My Secret History Read Free Page B

turned a corner. There was a mop stuck in a bucket in the middle of the corridor.
    “Someone left that there for me to trip over,” Father Furty said and halted and swayed sideways.
    I moved the mop and the bucket, and Father Furty continued. When he came to the last room on the right he caught hold of the doorway and hung on to it and panted, as if he had reached the end of a long struggle and was too exhausted to feel victorious.
    Just then the doorbell rang.
    “Let Betty get it. That’s Mrs. Flaherty. The housekeeper. Oh, bless us and save us.” He was still panting.
    The bell rang again, the same two tones, stupid and insistent. I left Father Furty hanging on the door to his room and went to answer it.
    A big distorted silhouette, head and shoulders, showed in the frosted glass of the front door. It was the Pastor. He scowled at me horribly when I opened the door, then he unstuck his lips and lowered his head and leaned towards me.
    “What are you doing here?”
    His sharp question made me uneasy and defensive; I felt instantly guilty, and uncertain of the truth. I did not know why I was here.
    “Mopping the floor,” I said, because I could prove it, and I was not sure I could prove anything else. “Alone?”
    “I guess so.”
    “You guess so.”
    He always repeated what you said when he wanted to be sarcastic, and it never failed: every time he repeated something I had said it sounded stupid, and it gave me another reason for thinking I was dumb and that nothing good would ever happen to me in my life.
    He repeated it again, making it stupider. I tried not to blink. Then I remembered my Mossberg in the sacristy, and I felt much worse and almost confessed to it.
    “I’m looking for Father Furty,” the Pastor said. “Have you seen him?”
    The last time I had seen Father Furty he had been hanging on the door to his small room and panting, “Oh, bless us and save us.” He wasn’t well, he needed protection; I knew the Pastor to be very fierce.
    But instead of saying no, I shook my head from side to side. I held to the innocent belief that it was less of a lie if you did not actually say the word.
    I hesitated, waiting for the thunderbolt to strike me down in a heap at the Pastor’s feet—and he would howl, “Liar!”
    “Don’t just stand there,” he said. “The floor will never get mopped that way.”
    I looked at the scarred rubber tiles.
    “Mop it for the glory of God,” he said. “Dedicate that floor to Christ.”
    When he said that, the floor looked slightly different, less filthy, and it even felt different—more solid under my feet.
    The Pastor did not say anything more. He turned and left, and I realized as he went down the path that I was terrified: the thunderbolt had just missed me.
    “Who was it?” Father Furty said, not sounding very interested. He was sitting heavily in his chair beside the bed, his arms on the arms of the chair, and his hands hanging.
    “The Pastor.”
    His hands closed and he sat up. “Where is he?”
    “He went away. I told him you weren’t here.”
    He settled into the chair again and smiled.
    “That was a close one,” he said. “But why did you fib?”
    “I thought you wanted me to,” I said, though I was very glad he had used the word “fib” and not “lie.”
    “I thought you were sick.”
    “It’s not fatal,” he said. “What’s your name, son?”
    “Andrew Parent.”
    “Shut the door when you leave, Andy,” he said. “God be with you.”
    Then he made a little sound, like a hiccup or a sob. I left him in the hot shadows of his small room.
    Tina was walking away from the bus stop as I crossed the Fells-way and when I yelled at her to come back people turned around.
    “Kid’s got a gun,” someone in front of the drugstore said.
    Tina said, “Hey, I’ve been waiting for over an hour.”
    She wore a blue jersey and white shorts and sneakers and had two pony tails, one sticking out on each side of her head. Her lipstick was pink, the