Precious Blood(25)

Or something.

Andy Walsh looked a little harder at his image in the mirror, and frowned. He had had a long day, and he looked it. There was one thing the Cardinal Archbishop had never been able to accuse him of. He was not a haphazard head of his parish. He said Mass and heard confessions with strict punctuality. He made sure the roof didn’t leak and the bills were paid up. He organized and oversaw every possible lay group from the Social Action Committee to the Fatima Novena, even though he didn’t believe Fatima had ever happened and thought the rosary an even sillier idea than transubstantiation. He was more than slightly aware of the fact that he had become head of this parish at a very young age on no merits of his own. The priest shortage had forced the Cardinal Archbishop’s predecessor into appointing him. He had promised himself, at the beginning, that nobody would ever be able to say he ran a slipshod operation.

Still. He looked at his image in the mirror one more time, made a face at it, and headed up the hall to the kitchen. Most of the time, being a parish priest was too much work, but not too too much. By getting up at five and going to bed at ten, he could get through what he had to get through in a reasonably restful frame of mind. Christmas and Holy Week made a hash of everything—especially Holy Week. All of a sudden, everybody on Earth got an attack of the guilts. There were extra confessions to hear and special penitential services to ease the embarrassed back into church. On Good Friday, there were the Stations of the Cross. From Holy Thursday to Easter Sunday, there were special Masses and special services, times when you did and did not consecrate, times when you did and did not offer Communion  , special rubrics, special prayers—and, always, a new pack of altar girls and boys to be trained and worried about. He had to worry about them, because they never got it right. Andy gave a little thought to the altar girls. With O’Bannion coming tomorrow, it might be just as well to do without them. It might be just as well to do without Judy Eagan handing out Communion  , too. Andy didn’t mind offending O’Bannion—he went out of his way to do it often enough—but the damned idiot was likely to embarrass people. Andy didn’t want a lot of defrocked altar girls weeping all through Mass in the back of his church. He didn’t want Judy Eagan, shorn of her robes and deprived of her place at the altar, in high dudgeon, either. He couldn’t understand why the Church didn’t just give up and get with the spirit of the times. It was a new world. It wasn’t going to do the Church any good to refuse to live in it.

Judy Eagan was waiting for him in the kitchen.

Andy stuck his head through the kitchen door and said, “Have I kept you waiting forever? I feel like the walking dead.”

Judy was sitting in one chair with her long legs stretched across another, drinking a cup of coffee. “I’m all right,” she told him. “I’ve been thinking.”

“That sounds like a very dangerous activity.” He came in, sat down in one of the free chairs, and reached for the coffee. “I suppose you’ve got a lot to think about. What with Stuart running for office and all.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Andy. Don’t joke. This is serious.”

“I think I’m getting tired of people telling me things are serious. What’s serious? Stuart will run for Congress. Either he’ll win or he won’t. It won’t make a damn bit of difference to the state of the world.”

“It’ll make a lot of difference to the state of my life.”

“True,” Andy says. “If he wins, you’ll marry the idiot. I’ll pray for a really big loss. Something really cataclysmic. Like Reagan-Mondale.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Judy stood up and started to prowl around the kitchen, moving from the dove of peace poster on the refrigerator door to the clasped hands poster (legend in Spanish) on the cabinet next to the sink. Andy Walsh found himself wishing he possessed that intangible thing known as a sex drive. He had, once, but he seemed to have lost it. If he’d kept it, Judy would have been just his cup of tea. It wasn’t that she was such a beautiful woman—although she might have been; he wasn’t good at that kind of judgment—as that she was so uncompromisingly groomed and so blatantly expensive. Everything, from the smooth muscled tightness of her calves to the studied informality of her tossled blond hair, had been calculated. And paid for. He wondered what it cost to have ten nails that were always the same shape, always the same length, and always the same color.

She stopped in front of his framed photograph of a starving Ethiopian child and said, “To tell you the truth, it’s not Stuart I’ve been worrying about. It’s all this fuss about Cheryl Cass.”