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your ownchurch was insane but I learned to shut up about it. When I went to the St. Augustine School, having your own chapel didn’t seem quite so preposterous. Some other kids were in the same boat.
    Now the chapel was dripping in the rain like something you’d find in an old English churchyard, in a poem. It was dark and dreary and full of mice. The grass needed cutting. It was lacquered over with a thin coating of ice. I grabbed the handrail and climbed the steps to the iron-bound oaken door. The ring handle squeaked slightly when I gave it a tug. A single candle guttered in the rush of air from the doorway. One little candle. The chapel was utterly black beyond the halo of light, almost as if it were just emptiness. Still, Val must have been there to light the candle. And then she’d gone off somewhere.
    I went back to the house, turned off the lights. I couldn’t bear the idea of making myself at home in that cold house without Val. It wasn’t like her to leave me hanging. But it was a rotten night and she may have had errands and gotten slowed down somewhere. She’d show up later.
    I was hungry and needed a drink. I got into the car and took one look back at the lonely old house in the pelting rain, and drove in to Princeton.
    There was a pleasant buzz of conversation in the downstairs taproom of the Nassau Inn. The bar was crowded. There was a haze of smoke, the faint air of clubbiness that clings to the name if not to the actual place itself. There were the framed photographs of Hoby Baker and other heroes of another age, the deep carvings of generations of Tigers in the tops of the tables. The smoky haze might have been the mists of time.
    I sank into a booth and ordered a double dry Rob Roy and realized how tense I was. It was Val and the fear in her voice, and now where was she? She’d been so insistent, and now nothing. Had she put a match to that single candle?
    My cheeseburger had just arrived when I heard someone call my name. “Ben! Ben boy, a blast from the past!”
    I looked up into the boyish, blue-eyed face of Terence O’Neale—Father Terence O’Neale, who was between Val and me in age but would always look like a freshman somewhere. Everybody used to call him Peaches because he had one of those perfect peaches-and-cream complexions, eternally youthful, ever innocent. We’d known Peaches forever. We’d played tennis and golf and he’d always contended that I’d gotten him drunk the first time, out back in our orchard. He was smiling down at me, blue eyes glinting, dangling over the chasm of the past.
    “Take a load off, Peach,” I said, and he was sliding into the booth across from me with a beer of his own. He hadn’t started out to become a priest: that was pretty much Val’s doing. Golf and motorcycles and the world beer-chugging record, that’s what Terence O’Neale had seen when he looked into his future. That and a wife and a bunch of kids and maybe a job on Wall Street. Val was supposed to be Mrs. O’Neale. It had sounded fine to me. Now I hadn’t seen him in four or five years but he hadn’t changed. He wore a white buttondown and a tweed jacket. Vinnie would have approved.
    “So what brings you back to the scene of our crimes?”
    “I’m a workingman, Ben. Got a job over in New Pru. I’m the padre at St. Mary’s. It’s a little spooky—I keep looking out during the homily and I keep thinking I’ll see us, you and me and Val.” He grinned at the Lord’s mysterious ways.
    “Since when? Why didn’t you call me?”
    “Just since summer. I’ve seen your father. You should have seen him do a double take. I figured I’d catch you at Christmas. Val said she might get a skating party together out back of the orchard. She said I shouldn’t expect you at mass.”
    “She got that right. I’ve been going straight for twenty years, as you damn well know.”
    He plucked a french fry from my plate. “So what are you doing here? Your dad says you don’t get home