from his pants pocket. The tips of his index and middle fingers were stained yellow and he reeked of stale tobacco.
“Monsieur Yates,” he said, glancing up from the paper.
“Yes,” Edward Everett said.
“You have indicated Roman Catholic. Do you wish to receive the Eucharist?”
It had been since early February that he had set foot into a church, still playing the dutiful son when he visited his mother before the season started, but he said yes. The priest nodded and unzipped the case and took out a wrinkled white stole, kissed the cross embroidered near one end of it and draped it around his neck.
“You are in a state of grace?” the priest asked. From down the hall, a child let out a gleeful laugh, and a woman shushed him. Edward Everett thought of telling the truth, that he wasn’t in a state of grace, but then he might leave and Edward Everett didn’t want to be alone. The priest nodded at his assent, snapped open a small pewter case, extracted a thin host and held it in his hand a moment, inviting Edward Everett to recite the Our Father with him, before extending the host for him to take onto his tongue. The priest groaned slightly from the exertion as he leaned closer to Edward Everett to give him Communion. As he took it on his tongue, he tasted nicotine from the priest’s fingers and considered for a moment the sin he might be committing, but thought, You’re not a boy any longer.
While the priest sat beside him with his head bowed in a moment of reflection, a nurse came to the door and said, in a grave tone, that she had to close it for a moment, and did. He wondered why she’d had to do that. As if the priest could read his thoughts, the old man said, in a disturbingly matter-of-fact tone, as if he were commenting on the weather, “Someone died. They close the doors because they don’t want the patients to see them removing the departed.” Indeed, in the hall, beyond his closed door, a gurney rattled past, a wheel squeaking. The priest began murmuring something in French in a low voice: a prayer, Edward Everett realized, the Hail Mary, perhaps. When he finished, he looked up at Edward Everett and coughed slightly.
“They will open it when they are finished,” he said. “How did you …” He nodded toward Edward Everett’s leg that was in a cast.
“Playing baseball,” Edward Everett said.
“Ah.” The priest nodded. “For your college?”
“No, for the Cardinals.”
“The Cardinals?” the priest said, cocking his head in a quizzical manner.
“The St. Louis Cardinals.”
The priest chuckled. “Naturally, I was thinking the College of Cardinals.”
Naturally, Edward Everett thought.
“I imagined you performing on a field of play before the Princes of the Church, entertaining them with your athletic skill.”
The picture came to Edward Everett out of the man’s assumption and his stiff manner of speaking: himself doing leaps and somersaults in the middle of a wide meadow while a cluster of older men in crimson vestments sat in bleachers, applauding politely.
Then they were in an uncomfortable silence for a while longer, until Edward Everett blurted out, “I lied before.” He hadn’t meant to say it and was surprised as the words welled up in his throat on their own, as if the priest were some sort of magician, finding coins behind Edward Everett’s ears and producing Ping-Pong balls from his mouth, coins and balls and admissions he hadn’t known were there.
The old priest closed his eyes and nodded. “Would you like to make a confession?”
Edward Everett considered the question. It had been how long since his last confession? Since before he had gone off to play ball. The previous December, when he’d gone home for Christmas, his mother asked him about receiving the Sacrament of Penance, and Edward Everett had left the house on a Saturday afternoon, telling her he was going, and drove off toward the church, but instead went to Memorial Park, where he parked overlooking a frozen lake where a teenage girl was teaching a half-dozen small children how to iceskate. He sat in his car, watching the children stutter-step and fall on the ice, drinking coffee he’d bought at a gas station, as snow swirled like dust across the frozen water. After an hour, he went home. Was there a statute of limitations on forgiveness, a point at which he had accumulated too many sins and it had been too long since his last