"I thought I would think about him less when I was away from him. All last summer I had the thought that, in the fall, when I was away at college, I would love him less, I would think about him less." Bradley gives a devil-may-care shrug, a c.o.c.ky smile. "But, not so much." He takes another long drag. In the choked silence I stare up at Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, at the stained-gla.s.s windows that are covered with the opaque gray substance. What the h.e.l.l is it? An environmental treatment? Plasticine ashes? Covert sin?

"As it turns out, the whole love thing doesn't really leave because you will it to. I don't know what to do." Bradley inhales and holds it for as long as he can, until his shoulders shudder and he artfully exhales a long stream of smoke through the inch of unrolled s.p.a.ce in the car window. "I have to just wait it out, wait for that day when I don't care anymore. I'm waiting to love him less, though that's happening pretty G.o.dd.a.m.n slowly, if at all. But I think letting someone go is like the Holy Spirit entering your heart: you can't make it happen, you just have to be available to it."

And I'm a little lost on the theology angle, mainly just thinking: Love? Huh? Are you kidding me?

"So, yeah, I guess so," I say, encouragingly, my voice fraught with faux casualness, with my I'm so down with your relationship with the abusive priest vibe. I nod excessively. What is there to say?

"Anyway, it's an old story, I know. I think the pedestrian aspect of it is what bothers me most." Bradley takes another long drag. "I went to Disneyland, and I got the Mickey Mouse ears. Although I didn't really understand that at the time."

This seems slightly rehea.r.s.ed, but optimistic, as if he's wishing himself into a world where he will be free, a summation of heartache with an amus.e.m.e.nt-park a.n.a.logy.

"So," I say, because it is apparently impossible for me to start a sentence without nodding and saying "so." And I'll be G.o.dd.a.m.ned if I don't say it again with a nod that's verging on a perpetual head bobble. "So, wow-"

"I saw him last night. Here. It was a little better between us.... We smoked a lot and, you know ... Usually when I see him now, it's just crazy. It's nothing. He's all formal and hearty: 'h.e.l.looo, Bradley! Bradley, I hope you're studying and not going to too many keggers!' "

"Keggers? Who says 'keggers'? Does he think it's 1982?"

Bradley looks up at the church and over at the carriage house behind it, the same sweet Tudor-and-stone style as the church and Bradley's own home, just blocks away. This whole neighborhood so Hansel-and-Gretel quaint. I know that not only has Bradley been in the house, he probably knows the domestic mysteries of it, the hand towels, magazines and ottomans, the brand of dishwashing liquid next to the kitchen sink.

I try not to think about Bradley seeing Father Bob last night.

"None of it really matters, anyway. I've figured it out. He has someone new. His name is Miles. He was a couple years behind me in school. He comes from this super, super rich family that's trying to bring back the Latin Ma.s.s. So I feel bad for him ... I guess. Miles. He's never going to be able to have the gay talk with his parents. You can tell they love their country club Christ more than any of their kids."

Anther brilliant comment from me: "Wow." It's the best I can do with all this new information, with my mind swirling with Father Bob and Bradley, Father Bob and Miles. What animal should you never play cards with? A cheetah!

The church door flings open and Father Bob appears, his ca.s.sock billowing out like a superhero cape as he leans down and fixes the doorstop.

Bradley takes a long last drag off his joint, then opens the car door and stuffs the stub into a short cliff of dirty snow. And then we sit in silence as we watch Father Bob, or as Bradley calls him, Robert. He folds his hands behind his back and looks up at the sky. Soon, people stream or straggle out of the church. Most everyone stops to chat with Father Bob, to shake his hand. He cups his hand over a little girl's head while he leans down to talk to her, then throws back his head and laughs.

Bradley sighs. "You know, the thing is, my parents are so G.o.dd.a.m.n nice, it's annoying. They've always tried so hard." He a.s.sumes a chirpy falsetto, approximating a mom's voice: "Bradley, you are always free to bring a love interest home for dinner or to play backgammon, I don't want you to feel any different than your brother would about bringing a girl home."

