Free Vanity Insanity by Mary Kay Leatherman Page B

Confirmation process include naming a sponsor, who stands by the child during this big decision, and taking on a new name, one added to the birth-given name. That name should be one that a person takes on because of its significance. It looked really good to the teachers and other adults if you picked a name of a saint.
    My sponsor was Grandpa Mac. This was an easy decision. He had stood by me all those years while I served Mass and confessed my sins. He would stand by me as I confirmed my faith.
    Then there was the name picking. A young person could really make a statement about himself by picking a certain name. Marty, for example, picked the name Ann since she had intentions of going into the medical world. Saint Ann was a nurse. Theresa was unique, as she chose the male name Gerard, taken from Saint Gerard, the patron saint of mothers. I don’t need to tell you that Lucy had been planning her Confirmation name for years. Quite possibly, she’d made her mind up years earlier when she had been excluded from the great Mary procession of 1969. You guessed it: Lucille Bell Mary Mangiamelli.
    The year before, A.C. and I had picked out Confirmation names with careful consideration. Of course, A.C. had to be unique with his decision. While the rest of the to-be-confirmed chose names like Elizabeth, James, and Thomas, A.C., after studying many books on the saints, chose the name Aloysius. Saint Aloysius Gonzaga was the patron saint of compassion and Catholic youth. Maybe A.C. couldn’t pronounce it. He certainly could pull it off.
    I chose the name Joseph. Benjamin Howard Joseph Keller, a no-brainer decision. Joseph, father of Jesus, was the great Background Guy. He marrieda young pregnant woman, knowing that he had not fathered her child. He protected her and her child through many a turbulent day. That good-father factor certainly weighed heavily on my decision. Jesus was not even his biological son, yet he loved Jesus like a father should.
    From my chair in the kitchen, I listened to more sobbing. Would Mom ever do Ava’s hair? I sat at the kitchen table with the truth and my soggy cereal. I knew that Lucy was not a floozy. I knew that the only thing Lucy was guilty of was being honest and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She had not done any of the stuff that seemed to be bothering Mrs. Mangiamelli. I knew this because Lucy had told me.
    A month earlier, before the tornado, Lucy had her first baby-sitting job. Because she was twelve, she had taken the Red Cross class on babysitting. In perfect Lucy style, she handed out flyers to everyone within a three-block radius that shouted “Pick Me!” My next-door neighbors, Ted and Nancy Shanahan, were past the years of needing babysitters since their “baby” was thirty-two years old, but their daughter, Tammy, and her husband and four-year-old twins would be visiting. Mr. and Mrs. Shanahan, who happened to be one of the only non-Catholic families in our neighborhood, had asked Lucy to baby-sit their grandchildren while they went to a wedding reception. A perfect baby-sitting job for a first-timer.
    When I answered the phone that Friday night in April, I didn’t recognize her voice. Lucy was terrified.
    “Ben!” Lucy cried. “I’m scared to death. You’ve got to help me.”
    A million things went through my head as I felt panic growing in my gut.
What! Where? How much blood?
Before I could say a word, Lucy continued, “You’ve got to come over here. I just watched
Wait until Dark
. My mom’s gonna kill me…”
    “You’ve got to give me a little more information, Lucy. What are you talking about? Where is ‘here’?”
    Lucy explained that, after putting down the kids, she had watched a movie about a blind woman and some bad guys hiding in her house to steal a doll stuffed with drugs that had been planted on her—somethingher parents would never have allowed her to watch. The Red Cross had prepared Lucy for feeding kids, giving baths, reading bedtime