I looked at my mom.

“Go on,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

As Harvey walked with me to the car, I kept trying to think up some way to stay home. I knew what Mackie looked like. I knew he carried his gun in a shoulder holster. I knew he liked silver dollars, because I had one of his in my pocket.

I looked up, because Harvey was saying something to me. He had opened the car door for me, which was more than he usually did. “Pardon?”

“I said, get yourself situated. I’ve got a surprise for your mother.”

Before I could think of anything to say, he was opening the back door and picking up a package. A rectangular package. As he walked past me, I saw there was a label on it. South Street Sweets.

My mother took it from him, smiling and thanking him. “You know I can’t resist chocolates,” she said.

“Have one now,” he said.

I was about to yell out “No!”, thinking she’d forgotten everything I said, but she looked at me over his shoulder, and something in her eyes made me keep my mouth shut.

Harvey followed her glance, but before he could yell at me, she said, “Oh Harvey, his knee must be bothering him. Be a dear and help him. I’m going to go right in and put my feet up and eat about a dozen of these.” To me, she said, “Remember what we talked about last night. You be careful.”

All the way to the church, Harvey was quiet. When we got there, he sent me in first, as usual.

“But the choir loft is closed,” I said.

“It hasn’t fallen apart in a week. They haven’t even started work on it. Go on.”

I went inside. He was right. Even though there was a velvet rope and a sign that said, “Closed,” it didn’t look like any work had started. I wanted to be near Mary Theresa’s window anyway. But as I got near the top of the stairs, I noticed they sounded different beneath my crutches. Some of the ones that were usually quiet were groaning now.

I waited until almost everyone was gone. By the time I turned the lamp on, I had done more thinking. I figured Harvey wouldn’t give up trying to kill my mom, even if I had wrecked his chocolate plan. He wanted the house and the money that came with my mom, but not her or her kid. I couldn’t keep watching him all the time.

I turned the lamp on and waited for him to come into the church. As usual, he didn’t even look toward me. He went into the confessional. I took one last look at the window and started to turn the lamp off, when I got an idea. I left the lamp on.

I knew the fourth step from the top was especially creaky. I went down to the sixth step from the top, then turned around. I held on to the rail, and then pressed one of my crutches down on the fourth step. It creaked. I leaned most of my weight on it. I felt it give. I stopped before it broke.

I went on down the stairs. I could hear Harvey, not talking about my mom this time, but not admitting he was hoping she was already dead. I went into the other confessional, but I didn’t kneel down.

I heard Harvey finish up and step outside his confessional. Then I heard him take a couple of steps and stand outside my confessional door. For a minute, I was afraid he’d open the door and look inside. He didn’t. He took a couple of steps away, and then stopped again. I waited. He walked toward the back of church, and I could tell by the sound of his steps that he was mad. I knocked on the wall between me and Father O’Brien.

“All right if I don’t kneel this time, Father?” I asked.

“Certainly, my son,” he said.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I lied three times, I stole sixty cents and…”

I waited a moment.

“And?” the priest said.

There was a loud groaning sound, a yell, and a crash.

“And I just killed my stepfather.”

He didn’t die, he just broke both of his legs and knocked himself out. A policeman showed up, but not because Father O’Brien had told anyone my confession. Turned out my mother had called the police, showed them the candy and finally convinced them they had to hurry to the church and arrest her husband before he harmed her son.

The police talked to me and then went down to South Street and arrested Mackie. At the hospital, a detective went in with me to see Harvey when Harvey woke up. I got to offer Harvey some of the chocolates he had given my mom. Instead of taking any candy, he made another confession that night. Before we left, the detective asked him why he had gone up into the choir loft. He said I had left a light on up there. The detective asked me if that was true, and of course I said, “Yes.”

The next time I was in church, I put Mackie’s silver dollar in the donation box near the candles and lit three candles: one for my father, one for Mary Theresa Mills, and one for the guy who made up the rule that says priests can’t rat on you.

After I lit the candles, I went home and took out my wooden box. I put my father’s pipes on the mantle, next to his photo. My mom saw me staring at the photo and came over and stood next to me. Instead of thinking of him being off in heaven, a long way away, I imagined him being right there with us, looking back at us from that picture. I imagined him knowing that I had tried to save her from Harvey. I thought he would have liked that.

My mom reached out and touched one of the pipes very carefully. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said.

You know what? I believed her.

A Fine Set of Teeth

I saw Frank drop two cotton balls into the front pocket of his denim jacket and I made a face. “Those won’t help, you know.”

He smiled and said, “Better than nothing.”

“Cotton is not effective ear protection.”

He picked up his keys by way of ignoring me and said, “Are you ready?”

“You don’t have to go with me,” I offered again.

“I’m not letting my wife sit alone in a sleazy bar. No more arguments, all right?”

“If I were on a story-”

“You aren’t. Let’s go.”

“Thanks for being such a good sport about it,” I said, which made him laugh.

“Which apartment number?” Frank asked as we pulled up to the curb in front of Buzz Sullivan’s apartment building. The building was about four stories high, probably built in the 1930’s. I don’t think it had felt a paintbrush along its walls within the last decade.

“Buzz didn’t tell me,” I answered. “He just said he lived on the fourth floor.”

Frank sighed with long suffering, but I can ignore someone as easily as he can, and got out of the car.

As we made our way to the old stucco building’s entry, we dodged half a dozen kids who were playing around with a worn soccer ball on the brown crabgrass lawn. The children were laughing and calling to one another in Spanish. A dried sparrow of a woman watched them from the front steps. She seemed wearier than Atlas.

Frank muttered at my back about checking mailboxes for the first of the three flights of stairs, but soon followed in silence. Although Buzz had moved several times since I had last been to one of his apartments, I knew there would be no difficulty in locating the one that was his. We reached the fourth floor and Frank started to grouse, but soon the sound I had been waiting for came to my ears. Not just my ears: I heard the sound under my fingernails, beneath my toes and in places my mother asked me never to mention in mixed company. Three screeching notes strangled from the high end of the long neck of a Fender Stratocaster, a sound not unlike those a pig might make-if it was having its teeth pulled with a pair of pliers.

I turned to look at Frank Harriman and saw something I rarely see on his face: fear. Raw fear.

I smiled. I would have said something comforting, but he wouldn’t have heard me over the next few whammified notes whining from Buzz’s guitar. A deaf man could have told you they were coming from apartment 4E. I waited until the sound subsided, asked, “Should we drop you off back at the house?” and watched my husband stalk over to the door of number 4E and rap on it with the kind of ferocious intensity one usually saves for rousing the occupants of burning buildings.