Chapter 5: The Church

"The light was better in the back," I said.

"I've been to Mass in that church a hundred times," Ray said. "The light's terrible in the back."

"Then I got lucky."

He kept his hand on my chest a second longer.

Then he patted it twice and laughed.

"Okay, buddy. Get some sleep. You look like hell."

He walked back to his trucks, and his right-hand man climbed down off the cab roof without looking at anybody.

In the morning we took the kids back to St. Stan's.

The sign-out sheet said St. Stan's, and that was where a parent would come.

The front of the church was a hill of stone with the two towers lying across Peckham Street.

The back half stood just the way I remembered it.

Marta taped the sign-out sheet to the rectory door and stood beside it with her clipboard.

At eight, a father came over the rubble in a bathrobe and a winter coat.

His daughter screamed his name from the yard, and he ran the last fifty feet.

At ten, a mother came on a bicycle with a bread knife taped to the handlebars.

By noon, a grandmother had come for two brothers and walked them home holding one hand each.

Five kids had gone home since the sky opened, and five hadn't.

There were the twins, a boy and a girl, seven, who finished each other's sentences.

There was a girl of ten with purple glasses who drew horses better than Rosie and knew it.

There was a boy of eleven who wrote down everybody who came into the yard in a notebook.

And there was the smallest girl, five, in a pink raincoat she wouldn't take off.

Their parents' addresses on Marta's sheet were downtown, out by the airport and on Grand Island, and nobody was coming from those places today.

At four, Marta went into the rectory kitchen and stayed there a while.