Free Household Saints by Francine Prose

chest.
    “I’m dying!” she cried. Yet she was clearly alive enough to scream at the top of her lungs,
    “Get that garbage off there!”
    “It’s not garbage,” Catherine said quietly. “It’s a geranium. And I can’t take it back. I gave it to the saint.”
    “You aren’t even Neapolitan,” said Mrs. Santangelo. “Gennaro isn’t even your saint.”
    “He’s Joseph’s family’s saint,” said Catherine, with such a sweet wifely smile that Joseph, feeling like a fool, smiled back. “So I guess now he’s mine.”
    “Catherine’s right,” said Joseph. “You give something to a saint, you can’t just change your mind and take it back.”
    Even Mrs. Santangelo couldn’t argue with the logic of that, and so Catherine’s plants gained a somewhat firmer foothold in the Santangelo apartment.
    By the next morning, they had claimed it as their rightful territory.
    Shortly before dawn, Mrs. Santangelo woke up choking from the lack of oxygen which the plants had stolen overnight. On her way to the kitchen, she shot a hateful look at the altar. Then, fearing that the saint might misunderstand, she lit a votive candle and carried it toward the mantel. She looked at Catherine’s geranium, looked away, made the sign of the horns and looked again.
    “Joseph!” she called. “Wake up! There’s been a miracle!”
    Last night’s grubby and unpromising geranium had bloomed—two huge crimson blossoms cradled in San Gennaro’s outstretched arms.
    “It’s a miracle.” Mrs. Santangelo bobbed up and down and crossed herself as her son and daughter-in-law entered the room. “Last night that plant was a mess. And now?”
    “Sure, Mama,” Joseph agreed sleepily. Anything to keep peace in the family was a miracle. “Right, Catherine?”
    “Right,” said Catherine. “A miracle.”
    It wasn’t a complete lie. There was always something miraculous about the flowering of a plant. But miracles, as Catherine understood them, were supposed to be surprises—God’s way of shocking you into believing. And there was nothing surprising about those flowers. The geranium had been in bud, due to blossom any day. That was why she’d put it on the altar. Yet if Mrs. Santangelo wanted to believe it was a miracle, Catherine would not disillusion her. For she knew that she could trade on her new power as a worker of minor miracles for the one privilege which she had craved since the start of her married life:
    That same day, Catherine asked Joseph if she could work in the shop.
    Next to the bedroom, the shop was her favorite place, for it was only in those two places that she could find Joseph’s smell. She loved to watch him work, loved most of all to think that those hands which sliced and boned so deftly were the same ones which would touch her so gently that night.
    Joseph couldn’t believe that she really liked the smell. Ignoring her protests, he took hot showers before coming to bed. When she walked into the store to find him elbow-deep in gristle and blood, he was horrified to think that she might recognize those arms as the same ones which held her in bed.
    “What would you do in the shop?” he said. “It’s a man’s work, it takes muscles—”
    “It takes two fingers to work the cash register,” said Catherine.
    And so the job of cashier was invented for her.
    Mrs. Santangelo saw evil omens in every aspect of this arrangement.
    “That’s the end of the Santangelo business,” she predicted. “My Zio is turning over in his grave so fast, he can’t get up and visit me.”
    Mrs. Santangelo’s prophecies had a disconcerting tendency to come true, and Joseph feared that this one had a better chance than most. It seemed inevitable that Catherine’s help would hurt the business. How could he flirt with his customers if she were there? And more important, how could he cheat them with Catherine looking over his shoulder?
    As it happened, there was no need for Joseph to abandon these practices. In fact,