Any Bitter Thing by Monica Wood Read Free Book Online

had a rosary in his hand; from my pocket I took my own rosary, which he himself had blessed on the occasion of my First Holy Communion. I laid my hand on his shoulder and let it warm there. We weren’t halfway through the second decade when my uncle began to weep. I clung to him, afraid he might fall. He got up, crushed me to his beating chest, and for a moment I thought we were about to dance, the way we did sometimes at parish weddings, my legs dangling free. But no, he simply squeezed the breath from me and put me down.
    Early the next morning, before leaving for Portland, he gave me a real guardian angel, one he’d been saving for Christmas: a winged doll in sequined robes, sixteen inches high. It would be up to her to keep nightmares away, and in her glittering glory she appeared to be up to the task. After breakfast, Father Jack arrived, inexplicably, accompanied by a priest I knew just a little, and a pink-cheeked, nunlike woman who asked me a series of bewildering questions. The woman stayed with me that night, and when Father Mike finally returned, a day later, he was in the company of a monsignor whom I didn’t know at all. I have to go away, Lizzy. For a little while. His coursing tears silenced me. Within minutes, it seemed, he was gone.
    The angel reposed on my dresser for the brief remainder of my time at St. Bart’s, a dark-haired doll with a porcelain face and large, dolorous eyes and wings fashioned out of real feathers. Her lips parted faintly, as if she’d been created in the midst of confiding a secret. I thought he must have retrieved her from heaven itself. Whenever I woke in those last blunted days, there she would be, this benevolent specter to whom I whispered each night before falling into feverish sleep. I could scarcely breathe under the weight of ending. Father Mike gone, the house so quiet you could hear the padding of cats, the light snoring of a kindly woman sent to supervise my last days there.
    Your uncle went to a nice place called a retreat center. They’re going to help him there.
    Help him what?
    You’ll see. Everything will be fine , she said to me, and it was the sad-eyed angel whom I beseeched, night to night, When? A week later, when I finally left there myself—that awful, high-cold day—my angel got left behind, and no amount of pleading could persuade Aunt Celie, herself reeling from the concussion of change, to drive back to Maine to reclaim her.
    I believed I would never see her again, my shining, gold-threaded angel, but twenty-one years later, in my fog of recovery, she returned to me—her dark hair, her voluminous gown, her snowy feathers. She seemed to hover, warming the air, then stepped aside in a hush of wings to let him speak.

The Little Hours

    TERCE

SEVEN
From The Liturgy of the Hours:
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; He has sent me to bring glad tidings to the lowly, to heal the brokenhearted . . .
    His life is a pleasure for which he thanks God seven times daily, guided by his Breviary, a set of four prayer books bound in soft leather, one for each liturgical season. The Breviary contains the complete Liturgy of the Hours, a flawless scheme of psalms and canticles, inspirational readings, intercessions, scripture, hymns. Sometimes he sings aloud, sometimes he hums, often he whispers. Since his ordination he has woken each day to murmur the Invitatory: Lord, open my lips. Before breakfast comes Lauds, then The Little Hours: Terce at midmorning, Sext at noon, None at midafternoon. Vespers is said as evening falls, Compline in the dreaming moments before sleep. Sometimes he adds Matins, a prayer for the middle of the night, which has become obsolete for all but the occasional insomniac. Like any careful design, thisone offers more than one application: balm for the wounded, calm for the fearful, solace for the griefstricken, celebration for the blessed, inspiration for the ambitious. For him, in these radiant days of a