Chapter 7 Caterina #2
“The kind with a pulse and hands?” She bounces once on the balls of her feet. “While I was waiting right outside? Oh, my God, tell Auntie Pru everything. I need all of the details, you dirty little devil-angel, you.”
Our food arrives. She hands me a dog loaded with sport peppers, tomato slices, a pickle longer than my attention span. We claim a wobbly table under the strings of lights. Pru watches me like she watches fireworks: ready to cheer and ready to run.
I take a bite to buy a second. The bun surrenders. The mustard makes my nose prickle. “I went to pray,” I say. “And he was…there.”
“A priest?” she asks, gleefully horrified.
“No!”
She fans herself with a napkin. “Well thank God for small not-felonies. Details.”
I set the hot dog down and wipe my fingers very carefully, one by one, like there’s an order to honesty I can respect.
“I wanted…something…before I signed it all away,” I say.
“He has this thing he does every year on Halloween night.” I hear how that sounds and don’t fix it. “We…met in the confessional.”
She inhales a gasp so big the lights should flicker. “Cat. Caterina. Cat-of-Nine-Crimes.”
“It was not a crime,” I say. “It was a choice.”
Her grin breaks across her face like sun off glass. “You had sex,” she says, giddy with joy. “In a church. Oh happy Halloween ghosts and ghoulies. I love this for you.”
“In a confessional.”
“Even better,” she crows, clapping once. Then she drops her voice like I’m a spooked deer. “Was it…good?”
I close my eyes and for a second the mesh presses into my palm again.
The veil slips crooked. A rosary taps his wrist like a heartbeat.
Sanctuary. The first sting. The slow give.
The way he went still when I flinched and waited for my word.
The way I said now and he listened like the syllable could save him.
The metal in his… I didn’t even know such things existed. It was perfection.
“It was amazing.” I say those simple words instead.
Pru beams like she did the work herself. “My baby bird flew. I’m so proud I could steal a cop car.”
I can’t help it—I laugh. It hitches on the way out. “The adults are…not grateful,” I say, surprised to hear it out loud. “Do you know how many good days I’ve given them? How many clean answers? And they can’t even let me have one night. Even the Amish—”
“Give you rumspringa,” she finishes, wicked. “Noted. Next year we’ll get you a buggy.”
I smile into my Coke until the bubbles punch my sinuses.
It fades quick. “Now there’s this sit-down,” I remind her.
“I don’t think it had anything to do with me.
But I have this feeling that now they’re going to make nice and cut me into pieces until the plate looks empty, because I’m damaged goods.
So there’s nothing to plan. This is the plan. ”
She chews her dog and considers me like a general considering a coastline. “Okay,” she says brightly. “New plan.”
“Pru.”
“I’m not letting you get cloistered like a tax write-off. And I’m definitely not letting you walk into a room with men who think optics is a sacrament without a parachute.”
I shake my head. “I can’t just leave. My family is the mob, for Pete’s sake.”
She rolls her eyes so hard they should creak. “We have to work on that sentence.”
“What sentence?”
“Babe, you’re straight Boston, and you can’t even cuss.” She leans in, elbows on the paper tablecloth, chin in her hands like she’s about to teach me long division. “Repeat after me: My family’s the fucking mob.” She pinches her fingers for effect.
“Pru.”
“Say it.”
I look at the steam rising from our fries. The grease glistens like confession. “My family’s the…” I glance around. No nuns. No cousins. No crucifixes. No one’s paying me any attention.
“Out loud,” she urges.
“—fucking mob,” I whisper, and it lands hot and terrible and perfect on my tongue.
“There she is,” Pru says, way too pleased. “Again, louder this time.”
“My family’s the fucking mob.”
“Now: Those cunts.”
I choke on air. “Absolutely not.”
She pats my hand. “It’s a tool, like a wrench. You don’t have to love it. You just have to know how to pick it up when the bolts won’t move.” She rummages in her tote bag like Mary Poppins’ delinquent sister and produces a small velvet pouch. “Speaking of tools.”
I stare at it warily. “If that’s a grenade, I’m going back to the convent.”
She snorts. “Close.” She tips the pouch and a rosary spills into her palm. It isn’t the delicate, grandmother kind. The beads are matte black, not glossy; the cross is unadorned, simple lines; the links look…sturdy.
“It’s beautiful,” I say, because it is. Stark and serious and less like a piece of someone else’s piety.
“It’s also a microphone and a GPS tag,” she says sweetly.
I blink. “A what.”
“Recording device. Tracking device.” She waggles it at me. “I’ve been tinkering. Don’t make that face—your boyfriend does virgins in confessionals and all I do is solder in the computer engineering lab.”
“My boyfriend?” My voice jumps a register it doesn’t usually visit. “I do not have—”
“Fine,” she says, unbothered. “Your…mysterious man with a pulse and hands. Look. The cross is the mic. The top bead in the third decade is the switch—press and hold three seconds to start recording, same to stop. It uploads to the little cloud account I made for you labeled recipes. If you tug the centerpiece twice, it pings me your location. If you tug it three times, it pings me.”
