Sully was getting up from the table when Mason signaled to him.

            Sully raised an eyebrow and came over, his face amazed.

            “Can I talk to you a second?”

            “Yeah, sure, Mase. You know you can.”

            “It’s just… Today, when you grinned at me at the table… Well, that was the first time in a long time.”

            “No, it wasn’t.”

            “Yes, Sully,” Mason corrected, gently. “It was.

            “And remember a long time ago, well, two years ago. The day you came to my room and said we would be friends, I would get past myself? Well, I’m living up to that right now, Because I want to know what’s going on? You’re sort of cold to me. It seems like you’re angry at me.”

            Sully tried to laugh it off, but he felt caught in a lie. He just felt bad,

            “Is it Jared?” Mason said. “Because you know we can’t go out together? If you want me to introduce the two of you then I will.”

            “Mason,” Sully said. “Trust me, I don’t think Jared and me would work out.

            “Listen,” he put a hand on Mason’s arm. “I’m sorry things have been. I’ve had things on my mind. Especially things like how am I going to pay for school and all and… That’s what it is,” Sully lied. “I guess it’s because you have money and Balliol has money and…” the lie came out so well! “I take it out on you.”

            “Well, we’re all friends, right?” Mason said.  “If we have money you do too and if you have troubles then so do we.”

            Sully looked at Mason. He’d never thought that Mason was, in many ways, just as innocent as Tommy. But he was. And right now he felt so bad for the resentment he was just beginning to understand, had been building up in him.

.

The glass rosary beads were slipping through Bonnie’s  hands like pale blue water when the sound of Mark Power’s voice jarred her.

            “I’m sorry,” she said, laying it back down on the mantelpiece. “I was just admiring.”

            “Well,” Mark smiled kindly, “it is admirable.” He took it from the mantle and then placed it in her hands.

            “I never learned to say the rosary,” Bonnie told him. “They don’t do that in school now.”

            “They didn’t really do it when I was growing up either,” Mark confided in her. “And that was in the early eighties. That rosary was my wife’s.”

            “Oh,” Bonnie knew enough of the gossip about Addison and Mason’s friends to know that Mark Powers was a widower.

            “She never said it either. It was something she had when she came to the marriage. And when she got sick she always had it in her fingers. Toward the end she began to say it, to pray. She never did. Neither one of us did much. We were just church on Sunday Catholics. She prayed by herself. But then, or for that time at least, I had stopped believing in God. She knew it. She told me that she had faith enough for the both of us. I felt so bad. I felt like I wanted to pretend—just for her—that I believed. But I couldn’t fool her. She knew I didn’t.”

            “Did you ever?” Bonnie asked him.

            He looked up at her, distracted. In the last year Mark has let his hair grow into a red brown thatch, and he wore contacts most of the time so he was surprisingly handsome to her.

            “Believe in God again?”

            “I don’t think I ever stopped believing,” Mark told her. “I think I was just very, very angry. And I stopped being angry.”

            “How long was she sick Mr.—I mean, Dr.—“

            “I don’t think either one of those is going to do, Bonnie,” he said. “I think you can go straight to Mark.”

            She smiled. The smile was hard like she was holding back something and she said to him, “I want to know how long it was before you weren’t mad anymore.”

            Mark screwed his face up and grinned, “Ironically, it was when I stopped believing. No,” he clarified. “I mean when I stopped believing in this God up there who killed my wife, who gave her this sickness and didn’t hear my prayers. When I could get there—or leave there—then I started… to be happy again. I had to become a little agnostic. That’s how it worked for me. There was this good thing and… though all my life I’d belonged to a church that tried to explain it… it sort of defied definition. It was this good thing that moved through everything, even the really awful things. You know? And I didn’t become super religious. But I guess I began to have real faith. More than I had.”

            Bonnie’s eyes went over the rosary, over the clear sky blue beads, that joined at the metal virgin from which hung the three Hail Marys, an Our Father and the silver cross.

            “I don’t know what I have that. Faith. I don’t know that I ever did. Or ever thought about it. Everything in my life has just been… dim.”

            She was quiet, and then she said, “This morning started out so dim and then there was this little thing in me, this miracle. That’s how I thought of it. All of a sudden. I was talking to Addison. Really talking about not having it, slowly I knew I would, that I had to. I felt—I felt like the Virgin Mary with Jesus, or one of those Old Testament women that was too old, too past it all to have a baby. I’m not old. But I feel old. I feel like I’ve done it all, passed it all. Like nothing good can come out of me.

