Free Garden of Lies by Eileen Goudge

altar boy
    robes, tipping her a wink.
    Thinking about what they’d done, she felt her heart beat fast and high in her throat.
    But not because she felt ashamed or sorry. God forgive me. ...
    All the Penance in heaven, that couldn’t change the fact that she loved Brian. She would walk
    through fire for him. Even the fires of hell.
    And deep in her heart she knew that if Bri wanted her, she would do what they’d done all over
    again.
    If. The possibility that now he wouldn’t want her, even as a friend, put a chill in her heart.
    Today was Saturday, and she hadn’t seen him since Monday, the night they ... well, they forgot
    they were supposed to be only best friends. Had he been purposely avoiding her? She could have
    gone up and knocked on his door to find out, but every time she thought about doing it her
    stomach turned cartwheels inside her.
    “Hail, Mary, Mother of God, the Lord is with Thee, ...
    please don’t let Bri hate me ...
    blessed art Thou, ...
    he’s all I’ve got ...
    and blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, ...
    I don’t think I could make it without him, I honestly don’t ...
    Jesus.”
    Rose stopped fingering her rosary, and gazed at the [45] white-clothed altar, flanked by marble
    figures of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary. The bank of votive candles beside the vestibule
    guttered and smoked in the draft, which seemed as much a part of this place as its pocked wooden
    pews and dog-eared missals. As Rose stared ahead, a hump-backed figure in a black dress and
    shapeless cardigan genuflected before the altar, then shuffled on to light one of the candles,
    dropping a coin into the offering box with a hollow rattle. Rose noticed that the wooden lid was
    gouged and the padlock on it a new one. Oh yes, she remembered Sister Boniface saying there
    had been a theft.
    A church was supposed to be the house of God, she thought. But if God could live anywhere,
    Rose wondered, would He really have chosen Holy Martyrs on Coney Island Avenue and Avenue
    R?
    She doubted it. She doubted it very much.
    Rose looked up. The late afternoon sun shone grudgingly through the peaked windows, casting
    everything around her in a gritty gray light. The windows were striped with bird shit from the
    pigeons that roosted in the eaves, but no one ever bothered to clean them. Father’s heart, they
    said, had gone out of it two years ago when some street gang had smashed the beautiful stained-
    glass windows, and they had been replaced by plain safety glass, which was all the parish could
    afford.
    Rose knew just how Father must have felt. Something dear snatched away from him. Smashed
    to bits. Never to be restored. Gone forever. And it was the same for her. With her grandmother.
    The one dream Rose treasured, the best one, Nonnie had soiled it, ruined it, smashed it to pieces.
    Her mother.
    ... whore cheap little whore that’s all she was ...
    The memory of Nonnie’s hateful words twisted in the pit of Rose’s stomach. She squeezed her
    eyes shut. Hate rose in her, red hot and poisonous.
    An even bigger sin, she knew, than the one she had committed with Brian.
    I wish she were dead. I wish the old witch had burned instead of my mother.
    Rose, struggling in vain to blot away her evil thoughts, bowed her head into her clenched
    hands, and prayed in a feverish whisper, [46] “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy
    name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily
    bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not
    into temptation ...” She thought about Marie, how it had all started last week with her sister’s
    terrible announcement.
    They had been eating dinner, the kitchen stagnant with the smell of overcooked pot roast and
    potatoes, she and Clare and Nonnie, when Marie walked in, late as usual. Rose had sensed
    immediately that something was up. Something big. Marie just stood there in the middle of the
    kitchen, arms