So what is it this time?
“What unforgivable thing have you done, my child?”
Bill McCarthy was teasing, of course, when he stood before me, asking with his old-man charm why I was grounded. And I didn’t always tell him. He wouldn’t have understood the rat poison, for instance, or the fake communion, or the complexities of being a middle-school girl.
And he didn’t care why I was punished. Not really.
He just wanted a smile from the one who was always in trouble with the mother who had more trouble than she could bear. So when he called me “Punishment Girl,” it lightened the situation a bit, elevated my punishments (and my punisher) to the realm of normalcy, made them seem funny even.
Bill laughed.
Because he was kind. Because he had studied to be a priest and found bits of God in everything and everybody. Because he was an old man and I was a young girl and that was how he touched me.
I laughed, too.
I let my head fall back, forgot the pain of punishment, and laughed. Because of the way black olives bulged from beneath his brows. Because of his spindly legs and the way they bent and dipped, but kept standing just the same. Because his words gave air to my wounds, and healed them some. Because laughing was so much easier than talking.