            “And then this. This comes. I am so scared of it… Mark. So scared that I can’t rise up to it. But so sure that it’s a jewel. Really. You know?”

THERE WAS A KNOCK ON  the door of the shed. That was what Dan decided to call it. This is essentially what it was.

            “It’s open,” he shouted.

            There was silence. And then the rapping began again.

            “Come in!”

            Again the rapping. Finally Dan swore and, uncrossing his legs, pushed himself up and went to open the shed.

            Savannah smacked him across the face so hard, his neck nearly snapped back.

            “Don’t tell me that!” she told him.

            “Wha—”

            She slapped him again.

            “Dan Mitchum, don’t tell me how you almost kissed me. Don’t come back here and tell me that when the man I love, the man I’ve worked a long time to find, is a room away. You don’t have the right to tell me that. Not when I still remember you standing across from me saying you couldn’t love me anymore—”

            “I said—”

            Her voice shook as she repeated, “Saying you didn’t love me anymore.”

            And then Savannah turned around and left.

“I was thinking we could go to the 5:30 mass at Saint Genevieve’s,” Tommy was saying.

            “But I’m not Catholic.”

            “But Balliol, the nearest Episcopal church is a gajillion miles from here—”

            “A gajillion?”

            “Maybe a half a gajillion, and besides, didn’t you say a long time ago that you weren’t Episcopalian, you were Anglican and there was this big difference and… anyway, I don’t think they have one of your churches here, so you might as well go to Saint Genevieve’s. It’s nice.”

            “When did you start going back to Mass anyway? I thought you were all Evangelical.”

            “Well, I can be evangelical in my heart, right?”

            “Excuse me.”

            They turned around and saw John.

            “Was I interrupting anything important?”

            “We were quarreling about going to church,” Balliol said.

            John frowned and Tommy explained the situation, which—from the look on John’s face—seemed either incomprehensible or irrelevant.

            “Don’t worry about it,” Balliol told him, dismissing it. “How can we help you?”

            “I wanted to know about Sully?”

            “Well, haven’t you been talking to him all day?”

            “Yes,” John admitted. “But you only know so much about someone from just what they say.”

            Tommy sat back and said, “Generally to me that’s the best way to find out about somebody.”

            “That’s because you’re guileless and full of innocence,” Balliol told him. “Sometimes you have to dig a little.”

            Tommy shrugged and said, “Well, all I know is Sully’s a good guy. He’s the best guy I know—I mean, barring Balliol.”

            “Thanks for the backtrack,” Balliol frowned and said, “No, Tommy is goodness and light and if Tommy says that about Sully… you have to understand he adores him.”

            Tommy blushed.

            “And adores him for good reason,” Balliol continued.

            “He’s got this sadness thing in him,” Tommy said. “It’s this sadness that’s so far down no one can reach it.”

            “That’s true,” Balliol discovered.

            “Did this Chris guy reach it?” John asked.

            “That Chris guy caused it,” Balliol said. Then he admitted, “That’s not true. But Chris Powers didn’t help.”

            “No one reaches it,” Tommy reported.

            “Well, does he have anyone right now? Is he seeing someone?”

            “John,” Balliol said in mock horror, “don’t you have a girlfriend?”

            “I’m just asking,” John said. Balliol assessed him. Short, well thighed, dark haired, dark eyed. Sully would go for something like that.

            “To my knowledge Sully doesn’t have anything going at all,” Balliol reported as Tommy’s eyes bulged out, shut, and then he decided to say nothing.

            John nodded.

            “But I think he’d always feel more or less alone,” Tommy noted. “No matter who he was with he would never be happy unless he found someone who could actually touch him in that lonely place, who could go there with him.”

            John let out a whistle and took his hands through his thick hair.

            “That sounds like… work. High maintenance.”

            Balliol laughed darkly, like he was older and John was younger.

            John looked at him,

            “Love,” Balliol pronounced, “is high maintenance.”

Dan arrived at the Darrow house and rounded the alley to enter through the backyard and walk up to the coach house. He could still feel Savannah’s slap stinging his face. He had to apologize. He didn’t know what words he’d use, what he would say. His shoes were so loud on the warped wooden steps. He raised his fist to knock on the windowpane, and stopped, eyes dilating.

            He saw Adam and Savannah. Adam’s shirt was undone and hanging off of his shoulders. His pants were dropped. And he was fucking her. He was pushing in and out of her slowly, her legs wrapped around his waist, her breasts arched up in the air, and he came into her harder and harder, closer and closer, his face covered in sweat, grimaced in concentration. Sickness rose up in Dan. Needle pricks were in his face. He wanted to… The world felt so heavy, and it wasn’t that he was a voyeur. He didn’t want to see this. But his feet were too heavy to move.

