CHAPTER 4
THE BEADS
POV: RONAN
She leaves her pencil behind.
I find it at two, when I come back from Adams Street. It’s lying in the gutter of the top ledger on my desk, where she set it down when I told her to sit and forgot it when I told her to say amen.
A yellow number two. Chewed at the end.
I pick it up.
The tooth marks are small and even, all the way around, like a ring. She does it when she’s adding. I’ve watched her through the office window at St. Agnes on a hundred nights, bent over this book with the lamp on and the pencil in her mouth, frowning at a column.
I open the ledger to page nine.
March. Heating oil. The column that’s off by eleven dollars.
In the margin beside it, so small I have to hold the page to the window to read it, in her round convent hand:
carried the 2 — forgive me
She wrote it to the book. To herself. To God.
Nobody was ever going to read it. Mother Clare doesn’t check the margins. The diocese doesn’t check anything.
I read it.
I take the knife from my desk drawer and cut the page out along the gutter. Clean. Close to the stitching, so nobody will ever know it’s gone. I fold it once and put it in the inside pocket of my jacket, over my heart.
The pencil goes in with it.
Then I sit down in the chair she sat in.
It isn’t warm anymore. It’s been four hours. But the leather holds something. Starch. Vanilla. The cold that came in with her off the street.
I sit in it a long time.
I look at the glove on my right hand. The thumb. I haven’t taken it off since she left. There’s nothing on the leather. No mark. Her mouth was dry.
I look anyway.
Amen.
She said it against my thumb like she was swallowing something. Like it hurt going down. And then her eyes went dark, and her lips stayed parted, and she didn’t pull away.
Two years I’ve watched her say that word to other men. To priests. To Albright. To old women in the pews.
She said it to me.
The door opens. Theo.
“Conor wants a sit-down,” he says. “Tonight. The pub.”
“Of course he does.”
“He knows about Albright.”
“He knew about Albright before Albright did.” I stand and button my jacket over the page and the pencil. “Eight o’clock.”
Theo looks at the chair. At me. At my gloved hand.
He doesn’t say anything.
***
Conor Kavanagh keeps his hands flat on the table when he’s lying.
They’re flat now.
“I don’t know any Monsignor,” he says.
We’re in the back room of his pub on East Broadway. Wood paneling, Harp on tap, a dartboard nobody’s thrown at since the nineties. Two of his men by the door. Theo by mine. Nobody’s hand near a jacket, because this is a conversation.
For now.
Conor is fifty-eight. Red beard gone salt at the chin, a gut like a keg, eyes like a pawnbroker’s. He’s run Southie for his family since his father went to Walpole, and he isn’t stupid. That’s what makes him worth a meeting.
“Gerald Albright,” I say. “Holy Rood. Twenty-five hundred a month for fourteen months, out of your laundromat on Dot Ave.”
His hands stay flat.
“Terrible thing,” he says. “Heard he slipped.”
“In a font.”
“In a font.” He sips his beer. “They’re saying you were in Brighton last night.”
“People say a lot.”
“You drowned my priest, Draven.”
“God drowned your priest. I held the door.”
His men shift. Theo doesn’t. Conor watches me over the rim of his glass, then sets it down with a small, clean click.
“Let’s talk about the girl.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“There’s everything to talk about.” He leans back and the chair groans. “Two years ago Frank Holloway put her on my table for a hundred and eighty. You swooped in and bought his paper. Fine. I let it go. Paper’s paper.”
“Generous.”
“Practical. You pay, you’re owed. But you didn’t take her, did you?” His laugh is short and wet. “You put her in a convent. What’s that, Ronan? Layaway?”
I say nothing.
“Monday night Frank sat down at my cousin’s game at the Ironside and put her up again. Fresh marker. My cousin took it.” He spreads his thick hands on the wood. “So there’s two pieces of paper on that girl now. Yours is old. Mine’s warm.”
“Mine’s paid.”
“Yours bought a debt. It didn’t buy her.” He taps the table once. “In this city, a girl with no husband and no people is whoever’s got the nerve. You know the rules. You wrote half of them.”
“Touch her,” I say, “and I’ll put your family in the harbor one at a time. Oldest to youngest. You’ll watch from the boat.”
