The Garden of Happy Endings Read Online Free PDF Page A

shadows as he loped out the front door of the rectory and ran through the sleeping streets. It was snowing lightly, but with a certain steady intent that made plain there would be piles of snow by evening. It was good to be back in Pueblo, after so many years away. He’d beendeeply pleased when the bishop offered him this church in a challenged neighborhood in his hometown two years before. He loved Pueblo, loved being close by his siblings and large extended family, who were so proud of him, the priest.
    With his thumb, he caught the first bead of his rosary and began to quietly chant the Lord’s Prayer, then the Hail Mary’s and the Glory Be’s, sliding the beads around his wrist, each one worn smooth by his touch over the years. Sixteen years, to be exact.
    His usual run was six miles, a long loop down the levee, around the ditch, and through a sleeping old neighborhood of tiny houses in the shadow of a church, and back to San Roque. He prayed the rosary through the first half, then simply held the beads in his fingers, sliding them comfortingly back and forth across the back of his knuckles, and listened for anything God had to say in return.
    Sometimes it was prosaic, a nudge to check the toilet in the men’s restroom in the basement, or to ask Mrs. Marelli about the lasagna she usually cooked for the monthly potluck. Other times, it was more mysterious, a whisper to look up a passage from the bible, or a visual of a person who needed prayer. He made no claim to getting these communications perfectly right every time, but he did his earnest best.
    It was Elsa who was on his mind this morning. He had dreamed of her last night. Several times over the past few weeks, he’d caught something hushed in her tone, as if she were using her voice to compress something she could not say. In his dream, she was smoking, looking at the moon.
    Joaquin and Elsa had been friends since childhood. They had both been nerdy kids—Joaquin skinny and tall, Elsa one of those invisible girls with braces and crazy black hair and knees that were too big. He at least had had track, but she’d nothing to redeem her in the cutthroat waters of elementary school.
    Today, he rubbed his thumb across the beads and prayed to see the shadows obscuring her faith. To see how to help her heal.
    A warning moved through him.
Be ready
.
    Be ready. He frowned.
    When he was seven years old, Joaquin had had the measles, a terrible case that nearly killed him, at least by some accounts, and left him with scars on his body, face, arms, chest. Even at the end of grade school, he still wore a T-shirt to the swimming pool. His legs tanned and covered the marks, and anyway, who cared if you had scarred legs?
    At his very sickest, when he’d been limp with a fever that made him delirious, and likely should have had him in the hospital, an angel came and sat with him. He’d been painfully isolated, quarantined from the other children, and his mother was afraid of contagiousness so she barely visited his room.
    The angel didn’t have big white wings or even any wings at all. She wore a long green gown. Light emanated from her skin, and she had very dark clear eyes. She took his hand, cooling the heated, itchy flesh, and said, “Joaquin, you can’t die yet. You have important work to do. One day, you will be a priest and save many lives.”
    He had been delirious, but not that delirious. “No,” he said. Not a priest.
    She just smiled. “You’ll see,” she said, and started to sing the most miraculously beautiful song, as if harps and birds and guitars and the sweetest voices in the heavens were joined together. As she sang, she stroked his forehead and neck, her hands smooth as silk, and he smelled something that even now he couldn’t describe, like brown sugar or simmering cherries.
    He fell asleep, and when he awakened, his fever had broken. His mother brought him food. She asked who he’d been talking to, and Joaquin only shook his head. Obviously he