As they entered the kitchen, Mark said, “This is my son—”

            “Chris Powers,” Bonnie said, taking his hand.

            “You know me?”

            “Everyone knows Chris Powers,” Bonnie told him. “Or at least everyone that went to Saint Vitus, Magdalene and Genevieve.”

            “And this is—”

            “Bonnie,” Matt said with a smile, offering his hand.

            “I have done nothing to be famous for,” Bonnie declared. “Not at school anyway.”

            They all laughed and then Bonnie said, “I didn’t mean… Well, I guess I did mean… Oh, hell.” She covered her mouth again.

            “You can say oh hell in this house anytime,” Mark told her and said, “And this… is Rick.”

            “You’re the Dean over at Saint Vitus. You were the football coach.”

            “That’s right,” Rick’s face crinkled up in a smile. “Pleased to meet you.”

            Mark seemed to be deciding something, and before he could say something, Rick grinned and said, “Yes, you can. In fact, I’ll say it for you. Mark is my… what’s the word for it?”

            Bonnie put her hands to her mouth delightedly and said, “How about slice?”

            “Slice?” Mark raised his eyebrow.

            “Like a beau,” Bonnie said. “Only… hot.”

            “I need me a slice,” Matt reflected.

            “You need to stop pretending you’re Black,” Chris said, moving to the refrigerator to bring out lemonade.

            “So what brings you here, Bonnie?” he asked her.

            “Bonnie’s part of the family now,” Mark stated.

            Chris blinked.

            “Mark,” Bonnie was still trying out the word, “is good enough to take me in.”

“Take you in?” Matt’s voice sounded wounded.

“My parents threw me out today.”

“What happened—?”

They all looked up when there was frantic banging at the door, and then Chris got up and a few moments later, Addison Cromptley, sprang over his arm and came into the kitchen, white faced.

“Addison?”

“I called your parents and they said they didn’t know where you were. They said you ran away.”

“They fucking threw me out!” Bonnie shouted, and then looked at everyone else and turned red.

“They said it was my fault,” Addison went on, “and that neither one of us would be welcome there again. They said it might be Seth’s fault too.”

            “It most certainly is not Seth’s fault!”

            “Seth McKenna?” Chris and Mark said at the same time.

            “And no other,” Bonnie nodded.

            Matt put a hand up.

            “Yes?” Bonnie turned to him like a teacher to a pupil.

            “What’s going on?”

            Addison looked dumbfounded.

            Bonnie sighed and said, “I’m pregnant, Matthew.”

“What are we going to do?”

            “Well, Addison,” Bonnie said. “What I’m going to do is have one, not two if you don’t mind, Mark, of these crescent rolls. Hum hum hum,” she gave a Pilsbury Doughboy laugh, “and some of this broccoli, and I’m going to eat because I haven’t all day. And I suppose if Mark and Rick and Chris  are good enough, then you’re going to also stay for dinner, Add.”

            “We’d be honored to have you.”

            “But the baby—”

            “The baby will come in a little over nine months,” Bonnie told him. “Like most babies do. There won’t be that much for you to do until then. In fact, I can’t imagine there will be too much for me to do, either. Except get a bad back.

            “Now on the issue of rent—“she began.

            “Rent?” Mark raised an eyebrow.

            “Yes, I know I can’t possibly pay you what I really owe, but—”

            “Look,” Mark said. “When I said you’re going to be part of this family I meant it. The first issue we have to discuss is you picking out the room you want. There’s a spare down here, and one upstairs. The only second issue we’ll have is going by your house tomorrow to pick up your things.”

            Bonnie had attempted to hold herself together. Suddenly she couldn’t, She wanted to be all business. To make a new start. Tears sprang into her eyes, though.

            “Mark,” she gasped.

            “There, there,” Rick murmured gently, leaning forward and patting her on the back. As he heard himself say, “There, there,” he thought, I have never sounded so gay in my entire life.

When Addison left, he left with the promise that Bonnie would come by the house and they would both tell his parents about the baby.

            “They’ll offer to take you in,” Addison told her seriously.

            “But haven’t you been paying attention? I’ve already been taken in.” Bonnie said expansively, taking the whole room in herself.

            Addison still felt weird about it.

            “You don’t get to feel weird or not weird about it,” Bonnie told him, and gently pushed him out the door.