He doesn’t blink. “Then marry her.”
The room goes quiet.
“Put a ring on it. A real one, with a priest and a paper. Then she’s a Draven, and nobody in Boston lays a finger on her without starting a war with you.” He picks his glass back up. “Otherwise stop pretending you’re a priest. She’s on a boat by Christmas. I promised her father.”
I stand.
His men straighten. Theo’s hand drifts toward his coat and stops.
I button mine. “You’ve made a lot of promises to her father.”
“So?”
“Look how he turned out.”
***
At noon, after Theo drove her home from my office, she went down to the parish hall and served soup.
As if nothing had happened.
I watched from the car across the street. Hair pinned tight under the white veil. Cheeks still pink from my thumb. The ring back on its chain under her collar, where she thinks it’s hidden and I think it’s even better.
She ladled forty-one bowls. She counted every one in Latin under her breath.
At bowl twenty-six, a man in a Carhartt jacket held out his bowl, and when she filled it, he didn’t take it.
He took her wrist.
A squeeze. His thumb pressing into the soft inside of her wrist, right over the pulse.
“Pretty hands for a nun, sweetheart.”
She gave him the polite smile. She pulled. He held on one second longer than he should have.
On my phone, the number in the corner jumped from seventy-four to ninety-eight.
“Name,” I said.
Theo had it before I finished the word. “Gil Faraday. Drywall. Two DUIs. Every Tuesday since she started serving.”
“Which hand?”
“Right.”
***
Faraday lives on the top floor of a triple-decker on Savin Hill Avenue. He parks his truck in the alley behind it, and he’s always a little drunk when he climbs out.
Tonight he’s more than a little.
He sees us halfway to his back steps. Two men in dark coats between him and his door. He squints into the light over the stairs.
“The hell you want?”
“Your right hand,” I say.
He laughs. Then he gets a proper look at my face, and he stops.
“I didn’t— whatever this is, I didn’t do it.”
“You held a woman’s wrist today at St. Agnes.”
His eyes go blank. Then wide. “The little nun? Christ, I was just being friendly—”
Theo takes him by the collar and puts him face down across the hood of the truck. I take his right hand and flatten it on the cold steel. Palm down. Fingers spread.
“Please— man, I got a job tomorrow, I need that hand—”
“You should have remembered that at lunch.”
I drape my mother’s rosary over my wrist so the black beads hang where he can see them.
Then I take his thumb.
The first one is always the loudest.
I push a bead along the cord for each. Thumb. Index. Middle. Ring. Little.
Five.
By the last one he isn’t screaming. He’s crying, high and thin, like something left out in the cold.
Theo lets go. Faraday slides down the side of his truck into the slush and curls around his hand.
I crouch beside him.
“She’ll be at that soup kitchen next Tuesday,” I tell him. “You won’t.”
He nods so hard his teeth click.
“And if anyone asks—”
“I slipped. I slipped. I—”
“That’s the story.”
***
Draven House is dark when I get home, except for the lamp in my study.
There’s an envelope on the desk. Theo’s work.
An application for a marriage license, Suffolk County, the kind that takes three days unless you know a clerk who owes you forty grand in football bets.
Under it, a note in Theo’s square print: Priest in Quincy.
Owes you a favor and a liver. Says Thursday at four, if you want the church.
I want the church.
I want her married in the building she thinks belongs to God.
I pour two fingers of whiskey and don’t drink it.
On my phone: St. Agnes. Third floor. Fourth door.
She’s in bed on her side, facing the window. Blind up. Brass turned.
And the ring isn’t on the chain.
It’s on her finger.
She put it back on. After the office. After amen. Nobody told her to. She doesn’t know the gold is reading her pulse every four seconds, so as far as she knows, nobody on earth will ever see her do it.
She did it anyway.
Sixty-one beats a minute. Slow and even. The way it goes when she’s about to fall asleep with a prayer half finished.
I sign the application. Ronan Michael Draven.
Then I pull the notepad on my desk toward me, the one no clerk will ever see, and I uncap the pen again.
I write the name she’s going to have.
Magdalene Draven.
The ink shines wet under the lamp.
I write it a second time underneath, just to see how it looks in my hand.