Part 17 (1/2)
”I know. I heard about you.”
”What?”
”Nothing bad. Only that you'd gone through the whole laicization process. I didn't. I just . . . walked away.”
”I guess that's the norm.”
”You were never the norm. In seminary, I mean. You were always different.”
”Different? Me? How?”
”You kept to your studies and yourself. Oh, you played sports, did the community thing, but it was like you were never fully there.”
”I felt pretty grounded.”
”You never-” Jerome sucked on his own straw, as if swallowing his next words. He was drinking a cola, and Matt wondered about taking in all that caffeine so late at night . . . so early in the morning.
”I never what? I'm used to having my failings presented to me. Seminary, you know.”
”You didn't have any failings. We all figured you were the one who'd never leave. Except I-”
”You what?”
”I never bought that, even though you always seemed like you were really meant to be there. I always felt you were escaping your past, but I had to honor what you were trying to be.”
Trying to be? Matt wondered. Was he still trying to be something unreachably honorable? Not a priest, but a celibate. Would Max Kinsella consider honoring him for his . . . restraint with Temple? Would he be having this conversation with Kinsella ten years down the pike?
But this was now, and that was then, and it was disturbing news.
”All? You were all talking about me? I didn't talk about you.”
”Maybe that's why-You didn't know what was going on. Did you?”
”I like to think I'm fairly observant.”
”But then.”
”But then ... we were kids. We were engaged in a very serious course of self-examination and study.”
”I used to admire you.”
”Used to?”
”I mean, back then, when I was just a kid. I was two years behind. You don't remember me, do you?”
Matt tried to, and then he tried to think of a way oflying and saying he did without actually lying, but Jerome cut through all that.
”I not only had hair then, but I had gla.s.ses.” He looked up from his burger. He had pale blue eyes, rather soulful. ”I wear contact lenses now. I don't much want to be what I was back then.”
”It's understandable.”
”Is it? How can you say that when you don't understand?”
Matt felt irritation scratching like his long-lost clerical collar. He'd finished a draining night s.h.i.+ft at work; he was at worst a suspect in a murder and at best responsible for a woman's suicide. And now he was expected to make small talk with someone he didn't even remember from a time he wanted to forget.
And who expected him to do this? He asked himself. He did. He smiled wryly, at himself.
”I've got a lot on my mind, and, no, the brain is not turning back the alb.u.m pages very efficiently right now. Doing a live radio show is terribly draining. I'm told by those who know that there's a natural let-down' afterward. It's not my best time.”
Jerome swallowed, not any food or drink, just his own very visible Adam's apple. ”Mine neither. I'm not an after-midnight kind of guy.”
”What's your job?”
”Day s.h.i.+ft, obviously. I'm a picture framer.” He shrugged. ”Guess it's an outgrowth of all those Sacred Heart paintings the old folks at home had framed on the walls everywhere. You can't outrun your own history.”
”No. You can't.” The words cut Matt like a razor.
His own history was getting pretty lurid. He wondered what Jerome would think if he knew his old seminary schoolmate had been with a high-priced call girl just last night. Matt checked his wrist.w.a.tch with a spasm of guilt. This time last night he had been talking to Va.s.sar. She had been alive.
”I don't mean to keep you up.”
”It's not you,” Matt said hastily. This guy looked like people were always ducking out on him, and Matt didn't want to add that guilt to the load he already carried. ”I was thinking of a ... friend.”
”There's someone-?”
”Someone? Oh. No. I'm single.”
Jerome nodded, looking a little uneasy.
”Something wrong about that?”
”No. Only it's obvious-”
”What?”
”That you're committed to marriage, since you equate being single with having no significant other.”
”Yeah, I guess. Listen. We haven't seen each other in years and we weren't even in the same cla.s.s. I don't get-”
Jerome took a deep breath. ”You never knew, did you? I kinda hoped it was that way, that one of us got out unscathed.”
”Knew what?”
”What was really going on in seminary.”
Matt felt the burger bites in his gut congeal with cold, as if slapped with an ice pack. Oh, my G.o.d, was this about the nightly news?