"Story of Love," by Mark Jacobs

There is a hole of hurt in Lorena Pleasant’s heart. Father Pete keeps telling her only the love of God will fill it. Come home to Mother Church, Lorena, and your hole will heal, you will be lifted into the light. Lorena doesn’t believe it. She wishes she did and tries to believe, to feel it. But the words the priest speaks to her are just that, words. It’s not his fault. Name a thing that exists in the world today, and it has changed. Nothing is the way it used to be, Father Pete’s uplifting words included. Her too. Lorena herself is definitely included.

It’s November, rainy and bone cold. Deer season opens tomorrow. Men with more firepower than sense will tromp around the woods of the Southern Tier taking aim, taking aim. Every year she observes the lucky shots driving through town with a deer carcass strapped to the roof of their vehicle. Lorena grew up in the city and dislikes the whole idea of hunting. If she had somewhere to go, she would leave Bucks Hill until the season is over.

Her body aches. Pain has taken up residence in her joints. She is in a slump and has not kept up with her stretching exercises. Back to the routine tomorrow.

These are the thoughts banging around in her head when a terrible thing happens. There is a knock at the door. When she opens it, there stands Christopher.

“Hello, Ma.”

Lorena is stupefied. She shakes her head.

“How did you get here?”

“Bus. My Maserati’s in the shop. So, you gonna let me in, or do I freeze my ass off out here?”

Out on the street an old brown Jeep is going by, windshield wipers busy on the glass. All the world’s tears, she thinks, but that’s silly. She can’t remember the driver’s name. He used to bring the Jeep, or one just like it, to Perry, when Perry was still alive and had the garage. She hopes the man doesn’t notice who is at her door. That, too, is silly.

She steps aside, her son comes in. They do not touch. Their glances collide, then go in opposite directions. He drips on the carpet. How much there is that can be forgotten about a person who is absent. His face is broader than she remembers. The passage of time has stretched it. Those muscular shoulders, the cocky attitude, his father’s blue-gray eyes, all that is the same. But they are now at the service of an older person. She had him when she was thirty. That makes him a forty-five-year-old stranger.

He unzips his jacket. “Can I put this somewhere?”

Still unable to speak, she points to the front hall closet.

“How ‘bout some coffee?” he says into the closet, hanging up his jacket.

That much she can manage. In the living room, he makes himself at home on the couch, unlacing his wet boots and sprawling, while she goes to the kitchen to brew a pot of coffee. That gives her time to compose herself and think.

He must want something. Otherwise, why come home? Will he come right out and ask, or will he attempt to manipulate her? Money. It has to be money. It was money the first time, money the last time. If Perry had found out what was going on, that last time, he would have beaten the boy to a pulp. She banished Christopher for his own good.

Is that true?

Does he take milk and sugar? She has no idea. By the time she carries him a mug of coffee, she has found her voice, or the facsimile of her voice.

“You didn’t come. To your father’s funeral.”

Sitting up to take the steaming mug, he keeps his eyes on her face as though expecting something bad to happen there.

“I meant to, Ma.”

She is relieved that he does not come up with an excuse.

Perry has been gone for seven, no, eight years. Lorena’s life has been tranquil since her husband died. She is retired from the school district, where she was secretary to the principal. She cooks meals for one, she does crossword puzzles. She watches more television than is good for her including lots of golf especially if Tiger Woods is playing. She does not miss her husband’s mighty anger.

Take the bull by the horns.

“What do you want, Christopher?”

As he sips silently, hands around the mug, his eyebrows go up. “Want?”

“Why are you here?”

He seems to give the question some thought. She hopes he won’t lie, won’t tell her he has come to see her because she is his mother and he missed her.

“I’m wiped out,” he tells her. “I’ve got a blistering headache. I get them all the time lately. Mind if I lie down a while?”

She could say no. She could tell him to leave, and he would have to go. But she doesn’t.

“The guest room bed is made up. You can sleep there.”

He places the empty mug on the coffee table with a kind of precision, a physical tact she does not recall his having possessed. He stands, stretches, tells her it’s good to see her as though just discovering that it’s true. Then he pads down the hall to the guest room, closing the door softly behind him.

She should call Father Pete and ask him to postpone his visit. She doesn’t, although she couldn’t tell you why. Soon enough here he is at the door, handsome and considerate, with manners.

“Hello, Lorena. It’s lovely to see you. I hope you’re well.”

“Good morning, Father Pete.”

Pete is not his real name. He’s from Manila. His Filipino name is long and too complicated for his American parishioners. She likes everything about him, as a person. The milky tan of his skin, the dark sparkling eyes, the humor in the shapely mouth that would be, in a layman, a smirk.

