The Chapel Read Online Free PDF Page B

nursing home in Philadelphia to a facility near us. He couldn’t tolerate the idea of her spending her last days alone, and though she had long since forgotten who he was, he visited her religiously, every Sunday morning, till she died three years later. I visited her three days a week after school, and spent the better part of my time in her room collecting compliments fromher roommate and the nurse’s aide for Mitchell, whose devotion to his mother deeply impressed everyone.
    Shelby said, “And your parents?”
    I felt like Typhoid Mary. “I do have a brother,” I said.
    I couldn’t tell if Shelby was afraid to ask another question or if her curiosity about me was waning. She had taken up her knitting again. I closed my eyes and tried to come up with something interesting to say. It seemed a safe bet that Shelby and Allen Cohen were Jewish, but I’d been wrong about the bolero. I didn’t know where she lived or if she had children, but I didn’t want to insult her by proving I hadn’t read her personal profile.
    â€œDo you want to see something beautiful?” Shelby passed me her phone. “Allen just sent me this. He’s climbing the Three Saints this month in Southern California.”
    Above a foreground of palm trees, a vast snowcapped run of ridges and peaks rose right out of the desert, topped off by an impossibly blue sky. I said, “Put your needle there—the blue one—put it right there, on the sky.”
    Shelby tilted the stone toward the screen and smiled. “Lapis lazuli,” she said.
    I nodded. It was bluer than the familiar blue sky—it was the empyrean, the brightness Dante had imagined beyond the bounds of heaven and earth, beyond past and future, beyond the beyond.
    Shelby aimed her finger at the top of the little screen. “That’s San Jacinto, the tallest of the peaks. Ten thousand feet high. That’s where he’s headed right now. I can show you a picture of Allen on the mountain.”
    Her shoulder pressed into my arm and our hands touched again as she searched for the right button on her phone. I didn’t move. I held my breath. I wanted to extend this contact, this oddly intimate moment, extend my readiness to believe in that blue aboveand beyond the Three Saints, that immaterial place where Allen and Mitchell might someday meet.
    â€œT HE H OTEL A RENA IS PERFECT . I T ’ S IN A LONG, MODERN , arcaded concrete building with balconies, but inside it looks like the sort of place Thomas Mann might have stayed—a tiny wood-paneled reception desk, where a mustache in a tuxedo orchestrates dozens of dark-haired valets in green vests, and the elevator is smaller than your walk-in refrigerator. It’s all so charming.” I was determined to make Rachel believe I was happy to be here.
    â€œIs the bathroom tiny?”
    â€œCompact,” I said. The sink was a cereal bowl. “Handsome old green-marble floor and white-tile walls. And I have a perfectly Italianate view of red-clay rooftops.” This was true if you lay in bed so that you couldn’t see the tin ductwork directly below the one window. “I’ll send you some pictures.”
    â€œThat’s okay,” she said, “I’ve already seen the pictures on the Web. Daddy didn’t want to upgrade to a balcony room because he’d read something about traffic noise at the front of the building.”
    â€œI prefer it here at the back. It’s so peaceful.” So was the front of the hotel, which faced Largo Europa, a two-lane street with a leafy pedestrian park separating it from the next block, but maybe it was trafficky on weekdays. Admittedly, I hadn’t spent much time outside after we got off the bus, as it quickly became apparent that I was the only one in the group who’d paid the supplement to bring a second suitcase, and I didn’t want to hear about it from the married couples. “My luggage