Douglas Nelson - Cat On A Blue Monday

"They asked you? I'm impressed, but not surprised. Didn't you go?"

He looked down, away. "No."

"But you could have. What harm would it have done? Senior proms are such a rite of passage," Temple said in her dreamy turn. "Maybe you were better off not going, though. I went, and was I sorry."

"Why?"

"Why?" Temple wanted to clutch her hair, although she knew such a gesture was theatrical, "Because I was forced to go! Wouldn't you know that in front of the whole debating team, I would get asked by dweeby Curtis Dixstrom because I was the only girl shorter than he was--and the creep knew that I was too 'intellectual' to hold out for a jock or a class president. So I went."

"And you surprised yourself and had a good time?"

"You sound like my mother did then," Temple said sourly. "'Oh, go, dear, and maybe you'll meet somebody else nicer.' l didn't want anybody 'nicer,' I wanted somebody cooler. So I went, and loathed it, and Curtis got seriously drunk at the after-prom party and I ended up driving him home, and me too, in his father's dweeby Volvo station wagon."

Matt tried not to laugh. "You always end up taking responsibility, don't you?"

"You always turn personal questions back on the interrogator, don't you? You don't much like talking about you."

"No, I don't. We wouldn't be now if Sister Superfine hadn't used her nationwide nun intelligence network to track me down."

"Superfine? Oh, Seraphina/Superfine. Isn't it . . . disrespectful to call a nun that?"

"You bet it is. Catholic kids nowadays are almost as disrespectful as public-school kids. And it isn't really disrespectful. Only popular nuns get nicknames."

"I was going to ask you where these nuns get their names.

Do priests change their names?"

He shook his head. "Only nuns, I never thought about it that way, but it's probably sexist. Nuns are expected to give up their old identity, but priests aren't. Of course, brothers take new names as well."

"Brothers? Oh, brother. There's a lot about the Catholic Church that's Greek to me."

"There's even a Greek Orthodox Catholic Church." Matt mustered a teasing twinkle. "And in it, priests can marry."

"And still be Catholic? Amazing. Maybe you could . . . change churches."

Matt sobered and shook his head. "Celibacy wasn't the reason I left; it isn't the reason for a lot of ex-priests."

Temple's heart sank. Celibacy made a lot of sense in the current uncertain social climate, but she couldn't imagine any healthy prime-of-life person contemplating it forever.

"In the old days," Matt was explaining in his informative, neutral voice that so efficiently distanced him from the listener, from himself even, "boys entered the seminary from grade school. Now they enter after high school, or even after college, so there's no wav the candidates haven't had a chance to experience a normal social life."

"You mean that some priests aren't virgins

"The promise is for the duration of their priesthood."

"Forever."

"Forever."

"Except . . . in certain cases," she parroted his earlier answers about matters of ironclad dogma.

He nodded ruefully, "Except in certain cases."

"I'll never figure it out," Temple said, pushing her plate away and resolving to change the subject. "Any more than I'll figure out why anyone would harass an elderly woman like Miss Tyler."

"Kids would," Matt said promptly, "and this is gang territory."

"What isn't nowadays?" Temple asked with a shudder. "And making obscene phone-calls to a convent." She contributed another, deeper shudder to the conversation.

"Were you serious about Satanists?

The waiter retrieved their empty plates. Matt braced his elbows on the table and scrubbed his face with the palms of his hands. "There's not as much of it out there as the alarmists think, but it is a possibility. Satanists are known to be cruel to cats."

"And the attack on Miss Tyler's niece's cat at the show is strange. That seemed more of a prank, or the work of a malicious competitor."

"Could people get that worked up over a cat competition?"

"There's status and money in it," Temple said promptly, "and where there are status and money, there also is a motive for mischief."

"Sounds like another beatitude, only I'd call it a maleficitude."

"It's the oddest coincidence," Temple said, reaching for the small green chit the waiter slapped to the table before Matt.

"You drove, and then some," Matt said, sliding it off the table and pulling out his wallet.

New, Temple observed, like a lot of his clothes looked. Why hadn't she noticed that and come to correct conclusions before? Because nothing about Matt was particularly noticeable, until you knew his history, and then everything was more fascinating than ever . . . Oh, dear Lord, Could a congenitally curious woman ever have had a more perfect subject of interest?

"What are you doing the rest of the day if you're not resting?" she asked.

"If you don't mind dropping me off at the convent, I'll see how Sister Seraphina and Miss Tyler are doing. I can get home all right during the day."

"I'll stop by the vet's and check on Louie and poor Peter."

"How free are you today?"

"As free as a rock-concert ticket at a radio station, why?"

"Want to practice your self-defense techniques at four?"

"Not really, and you'll be dead tired--"

"That's why I'll need to do something like that."

"You must think I need intense help."

"No, but not many weeks ago you were confronted by thugs looking for Kinsella; now you're driving me around bad neighborhoods in dark nights. You need it. By the way, have you gone to group yet?"

"I will, I will, when I get a minute!"

"Four o'clock okay?" he asked, eyeing her hopefully.

"Okay." She thought he was crazy to push himself this hard after a night's lost sleep, but maybe that was exactly the way he kept himself sane.

Chapter 17

Cross Not the Cat

"You looked tired. Matthias," Sister Seraphina said in the cool visitors' room of the convent, the elderly air conditioner's hum as domestic and comforting as a refrigerators.

"You lost as much sleep as I did," he countered, "and it's just Matt now."

Her eyes shut in brief, placid admission of the correction.

"I do not work a night shift like you do, and the old don't need much sleep---luckily so, for we seldom get it. Nor do we change old habits easily. Matt, I think that you should meet Father Hernandez now."

Matt maintained silence. He had no desire to meet this Father Hernandez who was reduced to feuding with parishioners about the afterlives of cats, with managing fund drives to keep the parish alive, and with retreating to the bottle when the maddening daily wear and tear had become too much. Mostly, he didn't want to meet Father Hernandez because no matter how badly the man had failed, he had not deserted his post, he had not yet left the priesthood. Father Hernandez's mere existence, with all its cracks and fissures, would seem a rebuke. Matt realized that he was still raw from his severance with his vocation and only imagining that a man whom he was not willing to judge would be a harsh judge of Matt Devine. Father Hernandez would not even know Matt's history, unless Sister Seraphina had told him. Had she?

Matt finally rose without comment and let Sister Seraphina lead him out into the hot, post-meridian sun, which already fell less scaldingly on his fair skin. Autumn was coming.

He was given the grand tour on the way to the rectory. Our Lady of Guadalupe Church had a cool, old and ornate interior, laced with white plasterwork and pastel statues of the saints that most other Catholic churches downplayed now, confining even the Virgin Mary to a discreet side altar.

The blinding, blue-collar magnificence reminded him of his home church of St. Stanislaus in Chicago, the architectural opposite but spiritual cousin to Our Lady of Guadalupe. Working-class people were inspired by churches of blatant beauty, perhaps because their daily lives held so little of it.