Once We Had a Country by Robert McGill

gotten off the phone with her father, who had called with the news that in the spring he was going to leave his job and join a mission in Laos. When Maggie had asked what Gran thought of the idea, he’d replied that she was delighted. Maggie shouldn’t have been surprised. Gran had been waiting twenty-three years for her widowed son to do something with his life.
    “It will save money for me to live over there,” Maggie’s father had told her. Then he’d admitted what she already knew from Gran: bad gambles on the stock market had put him on the edge of bankruptcy.
    “So you’re going over there to save money?” Maggie had asked him.
    “No,” he’d replied. “To save lives.”
    At the bar, she only half listened as the others talked. For the most part the conversation was about politics, Brid arguing with Fletcher while leaning against Wale and reaching beneath the table every few minutes to clasp his knee. It was as if Brid’s body had split completely from her brain, and each was given over to a different man. As for Wale, each time Maggie glanced toward him, he wasstaring at her, smiling like they were sharing a private joke, and each time she looked away.
    When Brid went off to the bathroom, Wale asked Maggie about teaching. It was the last thing she wanted to discuss, and Fletcher must have sensed it because he came to her rescue, jumping in to ask Wale in turn whether he’d found a job yet. Wale shrugged, then asked Maggie where she was from. Maggie tapped Fletcher on the leg to signal that it was all right and started talking about Syracuse.
    Eventually, because there wasn’t really a way to avoid it, she came around to her father. It was easy enough to speak about the man she remembered from her childhood. Gliding through the story of her adolescence, though, she found herself running headlong toward describing his return to the Church. Instead of breaking off, she crashed right into it.
    “In college, I lost my faith,” she said. A funny expression, she thought, as if her faith were something she’d misplaced somewhere, when the experience was more like a wave rolling over a sandcastle. “I took a course in World Religions, and that was enough, just learning about all those creeds with their different gods. Suddenly it seemed arrogant to believe in one true Church.” She saw Fletcher nodding and realized it was her first time talking about this with him. “I didn’t tell my dad, though. He wasn’t a churchgoer, but I thought he’d take it hard. When I’d gone away to college—”
    She broke off, not wanting to tell Wale that her father had seemed lonely, that to make him feel better she’d often said how homesick and out of place she felt in Boston,even though in fact she’d liked her classes, liked the city, was happy knowing she could go out whenever she wanted without letting anyone down.
    “Then last year, while I was at teachers’ college,” she went on, “he called me to say he’d started going to Mass. At first I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. I felt so bad, I finally told him about the World Religions class.”
    “How did he take it?” asked Fletcher.
    Maggie shook her head, still dismayed. “He wanted to have a theological debate. This guy who hadn’t gone to Mass since he was a boy, suddenly he was trying to argue me back into believing. He went on about Vatican II and all the reforms, the liturgies in English, the Masses at people’s houses. He even felt obliged to tell me they have Eucharists of milk and cookies now, because milk and cookies are more relevant.”
    By the time Brid returned to the table, Maggie was explaining about her father’s plans for Laos. Fletcher squeezed her hand in sympathy, while Brid said missionaries were just another kind of soldier. Wale wanted to know if Maggie was familiar with Laos, and she admitted she’d never even seen it on a map. He said it was a squiggly turd of territory between Vietnam and Thailand with its own