I go still. “But why?”
“Because despite being a chaos gremlin I am not an idiot,” she says.
“Sometimes the dog with the biggest teeth is your friend. And sometimes your friend needs to be told where to stand to bite the right throat.” She winces.
“Okay, that metaphor got away from me. The point is—if anyone tries to do anything to you, I will know where to look and I know exactly what to do to get you free.”
I stare at the rosary like it has a pulse. “And if they don’t and I’m just wearing it while I do…penance?”
“Then it’s jewelry,” she says, shrugging. “A pretty string of Hail Marys that matches your aesthetic of nun, but make it noir.”
I try not to laugh and fail again. It leaks out, thin and grateful. “Pru, I can’t record my family.”
“You can record anyone who thinks they get to write your future for you,” she says, suddenly ferocious in that way she keeps hidden under jokes.
“You can record me if I start acting like I know better than you. It’s leverage if you need it.
It’s a breadcrumb trail if you don’t. I don’t care if you never turn it on.
” She presses the rosary into my palm. The beads are cool and weighty.
“I just want you to have a thing that’s yours. ”
I think of last night—the other thing that’s mine now. The way yes felt like a key in my mouth. The way he said thank you like the prayer belonged to both of us.
“Roisin Shannon is going to be at the sit-down,” I say, surprising both of us. “My father wants me to meet her. He called her competent.”
“Good,” Pru says instantly. “A woman with a knife and a ledger. She’ll like you.”
“You don’t know that. I’m…chattel.”
“Stop that right now. Women like us always spot each other,” she says. “Even when we’re playing different games.”
I roll the rosary across my palm. The matte beads catch on my lifeline, one after another, like a count I can start and start and start.
“If I wear this into that room and nothing happens—if everyone is very civilized and no one raises a voice and they hand each other a napkin with…I don’t know…
numbers or something on it—am I still the kind of person who needs a recording device? ”
Pru leans back and studies me with the seriousness she usually reserves for choosing the right donut. “You’re the kind of person who has learned to be careful. That doesn’t make you a spy. It makes you a survivor.”
“This makes me very nervous.” I tell her.
“I’m nervous for you,” she says lightly, and steals one of my fries.
We eat until the paper boats look like the aftermath of a small war. My Coke turns watery. The wind sneaks down the neck of my sweater and raises goosebumps along my spine. Somewhere, bells mark the hour like they’ve always had the right to.
“I have to go,” I say reluctantly, glancing toward the direction of the sanctuary. “Penances don’t pray themselves.”
Pru stands too, slings her bag like a weapon, straightens my scarf with the competence of a girl who can both start and stop fires.
“Text me when you’re done. Or don’t. I’ll assume you’re fine unless my gremlin cloud tells me otherwise.
” She taps the rosary. “Three tugs if something doesn’t feel right. ”
“What on earth would you even do?” I ask, half appalled, half…reassured, God help me.
“I am going to call whoever gets you out cleanest,” she says. “If that’s a librarian with a stern bun, so be it. If that’s a man who can lift two men at once, also fine. I’ve got friends and people who owe me favors everywhere, girl. And I’ll call in every single favor to get you free.”
“You terrify me,” I say, and mean thank you.
“Good,” she chirps. “Fear is respect with confetti, and I’ll gladly walk around picking it out of my hair all day.”
We walk back to campus. The wind has scraped the sky clear; it’s the color of a fresh bruise that’s decided not to form. Pru hugs me without warning, hard and quick, like she learned it from a stolen movie. “Be good,” she says into my hair. “Or be interesting. Both is too much work.”
“I’ll try to be orderly,” I say.
“Boring,” she sings, and peels off down the steps toward her econ class and the boy who keeps trying to argue feelings with spreadsheets.
I stand for a second with the rosary in my pocket and the card in my hand. Twenty rosaries. All five decades. Joyful. The word feels like a dare.
I slip into the side aisle of St. Brigid’s the way a diver slips into water he already knows is cold. The sanctuary is empty. No sexton. No cameras. No Nico. Just the hush of old wood and old air and candlelight too stubborn to go out at noon.
I slide into the second pew from the front—never the first, because I was taught humility; never the third, because I refuse to sit behind anybody when it’s my life. I kneel. The card goes on the bench. The rosary comes out of my pocket and settles across my fingers like it belongs there.
I don’t press the third-decade bead. I don’t need to. This isn’t a trap. It’s a spine made of twenty small decisions.
“Hail Mary,” I begin, and the words fit the shape of my mouth the way breathing does. “Full of grace.”
I pause. Close my eyes. See a mesh pattern on my palm. Hear a man say I’ll wait and mean it.
“Sanctuary,” I whisper into my hands, just once, for me. Then I start counting.
Outside, the city sharpens its knives and polishes its silver. Inside, I let the beads move under my thumb, one by one by one, and every pray for us sounds a little less like an apology and a little more like a promise I’m making to myself.
A reminder that I’ll never be perfect, so why am I bothering to try.