Free And Also With You by Tandy McCray Page A

gravestone. It’s a weeping marker, cold and frigid, of the dead and gone. I need to get to Brady’s already but I wait. I wait.
    Five minutes or twenty go by. I can’t be sure. I hear him before I see him. He’s got his phone out. “I don’t know where she went. Let meh just jog down to the next block, lovey. If she’s not round I’ll come on home, I will.”
    He hurries past the alley. He never looks my way.
    I count in my head, one to twenty, one to twenty, except damn it all, I can’t remember what’s after fourteen so I skip up to eighteen and begin again. Count and sing a bit of fa-la-la-la, and it’s so cold, so cold. I do not want to freeze to death. I want to meet the fallen angels with warmth in my belly and a fire in my heart.
    My fingers lead me along the alley wall; hand over hand, leaning ragged and bleary on the wall. The coast is clear. I set out again, foot over foot, into the abyss of snow and twinkling lights and every window lit with cheer.
    I look up a while as I walk, but I cannot see a star at all. There was no snow in Bethlehem, was there? A camel maybe, and a few dark-skinned Jews, but nobody in America thinks of it that way. Jesus is as white as Santa Claus these days. People love lies. Priests and doctors both. They say, “She has a good chance. We caught it early,” when what they mean is, pick out the casket while you’ve still got time. They say, “God will never give you more than you can bear,” when what they mean is, God does not care about you at all. He’s busy giving the next unlucky chick breast cancer. He’s quite moved on from you all.
    The bells are tolling at Saints Simon and Jude. They start as I cross the street to that side on the path to Brady’s and the rolling quell nearly startles me off my feet. I’m so close to them it feels like they are chiming in my guts. I get right on to it, the hulking mass of urban diocese, and want to walk on but my feet won’t move. It’s so awfully cold. Brady is a tightwad sonofabitch. Surely he won’t close early tonight. I could go in just a moment, just to feel my fingers again before I get along.
    I dip my finger and cross myself because it’s ingrained in me, and she wouldn’t be pleased with my disrespect. I already smell like the bottom of a ripened barrel. Surely I won’t burst into flame with a little holy water and a quickly bent knee.
    The last pew isn’t that warm because the doors are open. I make it on two more, third from the back, and that’s all the further I will go. I need a little warmth and that’s all. The row is empty. The kneeling bench unfolds against my clumsy fingers and I fall and do not get up.
    Everything dips and swims until the altar up front and the sacraments on the walls look like a bad trip. I’m in the middle of a Kevin Smith movie and I swear if I see Buddy Christ, I’m going to barf.
    My eyes close, my head against the wood of the pew in front of me. I breathe, slow and choppy, through the loose pulling in my head. For a moment, as I feel everything veering right in my brain as I fight the spinning and the nausea, it is as though I am eight again and waiting for her to take my hand and lead me up for communion. I am nerves and limbs. She is light and air.
    I squeeze my eyes shut tight, tight, tighter, and I pray for one moment, for real. I pray for redemption and for peace and mostly, to not be alone tonight of all nights, with a memory that cannot unsee or unknow a sorrow too deep for spoken words.
    The kneeling bench sinks a little more and I open my eyes. A man is crouched beside me, his hands a temple of pointed fingers posed for prayer. “Scuse me,” he says, and I smell the whiskey on him, heavy like mine and delicious.
    His hair is dark with streaks of red like whiskey set aflame.
    His eyes are brown.

TWO
     
    The place fills up pretty quickly. I keep my head down because what I drank at O’Reilly’s isn’t settling well, and because my eyes are bloodshot. No need to