She serves him coffee from a fresh pot along with cranberry scones she baked when she got up. These visits follow a pattern. A reading from the Bible, keeping it short. The priest then offers a few words of exegesis, somehow contriving to make it feel like a plain old conversation. Then, once she is drawn in, he finds the right moment to bring up her return to the Church. To his credit, he never overdoes it.

Today he chooses the Acts of the Apostles, seven, and these words stick in Lorena’s imagination: And at the second time Joseph was made known to his brethren; and Joseph’s kindred was made known unto Pharaoh. Something about the scene stabs her. She pictures Joseph in the same room – it’s a large room, and splendid, befitting a Pharaoh – with the brothers who behaved so abominably to him, selling him into bondage. What must he have felt, coming face to face with his betrayers after so long?

“Is something wrong, Lorena?

“Nothing is wrong.”

“You seem, I don’t know, maybe a little worried?”

A sense of fatalism prevents her from mentioning Christopher. She feels passive. What will be, will be. So when her son wakes and makes his way down the hall to find a Catholic priest in his mother’s living room it seems like something that has already happened.

“This is my son, Father. Christopher, this is Father Pete Corpuz. He’s the rector at Saint Albertinus.”

The priest stands. The men shake hands warily, as men do.

“Did you know my father?” Christopher wants to know.

“No,” says Father Pete. “I only came to the parish three years ago.”

“He hated the Catholic Church. Did Ma tell you that? Say Catholic to Perry Pleasant, and he started foaming at the mouth.”

Christopher sits. Father Pete sits. Lorena, after a moment, sits, too.

“I guess it’s a good thing I showed up, Ma,” her son says.

She waits for the hit. Here it comes.

“You hear all the time about ministers, priests taking advantage of old women. Predators, that’s what they are. They worm their way into the old gal’s confidence and take her for everything she’s worth.”

“Christopher, please.”

“Am I right, Padre? You must hear about these vultures. Con men in collars, that’s what I call them. Not to mention the perverts. From what I hear, the Pope is going broke, settling all those abuse cases. No disrespect intended.”

Lorena goes from stupefied to mortified. But Father Pete is magnificent. None of the filth her son slings in his direction fazes him. He is strong and steady.

“I wish I had known your father, Christopher. I would like to have had the opportunity to improve his opinion of the Church.”

“Fat chance of that.”

The two men go back and forth for a while. The upshot is, Christopher looks mean and petty, while Father Pete looks serene and sure of himself. The Church has in him an able defender. When he takes his leave, she walks him to the door. They shake hands as always but this time she holds onto his an instant longer. It’s her way of saying thank you.

When they are alone again Lorena asks Christopher, “I don’t understand why you’re here.”

“The bus went by Dad’s garage, coming into town. Place looks like hell.”

“It was bought, when he died, but they weren’t able to make a go of it. Please answer my question.”

“I’m here,” he shrugs. “It’s a freaking mystery to me.”

“If you want money, I don’t have a lot.”

She is long out of practice and unable to interpret the look he gives her. It’s clear now that he won’t come right out and tell her what he’s after. Hate to say it, Ma, but I’m in a jam. That means he intends to manipulate her. She must be on her guard.

They’re in daylight savings time. The November day goes by in a whoosh. She makes spaghetti and meatballs, and they eat in the kitchen with little conversation. The glass of Chianti she pours him goes untouched. Later, when she informs him she is going to bed, he surprises her by asking permission to spend the night.

“I suppose it’s all right,” she says, grudging the words more than the assent they signify.

Upstairs in her room, lying in bed, Lorena is incapable of thinking straight. Her confusion is great, as is her hurt. She wonders how much money she can come up with, when the time comes. She will give him what she can. She will resent it but give.

Christopher is out of bed before her in the morning. She finds him in the kitchen making coffee and buttering toast.

“Does your head still hurt?”

“Not at the moment. It gets worse as the day goes on. Afternoons are the worst. Later on, sometimes it tapers off.”

It seems wrong to eat toast prepared by her son’s hands. If not wrong, then uncomfortable. She chews slowly, wondering whether the headaches are a ruse meant to elicit sympathy.

“So, you’re retired now, I guess.”

At the high school, she had lasted through five different men in the job, not all of them hard to work for.

“They call me back to take a shift, now and then, when somebody gets sick. I don’t mind.”

“I was looking around,” Christopher says casually.

“Yes?”

“You still have Dad’s tools?”

“They’re down cellar.”

“You know you got a leak around the base of the toilet, downstairs bathroom, right?”

Lorena watches in wonder as he retrieves Perry’s tools and sets about fixing the leak in the toilet. She stands in the doorway as he works, stirred by the sight of those tools.

“When he died,” she tells her son, “I had a time, dealing with all the paperwork.”

“I bet.”

“It turned out that your father owed money.”

“To who?”

“A bank. He took out a loan I never knew about.”

