Requiem for a Realtor Read Free

then.”
    Something clicked in Marie’s mind. “Fifteen years ago. It was the last funeral Father Pacific ever conducted. A double.”
    â€œPacific?”
    â€œI know. And his family name was Hug.”
    â€œHow do you remember all these things?”
    â€œSome things are hard to forget.”
    â€œWhy did you say their son would have inherited a lot of money?”
    â€œMr. Cadbury could tell you about that. He was a trustee of the bank where Collins worked.”
    â€œAnd he confided in you?”
    â€œOf course not!” Why did he always have to spoil things, and just when they were having the kind of consultation Marie thought should be more frequent?
    â€œThen how do you know?”
    â€œIt must have been in the paper.”
    He tipped his head in disbelief.
    â€œFather, some things you just know and you don’t know where you got them.”
    He accepted that. Good thing. She would never admit what she had just remembered. She had wheedled it out of Maud, Mr. Cadbury’s jill of all trades at his law office. Since those days, Maud had become a bitter enemy who resented her employer’s paeans of praise for Marie’s culinary magic.

4
    David Jameson’s latest visit had been a trial. All the while they talked, Father Dowling was remembering Stanley Collins’s accusation, and it was difficult not to try to imagine Jameson in the role of illicit lover. Whether or not the lady was married, ‘going all the way’ with her was hardly the behavior one expected of someone asking how he might begin training for ordination as a permanent deacon. Permanent deacons were not celibate, but they were bound by the sixth and ninth commandments like everybody else.
    â€œIn high school I thought of the priesthood.”
    â€œThat’s not unusual.”
    â€œI don’t mean daydreams. I wrote to any number of religious orders. I still have the materials they sent. Oh, I suppose there was fantasizing involved. I would moon over their brochures, study the schedule of their seminarians, imagine myself in the role.”
    â€œIt never went beyond that?”
    â€œI familiarized myself with the curriculum of the major seminary later. I bought the textbooks for philosophy and theology and read them all. Canon law, too.”
    â€œWhy didn’t you enter the seminary?”
    â€œI was destined for dental school from birth.”
    â€œBefore your baby teeth?”
    No point in jesting with David Jameson. His mind was literal and without humor. Another impediment to imagining him as illicit lover. “I was meant to fulfill my father’s dream.”
    â€œHe wanted to be a dentist?”
    â€œIn the worst way. But he was a barber and that was that. When fluoride seemed to eradicate cavities, he wavered, but then he read an article about the boom in orthodontics.”
    â€œStraightening teeth?”
    â€œImproving your smile, is the way we put it.”
    â€œSo you’re an orthodontist?”
    â€œAt first. I’ve moved into dental surgery. We used to send people to specialists for root canals. Now we can do them ourselves. That’s my speciality.”
    â€œRoot canals?”
    â€œYou know what they are?”
    â€œSufficiently.”
    â€œIt is quite lucrative. The market economy reigns in dentistry. Up to a point. Many of my patients are on dental plans, and limits are set.”
    â€œAh.”
    â€œEven so.” Jameson’s eyes drifted away. “It is not a fulfilling life, Father.”
    â€œNot many cavities?”
    Careful, careful. But Jameson was pursuing his own thoughts.
    â€œWhen I come here to talk to you I get a sense of what my life might have been. I have a recurrent bad dream that when I die I’ll come before St. Peter and learn that I really did have a religious vocation. And I wasted my life doing root canals.”
    â€œGod is merciful.”
    He knew that Marie Murkin regarded Jameson as