The Good Luck of Right Now(42)

But I couldn’t make my mouth work, Richard Gere. I kept hoping you would appear to me, so that you might coach me through the situation, but you did not materialize, and I wondered if my being in a Catholic church had anything to do with it, since you are a Buddhist. Maybe Catholic churches limit your ability to appear to me—almost like a denominational force field.

“I can tell you this,” Father Hachette said when he understood I wasn’t going to open my mouth. “Father McNamee may not deserve your help, but he definitely needs it. He needs saving. That’s why he came to live with you. The drama is all part of his spiritual process. He’s a difficult man. But he is a man of God. To the best of his abilities, anyway.”

“So what should I do?”

“Pray.”

“Just pray?”

“And be patient.”

“Should I be listening for God’s voice?” I asked, hoping he would say that was delusional, ridiculous, thereby letting me off the hook.

Father Hachette smiled, tilted his head to the right, wagged his index finger at me three times, and said, “Always.”

We looked at each other for what seemed like an hour. He seemed to pity me, and I started to hate him, even though it is a cardinal sin to hate a priest, one of the deadliest, I do believe.

The man in my stomach was wreaking havoc on my digestive system. He was absolutely furious.

“That’s it?” I said to Father Hachette when the silence became too much to bear.

“Oh, I almost forgot. Try to get him to take these.” Father reached into his drawer and pulled out a small orange bottle. He gave it a shake, and the pills inside sounded like an angry rattlesnake.

“What are these?” I said as I took the bottle from him.

“Mood stabilizers. Lithium. The directions are on the label.”

I nodded.

“Tell Father McNamee that I miss him. I pray for him daily, and for you too, Bartholomew. I know you are unhappy with me, but I am serving you the best I can, given the unusual circumstances. I wish I could make it easier for you, but I can only offer my daily prayers at this point. You will understand soon enough.”

“Thank you,” I said, and then left.

Back home, I knocked on Mom’s bedroom door and said, “Father Hachette is praying for you, Father McNamee. He sent medicine.”

The door flew open.

Father McNamee’s eyes were tiny black snowflakes again.

He grabbed the orange bottle out of my hand, stormed down the hall, dumped the pills in the toilet, flushed, and then returned to his room, locking the door behind him.

He had looked like an insane bull, charging through the hallway, storming toward some imaginary red cape.

It was like he’d become a completely different person.

“Why did you do that?” I said to the door.

“I’m not taking meds!”

“Why?”

“They make me piss all the time. They also make me fat—or fatter!”

After a mostly sleepless night, I attended morning Mass to make up for missing the previous Saturday night. Afterward, Father Hachette asked if I was able to get Father McNamee to take his pills, and when I told him what had happened, he just nodded and smiled and then chuckled knowingly. “I’ll keep praying,” he said.

Nothing much else happened until I went to group therapy with Arnie and Max, which is when I began to feel as though maybe God was really beginning to speak to me—if only circumstantially.

I arrived in the yellow room early, before Max. Arnie was dressed in a tie, vest, and matching pants—like he was just missing the jacket of a three-piece suit—and he seemed very happy to see me.

“So glad you decided to continue on with your therapy, Bartholomew,” he said. “Please have a seat.”

I sat on the yellow couch.

Arnie sat in his yellow chair.

“I hear that you are no longer working with Wendy,” he said in a way that let me know he had heard much more.

I nodded.

“Things got a little too personal?” he asked, but nicely.

I nodded again, because it was the easiest thing to do.

“I’m sorry to hear that. Wendy is a young therapist. She’s still learning.”

“Is she okay?”

“Wendy?” he said, which was weird, because who else could I have possibly meant? “She’s fine. But it’s not your job to worry about her. Wendy’s not your responsibility. She was supposed to be helping you, not the other way around. She’s filled me in a little, regarding your treatment and progress, but maybe you’d like to tell me yourself.”

“Tell you what exactly?”

“Where you left off with Wendy. What sort of things you were working on. Your interactions with her, you could describe those. How your grief counseling was progressing.”

“Do you want to hear my life goal?” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“My life goal. Wendy said it was important to have those. Do you want to know what mine is?”

“Sure,” Arnie said, bridging his hands over his knee.

“I want to have a drink at a pub with a woman my age—a woman who could one day be my wife. I believe that at the age of thirty-nine, I am ready to go on my first date—or I want to believe that, anyway. It’s been a hard thing to believe in the past—especially when my mom was around. Do you think that this life goal is obtainable for me, even though I have never before gone on a date, nor am I well practiced at consuming alcohol recreationally with women?”