Free Acts of Contrition by Jennifer Handford Page B

death.
    With an abundance of grace, Colleen has tolerated and endured Sean’s drinking and infidelities. This baffles me because Colleen doesn’t seem the type to put up with crap from anyone. This is a woman who, in the midst of chemo treatments for her breast cancer years ago, asked the doctor to up the doses just in case the cancer had any idea of coming back. She wanted to send a strong message. I’ve never come close to being able to reconcile the incongruence, to puzzle the two pieces together: how Sean could be loving and loyal, and at the same time unfaithful. How Colleen could forgive the unforgivable.
    “It had to have killed your mother,” I once said to Tom. “She must have felt so betrayed. Her entire life a lie.”
    “I’m sure,” Tom agreed.
    “Did he ever
explain
himself?” Always wanting to dig deeper, fascinated by the nuances of moral judgment.
    “He said that it had nothing to do with Mom, that he loved Mom more than ever, that the affairs were separate.”
    “I just can’t grasp it.”
    “There’s more to the story,” Tom said. “
Technically,
the times when Dad stepped out, he and Mom were separated.”
    “You’re kidding me.” Sean and Colleen were a package deal to me; I couldn’t fathom the two of them apart.
    “Yeah,” Tom said. “There were a few times when Mom had had enough. Dad was drinking too much. It led to a bunch of crap. She basically threw him out. He’d binge, meet up with his ‘lady friend,’ and eventually crawl back to Mom.”
    For a long moment I just sat back, blinking at him as I assimilated this new information. “That does change things—the fact that they were technically separated.” Even then—in a situation that had nothing to do with me—I set my bargaining wheels spinning, rationalizing the lines of morality, testing the outer edge before the slippery slope turned into a landslide.
    Now it was Tom’s turn to blink at me. “I don’t believe being separated excused him from anything,” he said. “Marriage is marriage.”
    “Yes, but there is a start and a finish, and in their case, some ‘pauses’ in between.”
    “Nope,” Tom said. “The commitment is the bond. That should never be broken.”
    “Then why aren’t you harder on him?”
    “Because he couldn’t help himself—because of the drink.”
    I would come to learn that the booze was a perpetual Get Out of Jail Free card for Tom’s father and Tom’s brother, Patrick, a disease over which they were powerless.

    Domenic and Danny are rocking on chairs next to their grandparents and the girls are browsing in the gift shop when ourname is called. We sit at one of the larger tables, order coffee and juice, hot cocoa for the kids. Once we put in our orders, and the kids go and sit by the fireplace to play the golf tee/pegboard game, we settle in for a conversation. The starting point is always the same. Never a gentle step onto solid ground. Something more akin to jumping off a cliff.
    “How’s Patrick?” Tom asks, broaching everyone’s greatest worry, his baby brother’s magnetic pull toward the pub and the bottle.
    “He’s good!” Sean says, always happier to skirt difficult topics, always happier to talk about the kids and their activities. “That little Mia, she’s a pip!” he says of Patrick’s five-year-old daughter. Patrick and his family live only a few miles from where Sean and Colleen live in Virginia Beach.
    Tom and I both look at Colleen, the one who is likely to have more information.
    “He’s sober, as far as I know,” Colleen says. “But I have a bad feeling.”
    “Why?” Tom asks, leaning in.
    “He wasn’t feeling well the other day so he stayed home and of course, you know Patrick, he didn’t call his boss to tell him that he’d be a no-show. His boss was furious. He had to let Patrick go.”
    “Does he have something else lined up?” Tom asks.
    “He’s trying,” Colleen says. “But mainly he’s back to talking about baseball, how he