"Wow," I say. "That's totally nice." In truth, I had thought all Catholics were kind of jacka.s.sy about these matters.

"Although I'm not quite sure my mom would have been so thrilled had I shown up at home and said, 'Mom, waiting on the front porch is my very special date for the evening. We are deeply in love, so please don't freak out that he's older than I am. Oh, and one more thing, my special guy is none other than beloved Father Bob.' "

I laugh, thinking about this complicated game of Mystery Date. It's amazing that mothers, even kind and decent mothers, are so highly delusional. I remember my own mom at Target, yukking it up with Alecia Hardaway's mom over algebra teachers and playgroups. Their candied view seems so lame, but I suppose that mothers simply cannot know. My mind veers into grammatical confusion, and I correct myself; I let myself feel the pain of the singular, the punch of the past conditioned tense: My mother simply could not have known.

Bradley drums his fingers on the dashboard. "Shall we blow this Popsicle stand? This little old Eucharist-wafer shack?"

"Absolutely," I say. "I'm starving."

I manage to back out of the parking s.p.a.ce, but the place is jumping with crazy Catholic drivers. They may have enjoyed Ma.s.s, but now they are definitely ready to get the h.e.l.l out of here. I get stuck behind a jumble of cars. Bradley is looking out the window, watching Father Bob. I look up at the church and wonder again about the coating of gray on the stained-gla.s.s windows. Inside, the lit windows are so gorgeous, the robes of the saints glowingly root-beer brown, bottle green and velvet blue, their Cupid's bow mouths as jeweled and red as crushed rubies.

I point up at the windows. "What's the deal? Why can't you see the stained gla.s.s from the outside?"

Bradley looks up and says, "The church had to put a protective covering on them a few years back so they could get insurance."

I stare at the windows, inadvertently taking my foot off the brake and nearly hitting the Escalade that has pulled out in front of me, that big glimmering vehicle with the body of Christ clinging to the snowy hood.

"s.h.i.t!" I hit the brake just as the Escalade pulls up. "Why do they need insurance-"

"People used to break the windows at night. They threw rocks."

"Now, why would someone go and do a thing like that? Those windows are art." But I know how pleasing it is to hear gla.s.s break at night, to live in that half second before it falls into a cushion of snow. And to break the church windows? The shrieking saints, the clash of breaking gla.s.s, rainbow shards bleeding onto the asphalt below?

Bradley smiles. "I have not the faintest idea why someone would commit such a rogue act. It is a sorrowful mystery."

For our Sat.u.r.day-night fun, we hit the International House of Pancakes; we are hopping at IHOP. We are starving to death and there is a thirty-minute wait, so we gorge on candy of unknown origins from the dirty dispensers next to the newspaper machines. By the time we're finally seated, the overheated restaurant has made us frantic with thirst. We drink up our short gla.s.ses of ice water so quickly that the waitress sets two more down in front of us with a scolding sigh, thinking we are on meth. And of course we are equally hungry for everything on the menu and we agonize over our decisions, staring at the shiny photographs of sunny-side-up eggs and hot chocolate topped with ivory whorls of whipped cream. In the end, I go with a huge-a.s.s stack of pancakes topped with bright, canned strawberries. Bradley gets the blueberry crepes. We drink cup after cup of coffee-we have to! It's so weak once you grow accustomed to espresso.

And then we discover-via our sugared headaches-that a low-protein diet might make us even more mentally ill, so we very politely order a second meal of breakfast meats. The sausage is black and flaking from the grill and the bacon is severely undercooked, soft and curly blond at the edges. And yet still we stuff ourselves, the fried food a change of pace from the usual grief diet of cigarettes and skinny lattes balanced out by the occasional bag of peanut M&M's, the choked-down fast food eaten in the car. And so we eat with a sad pa.s.sion, we are piggish and pale blue beneath the severe fluorescent lights of IHOP. We have milk shakes for dessert and we drink them slow and sweet as poison as we ponder the inherent SAT question of IHOP: Food is to grief as ___ is to happiness.

