Free Last Things by Ralph McInerny Page B

Last Things? That was something she felt she had known but now could not remember. Whom could she ask? She smiled, remembering Aunt Eleanor’s plea. She found the number for St. Hilary’s and dialed it.
    â€œFather Dowling? Jessica Bernardo.”
    â€œHow is your father?”
    â€œBetter.”
    â€œThank God.”
    â€œI called to ask you a question.”
    â€œAll right.”
    â€œWhat are The Four Last Things?”
    A pause. “Death, judgment, heaven, hell.”
    â€œWow.”
    â€œWhy do you ask?”
    â€œI am planning a novel I want to call Last Things.”
    â€œIs this the one Eleanor Wygant spoke to me about?”
    â€œI suppose.”
    â€œAnd that is the theme? She said it was a family novel.”
    â€œI wish I had never told her about it.”
    â€œShe wanted me to talk you into dropping it.”
    â€œNo!”
    â€œI think I’ll stop by the hospital this morning.”
    â€œMaybe I will see you there.”
    Thunder and Diurno could wait. But suddenly she began to
type, and the story idea was all about Raymond and how what he had done affected his family. Of course that was the story of the Bernardos. Jessica wrote swiftly, acknowledging what her brother’s defection had meant to her, knowing what it had meant to her parents. Was Andrew unaffected? How could he be? But he probably saw it in turgid Graham Greene tones. She finished the page and printed it out and faxed it off to Thunder with scarcely a change.
    Then she called Andrew and told him she was going to the hospital.
    â€œI am meeting Raymond’s plane. I’ll bring him there.”

11
    O’Hare was LAX without sun or half-dressed people. Raymond felt that he was not dressed properly for late October, a pale green jacket, yellow shirt, black trousers, and loafers. No familiar faces, but then only passengers were admitted into these long ganglia that led out to the flight gates. Everything seemed larger than he remembered, not that he had flown much in the old days. It was always more attractive to take one of the cars and be in complete charge of one’s destiny. He smiled as the memories came back. Once he visited a high school in Indiana … He stopped, and grumbling travelers went around him like a rock in a stream. He got out of the traffic, entered an uncrowded waiting area, and sat.
The trip he remembered had been a recruiting one, talking with boys about the priesthood as a possible vocation. He looked at the people going by and realized that the world was full of people whose only contact with him had been as a priest. The full importance of this return came home to him. In Chicago he had been a priest; in California he was a counselor. Two worlds that could not overlap before, but now anyone, not just his father, could look at him with double vision, seeing both the priest that was and what he had become. If it had been possible he would have retraced his steps to the plane and asked to be taken back to Los Angeles. He rose and continued slowly to the baggage claim, where Andrew awaited him.
    The two brothers looked at one another across a gap of nearly ten years. What did Andrew see? Raymond saw a paunchy, tweedy academic trying to disguise his little brother. In a moment they were in one another’s arms.
    â€œHow’s Dad?”
    â€œBetter.”
    His heart sank. “How much better?” The question sounded as if he were asking if he had made this trip in vain.
    â€œHe’s still in the hospital.” Andrew looked away. “He won’t be coming home again, ever.”
    â€œWhat exactly is it?”
    They stood away from the carousel where passengers already stood three deep although no bags had yet appeared.
    â€œHe had a heart attack, a mild one, and if he were younger and stronger they would do open-heart surgery because of all the clogged passageways. I don’t know what I’m talking about, you understand. Jessica can