Today I was walking through our apartment’s parking lot towards the street when a moped whizzed past.
On it perched a priest, grinning even in today’s toasty 88 degrees. His mostly bald head shone in the sun. He squinted through his glasses and clutched the handlebars tightly. The black shirt and white collar he wore were nothing out of the ordinary, but shiny plastic flapped wildly on both sides of him because he held a dry cleaning bag on his lap.
He was there. He was gone.
But if he were one of my characters he’d have a gentle, steady, enduring name, like Graham or Elliot. And he’d be going to a luncheon on Marybelle Winslow’s estate. Marybelle’s late husband Charles was a wealthy parishioner who’d left his 82-year-old widow wealthy. Rumors spread that she’d be announcing something important about his money today.
Father had been preparing a small speech for days. This morning the speech papers fell into his kitchen sink full of water and the ink ran, leaving him with three pages of indiscernible words. Trying to recreate it for two hours cost him breakfast. Hungry, he sighed at the knock on the door. A parishioner wanted his advice about her son.
He knocked a glass to the floor in his hurry to usher her out when she finally stood to leave, and broke a window pane with the broom handle while sweeping the glass. Spending half an hour trying to remove a stain from his formal collar was unsuccessful and he relented to his dingy everyday off-white. Last and worst, his 1988 station wagon spluttered and wouldn’t start.
The phone rang as he was pulling the door closed, stressed and already twenty minutes late. He paused, frowned, and reluctantly answered.
“Hello, Graham? Yes, this is Marybelle. Would you be a dear and pick up my dry-cleaning? Nancy’s taking the day off and I’m just desolate without her and I need it for a special event this evening and I don’t think I’ll be able to make it before then. You will? Thank you. So sweet of you.”
Dry cleaning in tow, he appeared at Marybelle’s flustered, sweaty, and trying not to wrinkle any clothes—only to find himself at to her grandson’s surprise birthday party, arriving with the clown.
* * *