And then we are out of the IHOP and into the night and the world glimmers and sways with its many Father Bob Dugans and Catherine Bennetts, and we are stunned all over again by the freezing wind.

Bradley zips up his jacket and walks around the Dumpster for a quick hit and I open my glove box and feel my cold, cold gun.

When Bradley finishes weed patrol and hops in the car, wreathed with smoke, a bitter campfire, I ask, "Do you want to just drive around with me for a while?"

"That's exactly what I want to do, Sandinista," Bradley says. Resplendent in his post-weed calm, he closes his eyes.

We rest for moment, and then I start up the Taurus.

The food is heavy in my stomach and I turn on my windshield wipers, trying to break up the little cold stars on my windshield. It's Robert Frost's world, we just live in it. Cruising along the winter streets, I ponder the main events of the week, the details and detritus, the boring baggage of why why why.

As I drive, Bradley honors my silence-he doesn't ask any jacka.s.sy and/or existential questions like: Where are we going? Where have we been? He knows where I will drive, and I'm sure he knows my mind is a wasteland of why and why and why did everyone just act like nothing happened? Why? This is the world Father Bob Dugan and Catherine Bennett invented, and I see them holding hands and waving to the crowd like any politician and his wife who are the leaders of that big country called I Will Never Have to Pay for the Bad s.h.i.t That I Do. I Will Keep Smiling Like a Jacka.s.s and All Will Smile Back at Me. And behind them is their national flag flipping around in the wind, a free-floating open mouth with squiggles and lightning bolts shooting out, a pair of serpentine lips, puckering up to move in for a juicy Judas kiss.

Bradley looks out his window at nothing, at the chain restaurants and the strip malls, and I know he's thinking of Father Bob-Rahhhbert-and his new boy-the name Miles etched on Bradley's brain and hurting his heart; I know he's thinking how the world you know can be yanked out from underneath you and that, my friends, is that.

And there will be nothing left for you, no witness protection program, no kindness or understanding, only bland, blind smiles and people with their teasing I know/I don't know vibe, which of course is distilled, crystalline bulls.h.i.t. Certainly a lot of people knew about the way Catherine Bennett treated Alecia Hardaway, and they never did one thing about it.

Certainly I knew; certainly I never did a thing about it.

Maybe it's because I'm still a little Ma.s.s-dazzled, but it seems like G.o.d is calling me to act, to do something.

I cannot turn back the clock. Just as I'm thinking this my brain floods with the image of my mother changing the clocks for daylight saving time and saying, "Jesus, I'm going to be so tired in the morning."

I am not completely powerless.

And so it seems that my car knows which way to go. The Taurus realizes that it is headed to Catherine Bennett's house. I think how, if we could go back in time, the configuration of the pa.s.sengers would be different. My mother would be me in the driver's seat, and I would be Bradley in the pa.s.senger seat and Bradley would be unknown to me and off on some creepy adventure with Father Bob.

I take the all-too-familiar right-hand turn, and I drive down Ponderosa Lane until I get to Catherine Bennett's house.

Bradley, without asking, knows where we are.

"So this is the teacher's house," he says. He turtles his head across the dark front seat for a better look. The nutcracker is still displayed in her front yard.

"Yes. I thought I'd drop by and see if she wants to go for a cup of hot cocoa with us."

Bradley nods. "I do a lot of drive-bys too."

I think of Bradley driving through the parking lot of Our Lady of Mercedes in his parents' car, of seeing Father Bob's car parked in front of his charming carriage house, a regular car made dazzling by its G.o.dly loneliness. But in the parking lot, way in the back next to the Dumpsters behind the church, there is another car, of course. Or perhaps Miles has a moped or maybe a mountain bike. In any case, Bradley is left with the image of the new boy racing through the parking lot, his breath a cold cloud, his unzipped jacket beating against his back. When Bradley looks up at the church, he doesn't experience the comfort of the saints gazing down at him with their exquisite heartaches and unusual martyrdoms; he only sees the impenetrable, well-insured gray windows.

