Free The Patron Saint of Ugly by Marie Manilla Page A

full moon. I was only three. Nicky was four but already quite verbal since he’d spent so much time galloping through Grandfather’s reference books. Nonna ushered us outside with a clothespin bag looped over her wrist. She reached inside and pulled out four sprigs from what I assumed was Grandpa’s grapevine, cuttings she had planted in coffee cans and coddled all winter.
    She also pulled out soupspoons and directed each of us to the base of one of the four arbor posts; she took the last. “Dig-a this high and this-a wide,” she instructed with her hands.
    We hunkered down. I jammed in my spoon, hoisted out my first load, and a porous stone popped out with it. I’d never seen one like it, and when I held it in my hand, it was ludicrously light. I dug my spoon in again, and another one popped out, and another, and another.
    “What are these?” I asked no one in particular.
    My genius brother loped over. “Where’d you get those?”
    Maybe he wasn’t so smart. “From the hole,” I said, pointing.
    “Did not.”
    “Did too.”
    “Nuh-uh.”
    “Uh-huh!”
    Nonna came over. “What’s all-a the fuss?”
    “Garnet’s filling up her hole with pumice stones!”
    “Am not!” I didn’t even know what a pumice stone was. “They came out of the hole. Look!” I dug my spoon in and out popped another one.
    “That’s not right.” Nicky kicked the pile of stones. “Pumice comes from volcanoes and we don’t live on a volcano. She must have buried them there earlier.”
    “I did not.”
    “Did too.”
    “What’s-a the diff?” Nonna said. “We gotta get-a these in before the sun she goes down.”
    Before Nicky went back to his task he scraped dirt onto my bare foot, coating Antarctica and its glacial ice shelves.
    Soon I heard Nonna mumbling, “Here-a too?”
    She was pulling from her hole not pumice stones, but seashells. I crawled over and picked up a handful of pink scallops. I looked at her; she looked at me; we both looked at Nicky but decided not to call them to his attention. Especially since he was marveling at what he’d unearthed from his hole: a matchbox. He slid it open and discovered a toy station wagon completely demolished by some kid’s rough play.
    Then I looked over at Ray-Ray, who was not lifting an oddity from his hole but putting one in. He’d reached into his pocket and yanked out a dead bird, likely murdered by him. He slipped it into the grave, rammed his sapling on top, and scooped dirt around it.
    Ray-Ray’s clipping withered to a dry twig before morning. Nonna’s and mine flourished and eventually produced the sweetest grapes of all, though they weren’t the same variety as Grandpa’s Gaglioppo. Though Nicky’s vine grew, it was stunted and never yielded any fruit.
    I understand now how bizarre these occurrences were, Padre, but swaddled as I was in Nonna’s Old Religion, I thought everyone’s life was filled with mystery. I often wondered what other children found in the holes they dug. And there were plenty of kids on the hill in those postwar years whose first words were probably “Mommy, what’s wrong with—” I was never invited for birthday parties or sleepovers, and none of them would have had the courage to sleep in my much-talked-about globe room, which is why I never bothered to ask. Things changed when I was four and a little hill girl showed up at my door.
    I was at the living room window watching neighbor girls decorate mud pies with buttercups when Dee Dee Evangelista hiked up my steps holding a baby doll. I instinctively ducked behind the drapes. When the doorbell chimed, Nonna came from the kitchen and answered.
    “My doll needs a miracle,” Dee Dee said.
    Nonna’s eyebrows pinched together. “Huh?”
    “Nonna Lalia said Saint Garney can do miracles.”
    Nonna tugged the white hair on her chin. Finally she turned to me and held out her hand. “Come. It’s-a time.”
    I had no idea what that meant, but I slid out and went to the door. Dee Dee’s