“Don’t so what me. Don’t even try it. He called and asked me to come to the church to see him. I had no idea why. We’re a good family. We put money in the collection basket. So why should Father Gillespie want to see me? I drove up there thinking, it’s got to be one of the children. One of them did something in Sunday school, disrupted class or wasn’t paying attention. Well, what a surprise I was in for, huh? To sit there, in his office, and find out he really wanted to see me about me—because of what you told him.”

The conversation between Karen and Father Gillespie had occurred the week before. The meaty-faced priest made a habit of standing outside the classrooms when Sunday school let out and selecting a single student to harass. He would pull you aside, place one of his large, knotty hands on your shoulder, and thump a couple of times—like a mallet tapping a stake into the ground—while he asked stupid questions about grades, athletics, family. “Young Katherine,” he’d said that Sunday morning, one hand thumping her shoulder, the other knuckling a cigarette, “how are things in a girl’s world?”

Whatever that meant. She’d shrugged.

“Your mother tells me you’re reluctant to go to confession lately.”

“That’s none of her business.”

“Well, maybe not, but it’s certainly yours and mine. I hope your reluctance isn’t connected to that confirmation business last year. You can still confess, you know, even though you weren’t confirmed.”

“Confess what?”

“That would be between you and your—it would be between you and me, and God, in the confessional.”

“Why don’t I just tell you now?”

He’d tapped his cigarette onto the floor and stepped on the ash. “Your mother did mention a certain boldness that was troubling her. From you, and sometimes from your— Is it three brothers?”

Boldness. Her mother was the one who had enrolled both her and Matt in Sunday school under the last name of Kerrigan, telling them not to mention their “real father” or the name Ragazzino to anyone. “Yes,” her mother had clarified, “I’m saying it’s okay to lie about this one thing. Any other kind of lying is wrong, but God understands this one.”

The words real father sounded ridiculous to Karen when it meant that loud, wide-faced talker who showed up out of the blue once or twice a year in some ugly checkered blazer, looking and sounding like a used-car salesman. She hated the lunches he took them to; it was like having to eat with the principal of a school you didn’t go to. As far as she was concerned, the man they lived with was their father.