            Matt was standing there with Chris, and though Chris said nothing, Matt said, “You all… don’t act like most couples.”

            “Oh, well, we’re not most couples,” Bonnie said. “Really, we’re not a couple at all. We’re splitting up.”

            “Over the baby?” Matt was shocked.

            “No. We were splitting up, and then I realized we were having a baby. Actually I realized that Addison wanted to split up. Then I realized in some ways we were never together. And then I knew I was having a baby. Apparently Addison’s going to help out so now he’s having it too.”

            Bonnie picked out the room with the power blue wall paper and the late summer sun sinking through it onto the hard wood floor. There was a little day bed with brass rails, and a slender rocking chair in the corner.

            “I like this room too,” Mark said. “I hardly ever go into it. I should though. It was Margot’s reading room.”

            “Oh…” Bonnie shook her head. “I didn’t know. I’ll pick another—”

            “No, don’t you dare,” Mark said, putting a hand on her arm. “I have the feeling she’d reach out and slap me from the grave if I made this a shrine and didn’t let a real live girl stay in here.”

            Mark grinned suddenly.

            “Hum?” Bonnie said.

            “It’s just… it’s been so hard for me to think of Margot in a funny way, reaching from beyond the grave. I… I had a very hard time with her dying. I don’t laugh about her. Or talk about her. I should.

            “No, you stay here, Bonnie. Every time I know there’s a real living person in this room, coming in and out of it, breathing, doing things, I’ll remember her. And not the way I have. Emaciated. Dying. I’ll remember her happy… And alive. And fun. Cause she was.”

            Bonnie looked around the room.

            “It’s a good room,” she said. “I feel like she was a good person. I don’t think you’d have anything but a good person.”

            Mark smiled at her gently and said, “She looked like you.”   

“I think that’s so cool,” Matt said that evening. “I mean… if it was me, I’d just be so scared.”

            “I am scared,” Bonnie admitted shaking her head. “But I’m a little excited. I feel like God gave me something. I know, I know, that sounds all stupid and shit.”

            “No,” Matt said. “No. I go to church.”

            “See, I never figured you for the churchy type,” Bonnie said slyly.

            “Back in high school I used to go to Mass everyday. I mean during senior year. That was after Andy Rathko died.”

            “Aw yeah,” Bonnie snapped her fingers slowly. “That was you.”

            “What?” Matt said.

            “That day we all went to Andy Rathko’s grave. That was you. You were just so emotional, crying over him like that. ‘We’re so sorry… we’re so sorry.’”

            Matt’s face was heating up and Bonnie touched his hand.

            “No, Matthew, you don’t understand. I thought that was so cool. I thought that was the coolest thing I ever saw. You won my everlasting respect. Never really saw you again. But Bailey talks about you all the time, so it’s like you’re around.”

            “Balliol?”

            “Is there another Bailey? Well, I’m sure there is. But there really isn’t another Balliol. If you know what I mean. ”

            “He talks about me?”

            Bonnie looked at him sharply.

            “Aren’t you all like… best friends? To hear him tell it you are.”

            “Well,” Matt frowned. “I guess. I mean, yeah. I just didn’t know he talked about me. In a good way, right?”

            “You’re crazy, Matthew,” Bonnie told him, slapping his thigh. “Of course in a good way. He fucking loves you. Really.”

            “You keep calling me Matthew.”

            “That’s your name, right?”

            “But everyone calls me Matt.”

            “Well, then I’ll call you Matt if you want me to.”

            “No,” Matt grinned at her and touched the hand that was still on his knee.

            “I really like it when you say Matthew.”

IN THE LAST MONTHS OF his stupid marriage, which is what Dan Mitchum called it, as if distinguishing it from some other marriage, he had gotten drunk a lot, wondering how much he could spend at the bar before he went into his rent money. But there was no rent to worry about right now. So he could drink everything. He drank until he liked himself, until his face was a little red and his blond hair stuck up and he thought how he’d like to fuck himself. And then he kept drinking, leaning over the bar, looking at his reflection and murmuring pleasantries to the bartender, to the people around him. To the ladies who winked at him.

            When she came, grinning, laughing, kind, her purse over her shoulder, her hair a bit of a mess from her own shitty night, he just began talking. He   put out of his mind what neither one of them was saying. He wanted to forget, really forget. Forget Savannah and Adam and life in general. He wanted to just be with someone who felt really shitty.

            “I’d like to go back to your place,” she said at last.

            “It’s shitty,” he told her.

            “I love shitty places,” she told him earnestly. “My whole life is a shitty place.”