The Van Pact

33: Stevie

"You didn't know Valerie had cancer?" my mom took a sip of her coffee. "I could have told you that."

"Well you didn't tell me, so I never knew," I watched a blue-haired waitress struggle to balance a tray full of pancakes and maple syrup on her shoulder. She stumbled past our booth to the table behind us. My mom never picks the Perkins for dinner when she comes down from Connecticut, but it's my favorite. She always complains that the service is too slow. My stomach rumbled and I thought she might be right for once.

"Her mother told me around the time Grandma O'Shaughnessy came to live with us," my mom set down her coffee cup. I cringed as it clattered against its saucer. "You went through your grandma's entire illness and Valerie never brought up her own cancer once?"

"I said I never knew." When I think about it, it does seem strange that Valerie wouldn't have mentioned it back then. I talked a lot about Grandma O'Shaughnessy. I still do, from time to time. About her soft black hair that she only got to keep through one round of chemo. She wouldn't let me see her without her hat after that. About how she remembered Ireland. The dampness there was inescapable, worse than any Pennsylvanian April. One day she left her bedroom window open too long and when she returned she found the pages of her favorite Madeline book curled up at the edges, ruined by the wet air. How warm her mother's socks were on her feet, and how you couldn't find that quality of wool anywhere anymore, not least in shiny, clean America. About the way that she talked, the morbid fear of saying the Lord's name in vain, and how some of that seeped into my speech. Janey Mac, and Gosh, and Darn. I took a sip of my lemonade and missed the lilt of my grandmother's voice.

"She probably didn't want to give you false hope," my mom hypothesized. "Your grandma was terminal from diagnosis."

The sharpness of that sentence made me wince.

"That would require too much foresight," I said. "Valerie's all about hope, false or otherwise."

"People will surprise you," my mom ran her fingers around the rim of her cup. "Like your father, getting an annulment after all these years. What's the point?"

"He wants to date again." I took another sip of my lemonade.

"Then date," my mom picked up the straw wrapper I had discarded on the tabletop, "it's not like there's a gun to his head, you must follow the law of the Church to the letter," she chuckled. "If I did that, I'd want to kill myself too."

"Dad doesn't want to kill himself," I mumbled. "The Church tells you not to kill yourself."

I thought about how Grandma O'Shaughnessy prayed. I saw her purple rosary beads, spun between the swollen joints of each finger. Even before she got sick, and we lived up in Boston, I remember hearing her knees popping as she knelt beside her bed. She used to tell me the lore of family I never got to meet; a sister in a nunnery, with enough education to have multiple PhDs and a keen appreciation for comparative religion, who devoted herself to Christ after a pair of rubber soled shoes saved her from a lightning strike. An uncle who ended up working in the ports in London, who'd be pelted with apple cores and empty sardine tins by his Anglican coworkers in the canteen every time he'd bow his head to pray. It had seemed to me, then, that the stories of those long dead ancestors were strung together as if bead by rosary bead. And that each prayer I said was a way to keep their hearts beating- with each offering and intention, I'd seek for them that eternal life you read about in John 3:16. That's what kept me on my knees after Grandma O'Shaughnessy died and I thought my faith would have come tumbling down. My father is his mother's son. The Church has some meaning to him, even if all logic in his life - every screw up, every failure, every tragedy- tells him otherwise. Maybe, I thought, that was something I could understand now too.