"I don't think she's home," I say, looking at Catherine Bennett's unlit house. "Okay," he says.

"I'm going to circle around the back, just to check."

And Bradley says, "Oh, okay," with uber-cheerfulness, as if my house-stalking is just the thing to do, a perfectly reasonable and legitimate errand, and so despite all my innate despair, I'm feeling pretty happy to have such a nice friend, pretty happy not to be driving down these icy streets alone.

My mind goes hazy and honeyed for a second, but then there is the voice of Catherine Bennett in my ear: Are you ... Are you ... Are you ...

And forever is the dead feeling of life being so ma.s.sively f.u.c.ked up and everyone going along with all the bulls.h.i.t. Where is our motherf.u.c.king pioneer spirit? What would the saints say, those nutty iconoclasts who gouged out their eyes and jammed swords into their own human hearts?

Navy blue moonlight shines through the trees, and I think of Alecia Hardaway s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up her face, trying so hard to find just the right answer, and a deep, spreading anger blooms in me, a goth-black garden rose with charred and cancerous petals and splashed with pale yellow Pollyanna surprise at the unringing phone. And then there are the thorns of Catherine Bennett's paisley slip, the sight of which was never a victory, only a flag of grotesquerie that forms behind my eyelids like a blood blister, and I take the corner too fast.

There is the dark, stomach-flip thrill of my car fishtailing across the snowy street, the streetlights peering down like brontosaurus heads on their beanpole bodies.

There is the close-up image of my mom dancing around the kitchen in an orange poncho and jeans, and off in the hazy-snow distance there she is again, my mother standing on the street corner, my mother daydreaming and drinking her cappuccino and Oh, Mom, where are you? I love you I love you I do and then there is the half second of slick wild ahhhhh, before Bradley ruins my bliss of black ice by yelling, "Pump the brakes!"

I lean back and brace my arms to the steering wheel-my body seems to know to do this-but I forget to pump the brakes, even with Bradley imploring me to pump the brakes. What I do is slam my foot on the brake, and the car carnival spins, wild and thrilling, before it slides sideways across the street. I lose my grip entirely. My arms give way and my forehead smacks the side window. There is both the chaos of movement and total stillness as pain radiates down my temple. Bradley says, "Jesus!" And it's more a panicked plea than curse, and next comes the slam-danced icy stop before the lurching and crunching.

My glove box pops open, showering the floor with insurance information, cough drops, lipsticks and hair ties, and the box of bullets. My pink gun sails out and lands on the front seat between us. We are at an odd angle; the car has risen up in front like an obese person standing on her heels, struggling for equilibrium.

"Honey," Bradley says. Sometimes my mother called me that, and I think of the honey in a jar my mother bought at the farmers' market, the fat waxy honeycomb planted in the middle. It is my mother's voice I hear when Bradley says it again, her far-off, star-dazzled sweetness.

As he looks over at me from behind his puffy air bag. I feel a thud of pain where my head struck the window and my mouth is warm and salted, filling up fast.

Bradley says, "Hang on."

And here he has his miracle moment.

The Taurus is banged up against a tree, two feet off the ground in the front. I am blinded by the air bag in front of me, but when I look out the side window, the unnatural elevation makes me even queasier. But then there is Superman, ungloved hands on the grille, pushing the car off the tree. With a little rocking, with a snow-filtered "f.u.c.k!" from Bradley, the car bounces and aligns. I am back on solid ground.

Bradley opens my door, his cold, labored breath in my face. "Are you okay? I should have gotten you out of the car before I did that. I'm not thinking straight."

Squashed beneath my deflated air bag, I look up at him and smile. I try to say "Superman," but my tongue goes slushy.