“A loan for what?”

“As best as I could piece it together, he was losing money at the garage. Year after year. People started going to Pep Boys, or the Midas. The chain stores. Well, and Perry was so grumpy, the customers didn’t like dealing with him. After I sold the garage and paid off what he owed, there wasn’t anything left.”

“You should have hired a lawyer, fought it.”

“He was my husband.”

“He was a son of a bitch.”

“Why didn’t you come to the funeral?”

He shakes his head, turns away, goes back to work.

Around lunchtime, her phone rings. It’s Father Pete. He asks to speak with Christopher. She passes her son the telephone. He listens, snorts, says something unpleasant. Hangs up, lays the phone face down on the table.

“What did he want?”

“Said he wanted to take me out. Coffee, dinner, whatever. He wanted to get to know me because of his high opinion of you. I’m not interested.”

“Father Pete has great gifts.”

“He hooked you yet?”

Lorena Parisi was raised Catholic in Buffalo. When she married Perry he bullied her out of attending Mass. His hostility was titanic, and built to last. She fell away from the Church and did not go back after he died.

“I respect Father Pete.”

“Guess that means no.”

She turns away. Her son has always been able to offend her. That hasn’t changed.

In the afternoon he tells her the headache is back and lies down in the guest room. His presence in the house has unsettled her. They were apart so many years, she assumed she would not see him again.

She banished her only son. That’s the only word for it. He was living in Buffalo, how many years ago? He gravitated to her family there, which was a good thing, but then took up with her cousin Marty, which was a very bad thing. Marty was a small-time criminal. He thought his Italian heritage qualified him to be a wise guy but never found a way into the organization he longed to be part of. They didn’t want him. He robbed a little, cheated a lot, went in and out of prison. Bragged on his tattoos, and his jailhouse savvy. And Christopher fell under his spell.

The vig. First time she heard the term, her son was explaining to her how he had gotten behind on his repayments to a loan shark. Gambling debts. Of course it was gambling that got him into trouble. The vig was the interest rate on the amount of money you owed a moneylender. It’s killing me, Ma, the damn vig is killing me. This guy’s a brute, he doesn’t know the meaning of mercy. Christopher owed a lot, and it kept going up.

She kept Perry out of it completely. If he had known, he would have unleashed his full fury on the boy. No disrespect to the dead intended, but she believed he was capable of killing Christopher. She cashed in her retirement account, paying a stiff penalty for early withdrawal. She had to start over, saving for her old age. Take it, she said, and don’t come back. Christopher was in a constant fog, back then, a muddle of liquor and drugs and sheer stupidity, but he understood that she meant it. He never did come back.

She’s sitting in the kitchen. She takes a bottle of Tylenol from the cupboard, pours a glass of water, goes down the hall. She knocks gently on his door. If he’s asleep she doesn’t want to wake him up. But he’s not.

“Ma?”

She offers him the Tylenol.

“None of that aspirin-type stuff touches it,” he says.

But he takes two tablets, washing them down with water.

The curtains are closed. There’s a low-watt bulb in the lamp on the bedside table. The darkness has clumps. The clumps are dense and exude an ominous silence. This is the evening of my life, she thinks. This is how it’s going to be.

“I was in prison,” he tells her, lying on his side and facing her. “When Dad died. First and only time.”

He does not tell her the crime of which he was convicted. She does not ask. Instead she says, “You could have asked them to let you out. For the funeral. They do that, I think.”

“I’m pretty sure something is wrong with my head.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“No health insurance.”

“Is that what you want from me, money for the doctor?”

The question seems to take him aback. He turns away. She leaves the room.

That afternoon, when Father Pete calls, checking in, she does not tell him what Christopher has said about his head. Why? He invites her to a Bible study group get-together this evening. No pressure, he assures her, no commitment. It might be fun to see some new faces. She thanks him, putting some feeling into it, but turns down the offer.

The man does everything right. He is a priest for proper holy reasons. First and foremost among those reasons is his desire to illuminate for people the divine love he is so intently aware of. Lorena does not doubt his sincerity. Nor does she doubt the reality of that love in his own mind and heart and being. By extension, she thinks now, she ought to be able to feel some of it herself. The fact is, however, she does not. Is this a mystery or just a fact of her life?

Christopher gives no indication of leaving. Lorena considers asking him to go. The dismay he has stirred up inside her since coming home is an old thing, one of her most dependable possessions, stored away but not forgotten. She says nothing, however, and makes meatloaf for dinner.

That evening they call her from the school. The receptionist in the principal’s office is down with the flu. Will she work a shift tomorrow? She is eager to get away from her son but anxious about leaving him alone in the house. It’s a nonsensical feeling. She has nothing he would be tempted to steal unless it were her computer, and those are a dime a dozen anymore.

She does not want to have another reason to resent him.

