Stories

The house, so full with the heavy breath of prayer and the shifting feet of the waiting, settles another inch and the long vigil is suddenly over. Ona’s mother is dead. One after another, the women untangle their hands from their rosary beads and feel relief in knowing that now there will be more productive things to do than pray.

Our Lady of the Angels Grammar School was a brick building without artifice—not a tree or a shrub broke the solid flank it presented to Felton Street. I was walking back to Angels with my two best friends Joyce Wiowski and Rosemarie DeLullo. The school had no cafeteria, so most kids went home for lunch. The walks back and forth were the best part of the day anyway.

His new wife is nothing like his old wife. His old wife, Doris, had an affair with his Rabbi, more for her amusement than anything else. This was a man whose teeth were dark and uneven, a man whose suits and fingers smelled of cigarette smoke. When Doris took her husband’s goodwill and religion with a single pelvic thrust, she was a blonde with great calves and decent enough looks if you could ignore her oily skin and psoriasis.