Wendy Hornsby - The Color of Light

Max broke the silence that had settled over the cab. “John, how do you handle the weight of all the secrets you have to keep?”

Father John thought for a moment. “The confidences of the confessional don’t belong to me. I pass messages on to the boss upstairs and counsel the sinner to repent. And to fix his mess.”

“Can you really do that, just hand it off?”

Father John shook his head. “Not always. Sometimes what I hear makes my heart feel heavy. Hell, sometimes what I hear curls my toes. Why do you ask, counselor? Is something weighing on you?”

“At any given moment? You bet,” Max said with a sardonic little chortle. “Lordy, the crap I hear from my clients. But my job isn’t fixing them or saving their immortal souls. All I have to do is represent their issues before the law. Sometimes, though, it’s damn hard to sit by and do nothing when I’m told something that could really help someone out, but I can’t say a damn word.”

Father John reached across the space between their seats and clamped a hand on Max’s shoulder. Smiling, he said, “Have you tried going to confession, my son, to unburden your soul?”

Max laughed. “I gave that up a long time ago, Padre.”

“If I put a couple of easy chairs and a bottle of good scotch in the confessional, counselor, would you give it a try?”

“I might.” Max reached back and tapped my knee. “What are your plans tonight?”

“Jean-Paul is flying in,” I said. “So you’re relieved of duty.”

“So, John,” Max said. “You up for a steak dinner?”

“I know just the place,” Father John said. “Pick me up at seven.”

We dropped off Father John at the rectory and headed down Shattuck. As soon as we pulled the van into its parking space in the alley behind the deli, Beto started making lunch for Max and me. Kevin was already gone, and the lunch-hour crowd was beginning to thin. Max and I found a table near the front windows and sat down.

“How was it riding in back, Maggie?” Beto asked as he set pastrami on rye in front of us. He uncorked a frosted bottle of prosecco and poured it into three tall flutes; it had been that kind of a day.

“It was nostalgic,” I said, clinking my glass to his as he pulled out the chair next to Max. “Like the old days, when we went on jobs with your dad. Do you still do catering?”

“Oh, sure. More, actually. We cater a lot of lunch and breakfast meetings at Cal and Rotary, that sort of thing. When Dad still had the place alone, because those gigs always come at slam time here in the store, all he could ever do was drop off food platters and run back to work the counter. By the time I came aboard, he was already slowing down, so catering pretty much stayed status quo. But once our kids were in school, Zaida took over that end of the business, and she’s done a fantastic job, really grown it. She brought in Auntie Quynh to make desserts and help serve. If it’s a really big event, she hires her friends to do the serving, just like in the old days when Dad hired us on weekends. Now they have all the business they can handle.” Beto grinned. “I’m so proud of her.”

“That’s just great,” Max said. “Really great.”

“It is,” I said. I remembered that his mom used to work in the store during the lunch-hour rush. She’d see Beto off to school, and then she’d walk over; Mrs. B never drove a car.

“Any new word on your dad?” I asked Beto.

He shook his head.

“I’ll go over and see him this afternoon sometime.”

“He’d like that,” he said. “Look, if you’re going to the hospital, could you do me a big favor? Dad asked for a couple of things, but Zaida and Auntie are busy getting ready for a dinner gig and I can’t get away until closing. If you’d go by the house and get a bag for him, it would be a big help. Auntie will be at the house frosting cakes until four.”

“I’m happy to help,” I said.

My phone buzzed; it was Kevin, so I stayed where I was and took the call.

He asked, “You get Father John squared away?”

“We did. He’s going to call Larry’s family.”

“I’ll tell the chief.”

“You’re really off the case, then?”

“Yeah.” There was a pause. “Hey, Maggie, the D.A. is filing charges against Lacy for the shooting. Arraignment is scheduled for Wednesday.”

“That’s rough,” I said. “Max is here. Do you need him?”

“No, but thanks. He put me on to a good local guy. On the advice of Max, we’ve started the process of getting Lacy formally committed to a long-term program. Her seventy-two-hour hold runs out tomorrow. We want her to be inside when the papers are served.”

“Makes sense,” I said.

“You’ll be called to make a statement.”

“I don’t have much to tell, Kev. I didn’t see who shot at us.”

“They might ask you about some other things, too.”

“We’ll worry about that if it happens.”

“Yeah. Hey, maybe I should have a word with Max.”

“Hold on.” I handed the phone to Max and he walked outside with it.

Beto picked up his empty plate and stood. “Let’s hope they can keep Lacy in the hospital long enough this time to do her some good.”

With that, he walked away to tend to customers.

I finished my sandwich, visited the ladies’ room, and came back to find Max waiting for me.

“The cops are sending a car to drive us back to the house,” Max said.

“Where’s Larry?” I asked.

“He’s at the morgue. The crime analyst took the Dumpster somewhere they can comb through everything in it, so the police are finished at the house.”

“Bless their hearts,” I said, fighting to keep the pastrami down as I envisioned the forensic technicians going through everything in that putrescent iron box. I hoped they had good face masks and gloves.

A police cruiser pulled up outside and we said our good-byes to Beto. When we drove up to the front of the house, I looked at the mess left behind by police, gawkers, and media folks with dismay. The flower borders I had been so careful to protect from truck wheels all morning had been churned underfoot. I said a silent apology to my dad, and called Tosh Sato for advice. Right off, Mr. Sato asked about the Chrysler roses that formed the outer red band of Dad’s rainbows of flowers.

“Ground to confetti,” I said.

When he finished swearing, he gave me instructions for gathering the remains and putting them in water; maybe he could salvage cuttings. He’d be over in the morning with some new plants. We could not restore the borders to their former glory, but we could make them presentable.

While Max headed inside the house to make sure all was secure, I pulled on Dad’s heavy leather rose-trimming gauntlets and did as instructed, gathered the broken, thorny remains of the roses and set them in buckets with water. I thought of my dad, digging in the dirt, his mind light-years away as he worked through some thorny physics conundrum or another, searching for patterns, always searching for patterns.

I got out the big shop broom and began sweeping up the plant mess. No longer lined up in tidy color tiers, their petals were all in a jumble, the way bands of visible light might look if they were disassembled by a shattered prism.

It occurred to me that no one except my family would understand the significance of Dad’s planting pattern. Sure, they made a pretty rainbow, but why they made a rainbow had meaning only for us, the targets of Dad’s lessons about the optical spectrum. Any sort of plant would do to replace them, because the house’s tenants would likely not care about the terahertz waves in the color blue. Or red, or yellow, or…

“Dammit, Dad,” I muttered. Still carrying the broom, I ran through the garage and stood in the middle of the backyard, looking at the intact rainbow flower borders, the rose beds, the climbing vines on trellises, the vegetables, and I swore again.