She accepts the job but next morning feels a bit disoriented. The students who come into the office for various reasons look like hellions to her, rampaging down the road to ruin. She is distracted enough that the principal, a man in his fifties with an out-of-date brush-cut and square glasses, calls her into his private office and closes the door. He wants to know if perhaps the time to retire for once and all has come. He is a humane man and not acting out of cruelty. Is the work too much for her? It may be, it may well be, but it’s not the work that has thrown her off, it’s Christopher.

In the parking lot, leaving school, she calls Father Pete.

“Are you okay, Lorena?”

“I worked a shift at the school today.”

“How did it go?”

She’s not sure why she tells him the story of how she met Perry. It seems relevant, but she can’t say why. As always, the priest listens ably.

She was working the counter at her father’s auto parts store in downtown Buffalo. Perry Pleasant drove up from the Southern Tier looking for a carburetor he could not get his hands on locally. She was twenty six, with an associate degree from Erie County Community College. She had thought she might go on and get a bachelor’s. Had a vague idea of becoming a paralegal. But didn’t. She thought she was losing her sex appeal, and lo and behold here was a brash man from a place called Bucks Hill who found her attractive. Impulsively she agreed to go out with him.

“It was a mistake, Father,” she tells the priest. “But I lived with it. I honored the sanctity of marriage and lived with it.”

She feels vulnerable, relating this story. It opens her to criticism. But Father Pete not only listens well, he makes her feel that her life and experience are unique, and worthy of contemplation.

She is exhausted by the time she walks in her own front door. The last year or two, an eight-hour shift really takes it out of her. She blames the blow-up with Christopher on her being tired.

He comes down the hall when he hears her come in. His hair is mussed and he looks disheveled, as though he’s not sure where he is.

“Lying around all day, I suppose. Pretty nice work, if you can get it.”

Saying the unlovely words, she wants him out of her house.

“Jesus, Ma. You know you could always make me feel like a shithead when you wanted to. You were good at that.”

The conversation lasts another few moments but does not improve in tenor. It ends with Christopher going back to the guest room. This time he slams the door.

Lorena is too tired to be hungry, but she opens a can of tomato soup. She heats it and eats at the kitchen table, crumbling in a few crackers for bulk. She feels terrible. She also feels put upon, and misunderstood. She feels lonely, as though she has been abandoned. She only gets through half the soup.

Afterward she turns on the TV and falls asleep in her chair so that Christopher has to shake her awake. It’s late. Her son is in a state.

“I can’t stand it, Ma. My head is frigging killing me.”

As if to certify the truth of his words he lurches to the bathroom and heaves in the toilet. By the time he comes back she has her coat on, her keys in hand.

Neither of them says a word, getting into the car. She drives. The fear around both of them is palpable. She drives toward Olean. Outside the city there is an urgent care facility she once went to for a stomach problem. She parks in the lot, where the streetlights cast a sinister glow. She accompanies Christopher inside. At the front desk she provides her credit card information to the woman on duty. Christopher stands next to her, head hanging down. He seems confused. She guides him to a chair in the waiting area. She practically has to push him down into his seat.

“She says somebody’ll come get you in five minutes. Ten minutes tops.”

He does not respond. She wonders whether he heard her.

Now.

She walks out. Gets in her car. She leaves the lot, pulling onto the highway unaware which direction she is choosing. She wonders, as from a distance, whether she has a destination in mind. She understands that the sense of relief she feels, getting away, cannot be relied on.

Some miles go by. She must be in the country. The night is dark beyond dark. Her headlights create quivering cones. Is this what they mean by panic?

At a certain point she stops. She turns the car around. Thought does not enter into it. She drives back to the urgent care place and parks in the same space in the lot. She sits there a moment. She’s watching Christopher, who is sitting on a bench near the entrance doors. He is in ambiguous shadow, but she can see that his hands are folded in his lap.

She gets out of the car. Walks. Stands in front of him.

“What did they say?”

He takes his time, answering. He is gathering his wits.

“They said it’s serious.”

“What does that mean?”

“They want to put me in the hospital and run some tests.”

“I see.”

She is weak on her legs. The nap has worn off, and she is impossibly tired again. The stress makes it worse. She could lie down in a field of flowers and go to sleep for a long time. She thinks, dully, about the divine love that Father Pete would like her to experience. It would be nice. It would keep her on her feet. It would shape her actions and make them bright. She is sorry to disappoint the priest. He deserves success.

She notices an envelope lying flat on her son’s lap, under his folded hands. In it will be papers for the hospital.

“Ma?”

“Yes?”

“I’m scared.”

After a moment, the longest moment, she tells him, “Me, too.”

Christopher nods. He goes on nodding. Lorena does not know why.

“Wait here,” she tells him, and goes to get the car.