He’d been to confession again, after so many years; he cried when he told me about it. He hadn’t been since before he eloped to Reno with a Presbyterian. “He thinks if a priest touches him it’d go ssssss,” his brother (the funny, charming drunk brother) told me once at breakfast in the diner with all the old men. As a boy he’d wanted to be a priest or a bartender when he grew up. Loss, though — sickness, so thin now he lost his wedding ring when it fell from his finger, and that favorite brother’s death — both scared and shielded him enough to face a priest, to carry his heavy old church into a newer, reduced one.

The good bathtub adjoined his bedroom; when I went in to wash the kid I saw the pamphlets the priest had given him arranged on his dresser.

Christmas and Easter, he stayed home when we went to church. Now I do that.