Any Bitter Thing Read Online Free PDF Page B

invite other celibate men once per season to eat hamburgers and smoke cigars and play poker or pinochle half the night—what that kiss meant. It looked like a weapon, but couldn’t be.
    “Are you scared of him?” I asked Mariette afterward. We were sitting on the front steps of the rectory, surveying our world: church, church hall, the long gravel driveway that ended at the main road, and also, through the wide, tamped-down lanethrough the trees, the back windows of Mariette’s house. “I mean in the daytime,” I added. It went without saying that on those hollery nights Mr. Blanchard could be terrifying.
    She turned abruptly, her hair whipping against my face. “No. He’s my papa.” Then she grabbed her tipped-over bike and tore through the shortcut, where I had to pedal furiously to catch her. Her lie felt like a bruise inside my body.
    That evening, I asked Father Mike about the kiss. He was spooning fudge batter into a pan. Mrs. Hanson’s cake—white cake with white frosting—sat untouched on the counter. I had been instructed to bring it to Mariette’s for our sleepover, an unusual gesture on Mrs. Hanson’s part, but her pity for Mrs. Blanchard took more than one form.
    “He kissed her right in front of everybody,” I informed my uncle. “Like this.” I demonstrated on the back of the spoon, then licked the chocolate off.
    “Stop that,” Father Mike said, tapping the pan on the table to even out the batter.
    “It looked kind of yucky,” I said.
    “It probably was.”
    “How come priests can’t get married?” I’d broached this subject before, which he usually took to mean that I wanted a mother. Sometimes he said, “Because we’re married to the Church,” and sometimes he went all rubbery and confessed that he’d all but stolen me from Aunt Celie, after which I declared my relief and gratitude that I’d landed here, in this house, with our cats and our Lucy Maud Montgomery novels, and not in Aunt Celie’s catless, bookless, faraway house full of boys. Then he’d puddle up for my mother and father while I sniffled a bit, trying to feel the way he was feeling.
    But that night Father Mike took neither tack. Instead, he said, “Because you don’t get everything you want in life.” He was cutting the fudge already, his forearms working, shaping messysquares from which a fragrant warmth rose. Fudge was our specialty, though we never cared to follow the last of the directions, the part that said wait. He applied himself to his task, and I felt, as other children must have felt with their parents, a sudden, unwanted realization that his life was a mystery. “Don’t burn your tongue,” he said as I dropped a gob of fudge into my gullet, baby-bird style. He wiped my mouth with a napkin, then said, “Chapter eight tonight” We were reading Anne of Green Gables , our favorite book. I reminded him that I was headed to Mariette’s.
    “Is he home?” He always referred to Mr. Blanchard as “he.”
    “He’s going fishing.” As if to prove my point, Mr. Blanchard’s croupy pickup coughed to life next door. Mrs. Blanchard maintained, not without humor, that her husband refused to fix the exhaust system because he enjoyed swearing at it too much.
    I scooped a hoggish piece of fudge out of the pan to bring to Mariette—a secret present with which we planned to taunt Buddy and Bernard. “Mr. Blanchard says one of these days he’s going out to sea and never coming back.”
    “Let’s hope he’s a man of his word,” Father Mike said.
    “Mariette hates when he talks like that.”
    “Mariette isn’t lucky like we are,” he said. “But she’s got a good mother. And a good friend, too, hasn’t she? Isn’t God looking after her in His own way?” He ran the knife under the tap water and covered the fudge. “Ray hasn’t been scaring you, has he?”
    “Nope,” I said, knowing better than to repeat Mr. Blanchard’s stories of bloody hauntings. It was true my nightmares had returned,