Anne took the garbage out to the alley, and hidden from the house behind the termite-ridden back fence, she dragged on a smoke. She peered down the alley at the back of the Schraeders’ house. She liked that family—the husband a deacon at Rita’s, the wife not above her station—German, reliable. Unlike the Callahans. Their backyard was a calamity—the aboveground pool an eyesore, the rotting cedar-shake cabana and deck quadrupling its hideousness. At least the Peñas next door had the decency to sink their pool into the ground. But their latest attempt to grow palms and banana trees—well, it just wasn’t going to happen, and Anne stood there in the light autumn chill considering the brown and yellow husks of the banana leaves and palm fronds. They looked like dried tobacco and Christ she had to quit smoking for good. She heard her father’s voice in her head—Stop this nonsense, Annie—stubbed out the butt, and kicked it into the drainage line of the alley. She stood there alone, a little cold, contemplating a waning moonrise above a dead banana tree. She walked back toward the porch light and the patio. Granted, she was a little drunk and therefore prone to stare into the void. At this tired hour, her operating valence could be sad and inert, a lot like her father.

Over proper tea at the student center, Ronan Carroll told Anne he had been a Jesuit scholastic for three years and how he came to flee Ireland.

“My father wrote me off. My mother still speaks to me.”

“Do you have siblings?”

“An older brother—he’s a butcher, like my da. And an older sister who yielded a passel of nieces and nephews. I was the runt, the princeling, so they put me through the books, but honestly”—Carroll lowered his shoulders, still trying to parse it—“I never heard the call.”

“That’s not your fault.”

“Yes, but the disappointment was too much for them. I became a sinner.”

“We all are,” Anne said quietly, and sipped tea, keeping her own failing to herself.

He offered her a ride. Anne protested, the bus was fine, then agreed. Carroll drove a dilapidated Chrysler Imperial.

“The junkyard paid me to take it off their hands.” He winked. “Be ready to push, Mrs. Malone.”

The car barely made it across Fordham Road. Chugging along, the two of them diagnosed the faculty members of the department, each borderline in their own way.

“So how’s it going as the only woman in this loony bin?”

“Kind of like the Church. A lot of men with ideas, ignoring the women.”

They passed under the IRT at Jerome Avenue. “So where am I taking you?”

“Fordham Hill.”

“Classy.”

“We just moved. I grew up in Melrose.”

“What does your husband do?”

“He works for an airline.”