Some things didn’t change.
With a strangled groan, he grabbed up a pair of shorts and a shirt and headed for the bathroom. After a torturous burst of ice-cold water in the shower, he went downstairs to whittle with Sal, who was always up at dawn. The ex-priest had his ubiquitous Thermos of coffee and a Miami mug with flamingoes on it. Without so much as a good morning, he filled the Thermos top and handed it over.
“I’ve got troubles, Sal,” Jeremiah said, sipping the hot, surprisingly good coffee.
“Only dead people don’t have troubles, Tabak.”
“Words of wisdom from a former priest?”
“Nah, from an old man. But I guess forty years in the clergy, a few things are bound to get through. Whittle awhile. Dawn’s a good time of day to reflect, not to make decisions.”
Jeremiah took out his jackknife and chose a hunk of wood, and he might have been nine, listening to his daddy’s careful instructions, his mother hovering in the background, fretting about him cutting off a finger. There was no hurrying the wood, his daddy would say. You just stay with it.
The air was still, the light had a lavender cast to it, and the two men whittled awhile, saying nothing. Jeremiah felt his demons push back to the edges of his consciousness, at bay if not less threatening.
The blade of his knife slipped, nicked him between the knuckles of his left thumb. He saw the cut before he felt the pain.
“Cut yourself?” Sal asked, calm.
“Yes, dammit.” Blood spurted from the clean slit. “Hell.”
“That’s the world you’re swearing at, not that little old piece of wood.”
“I’m not swearing at the goddamned wood, I’m swearing at the cut.”
“You want me to get Bennie up? He’s got a first aid kit you wouldn’t believe. Let me tell you, that man—he’s ready for the apocalypse.”
Jeremiah put pressure on his thumb. “Sal, I’m bleeding here.”
“I can see that. Here, take my handkerchief.”
It was stark white, pressed, neatly folded, immaculate. Jeremiah shook it open with his uninjured hand and wrapped it around his bleeding thumb. He pulled it tight, knotted it. “I owe you a handkerchief.”
“The question is, what do you owe yourself?”
Jeremiah stared at him. “Sal.”
The old man smiled, embarrassed. “Sorry, it’s habit. I try to find lessons where sometimes there’s no lesson to be found.”
“Or a simple one, like you shouldn’t whittle before you’ve had your morning coffee.” Or, he thought darkly, when you’d rather be up with the pale-haired woman asleep in your bed.
“Think it needs stitches?” Sal asked.
“No.”
It was pounding now. Jeremiah applied pressure, cursing himself and Mollie both. If she’d just gone home, he wouldn’t have had to whittle at dawn. He could be asleep, not tortured by the contradictions, desires, miseries, joys, and fears of falling for her all over again.
Then again, if he hadn’t made love to her last night, he could have been down here anyway and cut off his whole damned hand. Whether upstairs or behind Leonardo Pascarelli’s gates, Mollie was in his life, and the frustrations of that abounded.
And also, he thought, the possibilities.
Sal handed him his coffee; Jeremiah sipped, grimacing at the pulsing pain. The cut wasn’t that deep. It would hurt and bleed like hell for a while, but it’d be fine.
“You ever think about getting married, Sal?” Jeremiah asked.
“When I was in the priesthood?”
“Whenever.”
Sal sat back, hands folded serenely on his middle. Jeremiah suspected Salvatore Ramie had academic degrees going up one arm and down the other. Bennie and Albert said his apartment was overflowing with books; they worried about them being a fire hazard. But now that he was a civilian, Sal liked to pretend he was just one of the guys, not a man who’d studied esoteric theological and philosophical subjects. He breathed in and out slowly, contemplating Jeremiah’s question.
Finally, he said, “I thought about marriage all the time.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know it isn’t. I thought about marriage in terms of an institution. As for myself and marriage…” He paused again, as if Jeremiah had asked him to define the meaning of life. “There was never any one woman, either before I became a priest or after I was unceremoniously booted out of the priesthood. But sometimes I’d imagine if there was a woman, if I did get married, and of course, it was all hypothetical because there wasn’t and I wouldn’t. So what did it mean? It meant I could fantasize about perfection. About everything I would want in a woman, a marriage. I could set the highest standards.”
“Because it wasn’t real.”
“Mm. And I kept it from ever becoming real.”