I get ordained in June

The horarium doesn't change. Morning prayer at six thirty. Mass at seven. Breakfast till eight fifteen, then class till noon. Midday prayer, then lunch at twelve thirty. Holy hour at four thirty. Dinner at six. The building's quiet by nine. Ten in the summer, except there's nobody here in the summer.

We eat at assigned tables, eight men to a table, and they redo the assignments every January so you don't spend a whole year with the same seven guys. I'm at the table by the radiator now. I had the one by the window the two years before that.

I have a beard. Nothing in the handbook forbids it and the rector's brought it up twice and both times not straight out. Twice that I noticed.

My mother's at her parish outside Scranton four days a week. Mondays she counts the collection in the school office with two other women, Wednesdays she does the bulletin, and the rest of it is linens or flowers depending what's coming up, or both, some weeks. She's told everybody. She told the girl at the pharmacy.

She ordered the cards in January. Two hundred and fifty, Saint John Vianney on the front, my name and the date on the back under a prayer she picked out herself. She sent me a picture of the box on the dining room table. She's handed out forty already and we're eleven weeks off. She never asked me which prayer I wanted.

My dad died when I was nineteen. My brother calls the whole thing the Jesus thing. He got me a plastic collar from a Halloween store two Christmases ago and my mother laughed and then didn't. He sells paint at a Sherwin-Williams and he'll be selling paint at a Sherwin-Williams when he's fifty. He's been waiting six years for me to quit, and he's relaxed about it, he's got no stake in it either way.

Pastoral year is third year. They put you in a parish from August to May and you live in the rectory and do whatever needs doing, and it doesn't have to be your own diocese, they send you where there's a man willing to have you. Mine was out west of here, town of four thousand, an hour and twenty on 33 if the trucks are moving.

Father Nagel's the pastor. He's forty-one, which is young to have two parishes, or it isn't anymore, they're short everywhere. He does the books himself on a laptop at the kitchen table because the office computer's slow, and he knows what everybody's furnace is doing.

He made me preach the third week I was there, which nobody does that early. Afterwards he said the middle of it was fine and the first two minutes were me apologizing for being in the pulpit, and that I should cut them. I cut them.

My job on Tuesdays was communion to the shut-ins. Nine houses. Dorothy Ruhe was always last because she'd keep me an hour. Ninety-one and on oxygen, with the Price Is Right going and the sound all the way down, and I'd sit there running Greek principal parts in my head, the liquid verbs, which you can do and still nod in the right places. She called me Father from the second week. I corrected her the first four times and then stopped.

She died the eighth of February. Funeral was the eleventh at ten. I drove out the night before with the seat as far back as my dad's seat goes, which isn't far enough, and slept in the same room I'd had that whole year, and my Greek chart was still taped inside the closet door.

Lunch in the hall after. The Rosary Altar Society does ham and scalloped potatoes and the green beans out of the institutional cans. There's a sheet cake. About ninety people, and it thins out fast once the cake's gone. Canon 1041 is the irregularities and 1042 is the simple impediments and I know both lists the way you know a phone number, and I stood there with a paper plate going down 1041 in my head while a woman told me her son does the lawns at the cemetery. He does the one out in Kenton too, she said.

The hall fridge was full so we carried the leftover ham across to the rectory in foil pans, two trips, him and me, across the lot in the cold without coats because it's forty feet. The light over the kitchen sink has a bad ballast and it ticks.

He kissed me by the sink. We ended up on the floor in the back hall and it wasn't long. I went back out for the second pan and the foil had come off one corner of it.

He said the road was bad past Kenton. I said I'd take it slow. I got back in an hour and five and made night prayer, and then I did two hundred lines because Tuesday's two hundred. I was behind from the week before anyway.

I've seen him twice. There was a study day in Columbus in March and he came in with three other men from out that way and we stood in the hallway by the coffee and talked about a furnace quote for twenty minutes. He handed me a cup. He asked how the Greek was going.

Then in April there was a funeral for a priest out of Lima, fifty of us in a sacristy built for six, maybe sixty. I went past him on my way to the door and said Father. He said my name. Then somebody needed by where I was standing.

I see my spiritual director Thursdays, one o'clock to one forty-five. Father Ruvolo. Third floor, window that doesn't open, box of Kleenex on the low table between the two chairs that I have never once seen anybody touch. He asks how my prayer is. I say dry. You can say dry in there and nobody follows it up. Nine Thursdays since February and I've spent every one of them on my mother.

A woman named Rosemary makes the albs out of her house in Norwood. She came in March with a tape measure and a step stool. Sleeve, thirty-eight. She said I was the tallest she'd done since 1998 and wrote it on the outside of the envelope.

He texted me once, the Sunday after. Made it back ok? I said yes. That's the whole thread. I still have it, it's nine words.

There's a retreat the first week of June, five days, no talking. Then the rehearsal Friday afternoon and the thing itself Saturday morning with the whole diocese sat in there. My mother's got a van coming down from Wilkes-Barre with my aunts in it and she's put money on the fire hall for after, which she told me about twice in one phone call because she was pleased with the price.

The diocese emailed about the program. They want to know whether my name goes on it with the middle initial or without. I started the reply Tuesday and it's still open in the drafts with the one word in it and nothing else. They need it back by Friday.