I Left to Make Him Follow, and He Let Me Go for Three Years novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: The Rededication

The chapel hall was full by one-thirty.

Two hundred people stood in the pews and along the stone walls, in dark coats, with the winter light coming through the windows.

The Monsignor had rung the bell himself, and the sound was still going out over the Strip.

Halina had not been stopped at the door.

She had come in at one with her three lawyers and the old watchman, and she had walked up the center aisle with her back straight.

She had taken the front pew on the family side.

The lawyers sat behind her, three men in navy with their briefcases on their knees.

The watchman stood against the back wall with his cap in his hands and did not look at her.

I knew why she had brought him.

She had meant him to say that the room had never been opened, and that Ansel had no right to it.

I stood at the front of the hall beside the iron frame, in the grey wool dress I had worn to the courthouse five years ago.

Ansel stood beside me in his black suit.

Behind us the great rose window hung in the stone, a third of it glass, the rest dark iron.

Above the altar the afternoon sun came in low and struck the colored panes, and the whole hall glowed rose and amber.

I held the last panel in both hands.

It was a small square of grey and wine glass, backed with a board and wrapped in a cloth.

I had cut it myself, over three nights, with a girl's wheel, and Ansel had soldered the leading.

"Father," I said.

The Monsignor nodded.

He stood in the pulpit in his vestments.

"We are here for a Mass for Marta Kowalczyk," he said, "who died eleven years ago on the ninth of October. We have not said her name in this hall for a long time. We will say it now."

He said it.

A woman in the third row began to cry quietly into a handkerchief.

Halina did not move.

The Monsignor finished the prayers.

Then he looked at me.

"Mrs. Kowalczyk has something to set in the window," he said.

I walked to the iron frame.

An empty space waited in the lower left, where the petals met the ring.

I took off the cloth and lifted the panel into place, and Ansel slid the pins home.

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