Chapter 8

He released her at once. He had sense enough not to touch a student. What would Dario think?

Dario seemed not to have noticed. He was rolling up the architect’s plans, aligning the layers with care.

Emmy ran through the rooms on tiptoe, her path defined by breathless giggles. Hance found her at the kitchen table reading aloud from a picture book of children’s Gospel stories. A little girl was on her lap; the boy she had chased clung to her arm.

Though the children’s faces had the shine of a recent scrubbing, Hance sensed little else clean about them. They had to have come from the settlement in the woods.

Seeing him, Emmy stopped reading long enough to pour him a cup of coffee from a white ceramic carafe on the table nearby. There was something about the way she held it out to him that forbade him from refusing. The scent suggested more than coffee; the taste, dark chocolate sprinkled with shavings from roasted coffee beans. It was delicious. Pleasantly hot, too. He leaned against the counter, sipping the beverage, listening to Emmy reading the miracle of the loaves and fishes. She had no likeness to herself as a singer. This girl believed the content she sent into the world. She had the ability to make others believe it, too. Why would she be so conscious of herself while singing, yet so willing to give of herself through a book?

At the end of the story, Emmy took the children by the hand and walked them back to their mothers in the woods. Hance went with her, lest she not return and he lost her again. “The nuns were worried about you,” he said as they stepped among the tents and campfires. That’s a lie. I myself was worried about you. “You didn’t call or leave any kind of message that you wouldn’t be in for your lesson, either.”

“Sometimes it’s easier that way. I don’t like to argue with people. If I called, somebody would have tried to talk me into taking the lesson.”

“That’s not arguing, that’s making you see the reality of the situation. The lessons are paid for at the beginning of the semester. Why waste that money by not showing up?”

“Why are you angry with me?”

“I’m not angry with you.”

“You sound angry.”

“I assure you, I’m not.”

Another lie.

“You shouldn’t be. I wasn’t skipping out, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I was thinking no such thing.”

“Then what do you think I was doing?”

“I have no idea. I’ve been looking for you because––”

“You were worried about me. You, not the nuns.”

She knows. How? Is it so noticeable? Hance would not refute her claim. “Where have you been?”

“I’ve been working.”

Ripped jeans and that faded violet jacket were hardly the stuff of office attire. Hance wanted to blurt, In that condition? He settled for a polite “Where?”

“Here.”

Had Dario not told him the truth about the shelter? Was some funding already in place? “How much is Father Dario paying you?” Surely, not enough to live on.

“Oh, it’s not that kind of work. It’s the kind of work that Jesus did. Our Father’s work. ”

Nobody, clergy or lay, had ever spoken to Hance about doing “Our Father’s work.” They all had degrees of devotion and belief, but those degrees were modest; their expression, subdued. Emmy was speaking like a mystic. If she was indeed on that level, she might know more of him than he preferred to reveal.

But if she were not on that level, why would she let him take her arm and greet him with a glance that signaled she had been waiting for him? Hance felt his flesh shrink. There was one way to find out.

“Would you have time to take that lesson now?”

He hoped she would say no.

She said yes.