"Oh, G.o.d," Bradley says. He squints down at me, the wind stirring his bangs. "Can you get out of the car?" And so I do, I stagger out, dizzy and stumbling in my c.u.mbersome platforms. My body is ringing and ringing, the feeling of Catherine Bennett kicking my desk, that vibration amped up and shooting through my limbs, radiating my heart and organs, that part of my body known in the obtuse lingo of yoga cla.s.ses as my core, and it's all f.u.c.k you f.u.c.k you f.u.c.k you and Wow, so wearing a seat belt is a practice I should probably look into.

Bradley puts his hands on my shoulders. I blink up at him, at the telephone wires and snowy tree branches, all the refreshing cold after the hot chemical smell of the air bags, the lit-up houses in the distances, sweet as cottages in the Black Forest. It is suddenly very, very important for me to tell him: The world is brutal but beautiful, but I can't get the words out.

"Can you spit?" Bradley turns into a bossy dental hygienist and says sternly: "You need to spit, Sandinista." And so I hang open my mouth and lean over. A fat Rorschach of blood stains the snow around my shoes.

Bradley looks down at me, his face so kind and full of worry that I feel a wintry jolt of happiness, and smile.

"Your teeth look a little b.l.o.o.d.y. Are they okay?"

I run my tongue over my teeth. I wipe my mouth with my hand.

Like a magician, like Cary Grant, Bradley whips a handkerchief from his back pocket and blots my face with it. I think of church-the cloth swiped over the goblet.

"My teeth are fine!" I say triumphantly. I lean over and spit into the snow again. "I think I just bit my tongue or my lip or something." I run my tongue over my teeth again. "My teeth are exactly the same!"

"Okay," Bradley says. "We better get out of here."

He takes me gently by the shoulder and helps me back into the car, where the air bags are already deflating, drooping like ancient b.r.e.a.s.t.s. He walks around to the driver's side, pausing to look at the grill and saying, "s.h.i.t," under his breath.

He pulls open the door and gives me the news: "The front of your car is pretty messed up. But I think it's still drivable." He shuts his car door. "Jesus."

"Yeah," I say, as if blaming the so-called savior or pleading with him like some imperiled Bible-beater. "Jesus Christ."

Bradley runs his hand over his neck and says, "I don't know if we should call your insurance company, or do we need to file an accident report with the police-"

"Let's just go," I say. "Let's just move."

Bradley nods and pulls the spent air bag to the middle of the front seat. It has sprouted from the center of the steering wheel that hangs open like a stunned mouth; there's no honking my horn now.

The gun falls from the front seat to the floor.

"Whoops-a-daisy!" I say, my voice saccharine and strained.

Bradley reaches to the floorboards with a wince, giving up a little ugh of pain as he grabs the gun. It gleams in his hand, pink and white as Easter. He chuckles under his breath, before he says, slowly and instructionally, "Of course, we should probably get rid of the gun if we are considering calling the police to report the accident."

"Probably," I agree.

"Where did you get it?" he asks, frowning at the candied handle.

"It's a bit of a long story, but I got it at Second Chance?"

"Arne sold you a gun?" Bradley snorts. "Jesus, that guy's a stone-cold freak."

"No. I mean, he didn't sell it to me. He gave it to me. It was a gift. A donation. And he's not a freak, either."

"Guess what?" Bradley says quietly. "That's even weirder: that he gave you a gun. Do you have a license for it?"

"Well, you know, not as yet. To tell you the truth, Bradley, I didn't know that you needed a license for a gun." I try to downplay the weirdness of this postcrash talk with humor. "Now that I think about it, that policy strikes me as highly un-American."

"Well, aren't you quite the patriot." He reaches down and takes the box of bullets off the car floor. "These flew out and hit my knee like a boulder."

"Sorry," I mutter.

He looks at the box. "You know, these are not bullets for a handgun. This is deer-hunting ammo. These bullets wouldn't fit in your gun." He chuckles. "G.o.d bless Arne. He probably wanted you to have the gun so you would feel safe, but not actually be able to harm anyone. Yourself included. You never tried to put the bullets in?"

"Well, no," I say, a little testy, ever the duped and dumb girl. "For safety reasons I didn't want to load it before I needed to use it."