The Chapel Read Online Free PDF Page A

reviewing the roster, but I wasn’t looking forward to being the sad sack of the group, the distraught widow. “I’m frankly not sure what I expected, but I am not very well prepared for this,” I said.
    â€œThis—you mean the trip?” Shelby was working up a sleeve to go with that cuff.
    â€œThe trip, Italian vocabulary, sticking to a schedule, holding down my end of a casual conversation on a bus. Being alone.”
    She leaned forward in her seat and pointed to the middle of her back with her needles. “Is something all ruffled up back there?”
    Something was amiss. I tugged tentatively at the wrinkly pink ruching between her shoulder blades, which dropped down, as did the puffed-up fabric on her shoulders, which I’d mistaken for epaulets. It was a cashmere cardigan.
    â€œThanks,” Shelby said flatly. “That’s one of the downsides of traveling alone. You never know the condition of your hind quarters. But there are benefits, too.” She leaned back. “After the group meeting at the hotel, we’re on our own for dinner, and the doctor offered to take me along to a place he wants to try in the Piazza del Erbe.”
    The meeting, the doctor, the piazza—I should have grabbed my itinerary and welcome packet instead of my phone and memorized a few useful facts. I wasn’t even sure Shelby was inviting me along for her outing. “I don’t want to be a third wheel,” I said, the anthem of all third wheels.
    â€œOh, don’t worry, you might be a fifth wheel,” she said, and she didn’t explain because my cell phone rang.
    It only rang twice and then stopped, but one of the men behind us said, “No, she didn’t turn her ringer off because she’s above the rules. Harvard, you know.”
    Shelby turned around quickly, as if she might say something in my defense, but I put my hand on hers.
    Shelby smiled. “I guess you’re used to that—occupational hazard.”
    â€œMore like guilt by association,” I said. “I was a reference librarian until my children were born. Now, I teach reading to public-school kids. Or I did before Mitchell was diagnosed.” Well, about five yearsbefore the diagnosis, the public schools cut reading specialists out of the budget and I agreed to roam around the city as a fill-in librarian and substitute teacher’s aide. I spent many days portioning Gummi Bears into little paper cups under the scrutiny of women younger than my daughter. Mitchell urged me to quit and do something more rewarding, but I told him it was a point of pride. “With italics for emphasis on a point ,” he’d said. This past September, I retired because I was finally fully vested, with a pension that might cover the rent for a third-floor walk-up studio apartment on the Somerville side of the Cambridge town line—if I went easy on the utilities.
    The woman directly behind us said, “No, it wasn’t because he was rejected.” She amped up the volume, or else she leaned forward so I could hear her clearly. “And I heard there were at least two other boys in his class who got into Harvard but went to Duke.”
    Shelby shrugged.
    I said, “I think Harvard is infuriating because all the self-important monkey business somehow preserves something people still look up to. It’s like the Vatican. I almost feel like skipping Rome because I know I’ll have to be grateful to the scoundrels after I see the Sistine Chapel.”
    Shelby said, “Are you a Catholic?”
    Not much of one, not since my sophomore year in college, when my mother died suddenly of a cerebral aneurysm. She’d been plagued by migraines for months, and instead of bothering her doctor with complaints about a silly headache, she had decided to give up coffee for Lent on the advice of a parish priest whose sister was a missionary nurse in Guinea-Bissau—“formerly known as