Free The Patron Saint of Ugly by Marie Manilla Page B

eyes rounded, and I could tell she wanted to bolt, but she looked at the sick doll and finally held Betsy Wetsy toward me. “She can’t pee.”
    I had the same doll, Padre, only Mom had painted geographic splotches all over its skin with nail polish. How I loved that doll, and my mother.
    Nonna clamped her hand on my shoulder, and the warmth from her palm seeped through my shirt and into my skin, where it radiated down my right arm and made my fingertips throb.
    “Miracle her,” Dee Dee whispered, picking at a pronounced sty on her eyelid.
    I looked into Dee Dee’s eyes, and Dee Dee stared back (the flaming sty also staring); her belief was so stern I took the doll, jiggled her, and heard liquid sloshing around in her belly. Even I knew the mechanics of Betsy Wetsy. You fed her a bottle of water and gravity took care of the rest, the water funneling through her and dribbling out a BB-size hole in her asexual mons. I lifted her dress and cringed at the brown streaks running down her legs, a hardened plug of it in her pee hole. I tried not to gag. “What did you feed her?”
    Dee Dee’s head hung low. “Hershey’s syrup.”
    I handed back the doll. “Wait here.” I ran to the kitchen and returned with Betsy’s bottle filled with hot water, plus the dish of toothpicks Dad used to jab salami fat from between his teeth. I again lifted Betsy’s dress to perform a delicate operation: I poked a toothpick in her stoppered pee hole while mumbling a prayer I had heard the Saint Brigid nuns utter countless times: “Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae . Amen.” I botched the Latin, but I was sure the Virgin Mary applauded my effort, because my body burned with fever at the same time that syrup oozed from Betsy, thick droplets of it. I fed the doll the bottle of hot water and soon Betsy Wetsy was peeing freely once more. Dee Dee’s eyes widened as she took the doll and kissed its face, and that’s when I noticed that Dee Dee’s eye was suddenly sty-less.
    Nonna crossed her chest three times. “It’s-a true.”
    I looked twice to confirm, but the sty was definitely gone. I also felt wetness on my bare foot and was stunned to see that my recent hot flash had melted Antarctica’s glaciers, the second instance of someone toying with my geography. I twisted around to see if some old gabbo had snuck into the room to toy with me, but it was just Nonna and Dee Dee, who looked at me in a way no child ever had.
    An hour later, Arabella Bellagio appeared on my front porch. “Her eyelid is stuck. Heal my doll too.”
    She held the doll out, but I was captivated by Arabella’s face, so peppered with freckles that I wanted to grab a pen and connect the dots. Nonna nudged me, so I took the doll and tipped her forward and back, the motion that would get her eyelids blinking. The right one winked at me; the left remained open, glued in place by Popsicle drippings, perhaps. Fizzies juice. I did what any healer would do under those circumstances: I spit in the doll’s stuck eye socket, mashed the eye around with my finger, then dried it with the hem of my shirt while praying, “Sancta Maria, Mater Dei.” Then I tipped her forward and back and—ta-da!—her eye was cured, and about every fifth freckle on Arabella’s face had vanished. I rubbed my own eyes in disbelief and looked at Nonna, who was rubbing her eyes too.
    That night after dinner I sat on the floor in my closet nurturing the hope that I actually was the reincarnation of Saint Garnet. I rifled through my cigar box of treasures: found marbles and buttons, a tire-mashed ring, a collection of bottle caps, cigar bands, and, from the nuns, an assortment of holy cards.
    I fanned the cards—Saint Dymphna, Saint Agatha, Saint Germaine (another child whose birth defects made her a target for cruelty)—and wondered if it could possibly be true. Had I really healed those dolls and their owners? I didn’t know the answer, but I