Read Online Earthquake I.D. by John Domini - Free Book Online Page B

entered their third trimester.
    The priest had come closer again. “You have your doubts, but you don’t know for certain? You can’t bring yourself to ask him?”
    â€œBut haven’t you heard what I’ve been telling you, Father? Haven’t I been saying, inside a marriage, power is just as real as out on the street?”
    â€œWell, power of a kind, I suppose. But you made your own choices. Didn’t you just see fit to remind me that you have five children?”
    Do the math, Barbara. Three boys plus twin girls equals enough to keep you happy. Or it used to be enough, as she’d explained to the old Jesuit the last time.
    â€œOh listen,” she reiterated now, “the mother scene, that’s over for me.”
    Cesare folded his arms, more sticks in sacks. “Really, Mrs. Lulucita?” Barbara had told him how she used to thrive in parenting, its snot and intimacy. “I heard you say that even on your first morning in Naples, on the most bewildering streets in Europe, you were such a dedicated parent that you could enter the mind of an eleven-year-old boy.”
    â€œI know what I said, Father. Cesare. And I’ll tell you something, I know the girls even better than I know Paul. But those girls are out of third grade now.” Barbara faced the speckled altar wall again; she didn’t want to whine. “After this, the way their social life takes over, it’s as if they’ve gotten their driver’s license. The best part of being a mother, that was over before I left Bridgeport.”
    Cesare might’ve shown some sympathy, a softening in his posture. But to hear him clear his throat, you would’ve thought he was grinding gears.
    â€œMrs. Lulucita.” His tone frosted the name’s musicality. “You know, Christ wasn’t nailed to the cross for unhappy wives.”
    In his half-disgusted wave, Barb caught a glimpse of an alternative life. The man would’ve made a homosexual of the old school, courtly.
    â€œIn Dublin too, don’t you know, the complaining was quite interminable. The song of the unhappy bourgeois.”
    â€˜You’re my priest,” Barbara told him. “I have to ask again, do you want me to lie? To live in a lie?”
    â€œWell, let’s rehearse what we have here, shall we? Children grow up and leave home, isn’t that a fact of our existence? And lovers lose their charms, inevitably.”
    Then with two knobby fingers still extended, Cesare reminded her that he went downtown three times a week, where he worked with people in real trouble. “The very sort of clandestini you’d find out at your husband’s worksite.”
    â€œSo.…” Barb needed another look around the church. “So what you’re saying is, before I book a flight for New York, I should go see what he’s up to.”
    â€œWe live in a time of a great challenge, Mrs. Lulucita, one that seems to have come straight from Christ’s teaching. This city, whether it can continue as a place of justice or not, seems now at the heart of that challenge.”
    When Barbara cast her eyes up, the stony heights tweaked her knees with vertigo. ‘You remember I worked with broken families, Father? I never got the credentials for actual counseling, but I’ve done some good for families. For children.”
    â€œBut the effort Christ calls you to here in Naples, signora, requires no greater credential than a caring heart.”
    She went on staring at the ceiling, her head on the back of the pew.
    â€œA caring heart, Mrs. Lulucita.” The afternoon sun had sunk low enough to fill the stained-glass windows, and Cesare had leaned into a patch of these airborne colors. “When you adopted that girl, that time, what did you require, except—?”
    â€œThe adoption failed.” Barbara sat up and heaved to her feet. “If you ask me, I required a whole lot more.”
    â€œBe that as