Pology Cake, Janie followed her own counsel and went with lemon cream cake. She thought Father Jake might be a lemon kind of guy.

As she measured the flour, her thoughts drifted to the inception of Pology Cake. She remembered the incident, of course, but it went back farther than that. It really began because she and Mike were so completely different. Janie was the chatty, smart-alecky one, Mike was the silent, speedy one. She back-talked Mum to death; he just took off.

But more than that, Mike had always been a little odd—too easily overwhelmed, shy to the point of reclusive. He was often unable to attend to the simplest tasks, yet mysteriously able to create complex works of art in the sanctuary of his room. An enigma even to his twin.

Perhaps it was because of this lack of true understanding that Janie and Mike nurtured little commonalities to get along. Foremost was the currency of food. They had an elaborate scale of which Halloween candies equaled other things. Like two Tootsie Rolls was fair trade for an extra turn on their only pair of roller skates. Choosing the TV show cost a full-sized Snickers bar—not the mini kind. Food restored the balance of power, which had always been tipped decidedly in Janie’s favor.

For Cormac’s tenth birthday, his mother, Aunt Brigid, told him that he could have any kind of cake he wanted. So Cormac, the original envelope pusher, thought about it for a solid week. When he placed his order, Aunt Brigid stared at him with her mouth open for a few seconds, and muttered, “You gotta be kidding me…” Then she narrowed her eyes at him and said, “Fine.”

It was ten layers. She built and decorated it to look like the Prudential Center tower in downtown Boston, as requested. It was colossal, an edible engineering masterpiece. Uncle Charlie had
helped her to steady it with a series of upright chopsticks hidden inside. And there Janie and Mike were, two eight-year-olds sitting with all those big-boy friends of Cormac’s, being served slices of cake bigger than their heads.