Faith by Jennifer Haigh Page A

innocence like a tourniquet. Without knowing quite how I knew it, I understood what might be said, and what must be kept quiet. If from the outside the rules appeared arbitrary, from the inside they were perfectly clear.
    Art’s news was unspeakable, by him or by anyone. I didn’t take this personally. If I felt excluded, injured and aggrieved, that bolus of emotion was at least familiar. It attends all my dealings with my family, and theirs with me. Every one of us limps from old wounds. In a perverse way, they entertain us. We poke each other’s tender places with a stick.
    T HAT EASTER Sunday Mike woke before dawn, an old Navy habit. In the basement he warmed up on the treadmill, then stretched out on the bench. I have witnessed this spectacle more than once, Mike grunting and huffing beneath a bar loaded with plates, his fair skin turning a rainbow of colors, pink to red to nearly purple. It seems a punishing way to spend one’s first conscious minutes, and yet afterward he is weirdly invigorated. He bangs around the kitchen whistling and ravenous, scrambling egg whites, blending protein shakes, oblivious to any poor houseguest feigning sleep on the sofa bed below. He wolfs down his massive breakfast, and without even a cup of coffee he is ready to attack the day.
    On Easter morning he showered, made French toast for the boys, helped Abby dress them for early Mass. Mike himself stayed behind to hide the Easter eggs in the yard. This was a tradition from Abby’s childhood, not ours; but Mike had embraced it. Each year he looked forward to standing on the back porch with Ma and Dad, watching the boys race around the yard like excited puppies, the colored eggs magically appearing from behind rocks and flower pots, the dark corners of Abby’s gazebo. “It seems like a lot of bother,” Ma would say, though Mike understood that her disapproval was more general. The egg hunt, like all his wife’s faults and failings, was a foreign custom, something Protestants did.
    He was hiding the last egg when the telephone rang.
    â€œMichael, I don’t feel well. I’m not myself this morning,” Ma said, her voice indeed sounding sick and strange.
    So for the first time since Ryan was born, Mike’s boys celebrated Easter without their grandparents. Colored eggs were found and collected, a ham eaten, chocolate bunnies gored with small teeth marks and eventually gnawed down to nubs. Through it all my brother felt a creeping unease. Ma was then sixty-eight—not yet old, but neither could she be called young. His whole life she’d been immune to sickness, too mean even to catch a cold (“What germ would bother with her ?” Clare Boyle used to say). Then, two years ago, she’d found a lump in her breast. Not cancer, thank God, but it had changed the way Mike looked at her. Suddenly she was no longer bulletproof, the indomitable Mary McGann.
    In the afternoon he drove to our parents’ house, to pick up the Easter baskets Ma had assembled for the boys. He enjoyed the ride, the roads empty of traffic. He didn’t spend much time in Grantham anymore. Except for the occasional afternoon at the beach, Abby refused to visit. The house was small and cramped; the boys got restless there with nothing to do. “There are five of us and only two of them,” she was fond of saying. “If they want to see the boys, they can come to us.”
    The neighborhood was bustling that day, families gathered for the holiday, Teare Street lined with cars. At the end of the block the Morrisons’ windows blazed with light. Their front porch had become a staging area for strollers, grandchildren’s bikes, an Igloo cooler, an extra case of beer. Mike drove slowly past the house, thinking he might recognize someone. Sure enough, Tim Morrison was getting out of his battered Ford truck, a magnetic sign on the driver’s side door— MORRISON ELECTRIC Serving the South Shore.