Free The Good Life by Erin McGraw Page A

coach me at the track. I need some coaching.”
    Adreson needed a moment to process this. Once he did, the expression that crossed his face made Father Murray shiver.
    â€œDon’t look to me to cut you any slack,” Adreson said. “I take running seriously.”
    â€œIt’s your great gift,” Father Murray said.
    â€œI just want to make sure you know what you’re getting into.”
    â€œI know,” Father Murray said. He hoped that Adreson could not hear the light edge of fear in his voice, but even if he could, it would change nothing. Father Murray was committed. “But I’m going to help you first.”

APPEARANCE OF SCANDAL
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    A FTER THE SCREAMING and the poisonous accusations, after the broken vase and rib, after the gonorrhea, waking up to find Anthony gone was not the hardest thing. It was not the hardest thing to sleep on the fluffy clown rug between the girls’ beds or to come to school to pick up Stephanie the day a rash bloomed across her chest. It was not even so hard to forward Anthony’s mail and to review the bar association’s list of divorce lawyers, so many of whom Anthony had gone to law school with, and mocked.
    The hardest thing was sitting in church, where the scalding sense of failure shot from Beth’s hairline to the soles of her feet. Surrounded by intact families with husbands who looked proud of their wives—Anthony had not looked proud, ever—Beth read the ads on the back of the bulletin for funeral homes and CPAs, leafed through the hymnal, distracted herself in every way she could think of until the hour was over and she could race to the parking lot, always one of the first to gun it out.
    â€œYou don’t know how hard it is,” she said to Father Marino. “If it weren’t for the kids, I wouldn’t come back here.”
    â€œThen thank goodness for the kids,” he said.
    The easiest thing after Anthony left was Beth’s talks with Father Marino. Every week he made room for her in a schedule filled with Social Justice Committee meetings and intramural soccer and daily hospital visits—needs more legitimate than her small loneliness and sorrow. Every week he opened his office door and produced his cracked-tooth grin, and she saw the sort of boy he must have been, round-headed and cocky, sure of the world’s affection.
    He had long ago captured the affections of everybody at Holy Name. After cranky Father Mestin had retired and nervous Father Torbeiner had been whisked away with so little explanation—people still murmured about him—parishioners recognized their good fortune in Father Marino. He had a friendly habit of snapping off his Roman collar in midconversation. “Enough of this. Let’s
talk
.” People confided in him—guilty teenagers and angry mothers and the whole Men’s Club, which took Father Marino on a trout-fishing trip every June, returning sunburned, hung over, and sheepishly low on trout. Beth wondered whom Father Marino confided in, but she recognized her curiosity as the question of a freshly divorced woman half in love with her priest and kept it to herself.
    Instead, she told him about her job at the Women’s Services office on the weedy outskirts of town. Now she was working as a receptionist and sometime counselor, but she was planning to become a paralegal and, after that, an attorney. “That would kill Anthony,” Father Marino said.
    She said, “My point, exactly.”
    Anthony had already asked her how she, a Catholic, could work in such a place, a question she thought rich, considering that he had been the one with the girlfriend. “The women who go there need help,” she said shortly. She wasn’t about to give him details on the sullen, exhausted mothers who edged through the office door, needing health care, legal advice, babysitters. Sometimes they needed abortions, and Beth counseled them about