They moved him to Panorama City

The room's off the sacristy, on the parking lot side. Gray linoleum with the white flecks in it, and a metal desk nobody sits at. There's boxes of palms in there from a couple Palm Sundays back. The window looks out at the lot, and the light on the pole out there goes off at ten. Not ten fifteen. Ten.

I was in that room in March because the corner of the ceiling had come down where the cooler had been dripping into it for two years, probably longer. My mom volunteered me. She's cleaned that office eleven years, Tuesdays and Fridays, so when she tells them her son does drywall they say okay, and then it's a Saturday and it's me in there with my own screws.

Father came in while I was scoring the patch. Thirty six or around there. He had a Rams shirt on and I told him I thought you guys were supposed to pick the winning side. He laughed at that longer than it was worth. He asked how long the mud had to sit and I told him overnight for the first coat, longer if the room's cold. He said he'd leave the side door unlocked so I could come back Sunday after the ten o'clock. He held the piece up against the joists on the last cut so I could get my screws in.

That was March.

I'm on a crew out of Sun Valley. Mostly hanging, and I'll finish if they're short a guy. We start at six, so I'm out of my place at twenty to, and I go Glenoaks, because Van Nuys has that light at Arleta that'll sit you there two minutes for nothing. If the job's up in Santa Clarita I'm leaving at five. Five eighths on a ceiling is a hundred and some pounds of sheet and you're pushing it over your head off a bench, and you do that for eleven years and you're not the size you were. I was one seventy five at twenty two. I'm not going to say what I am now.

It happened twice. A Thursday in April, then the end of July, both times in that room. The second time the AC in the window was running, one of those ones that sounds like a truck idling.

I called him Father to his face the whole time. Even in there.

The Thursday in April I told my mom I was going over to look at the water heater, and that was true at six o'clock. It was the tenth. No, it was the week after, because the week of the tenth she had the thing at Guardian Angel for my cousin's girl and I drove her both ways, so the seventeenth. Then there was months of him texting me. The water heater. The side door sticking when it rained. A light in the hallway that was the bulb. Then a shelf in the rectory closet, and there was nothing wrong with that shelf, I looked at it twice. I'd drive over anyway. It's six minutes from my mom's place. You go straight down the boulevard and you don't even turn.

In August they had the kermés and they needed the chairs out of the hall, and I've got the truck, so I was the one standing there at seven in the morning waiting on a guy with the key to the gate. I picked a bulletin up off the table in the back where they keep the envelopes. Page two, under the part about the second collection.

He'd been assigned to a parish in Panorama City. Effective the first.

The first is when I send money to my mom's sister in Sonsonate. Two hundred, every month, since I was twenty three.

I read it again and put it in my back pocket, and then the guy came with the key and I moved the chairs. There's a hundred and four of them. I know that because I've moved them before.

He never texted me. Panorama City is six miles. You can see the sign for that church off the boulevard if you know where to look.

That week I hung a house in Sylmar. Four bedrooms and a bonus room over the garage, and the guy kept coming out to tell us about his floors.

My mom liked him. She liked that he did the Spanish mass slow, because she says the other one races and she can't keep up. Now she comes home on Fridays and tells me about the new one. He leaves cups in the sink. He wants the files in the cabinet done by year instead of by family, which means she's got to pull every one of them out. She does that hallway on her knees. Nineteen hours a week. She had the left knee drained in June and she was back in there on the Tuesday.

In September she asked me about him. ¿Vos hablabas con él? Por lo del techo. She was at the stove and she didn't turn around to ask it. I said not really. She said he was a good one.

The new one texted me Tuesday. The corner's wet again, up where I patched it, so either that cooler's still going or it was never the cooler. He got my number off my mom. He said whenever I get a chance, no rush.

I haven't answered him. His message sits right on top of the other thread in my phone. The last one in that one is thanks for the door.

She's in that office Friday. She does the hallway first and then the files, so she'd be twenty feet off that door the whole time I was in there. She'd bring me a plate and stand there while I ate it.

Sunday night I did my hands at the table with the game on. It's the cloth tape, not the plastic kind. You go around the knuckle twice and then once down between the fingers, and the left hand comes out worse because I'm doing it with my right.