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ST. DAMIEN’S CATHOLIC Church is an incongruous pink confection, conspicuous on a narrow street of rusty-roofed plantation shacks and jungle-infested vacant lots. It’s not exactly on the way to the Maritime Club, but I made the twenty-minute detour. I wanted to stop in before I met Pat and Emma for dinner.
The church’s wide double doors were open, and the interior was quiet and dim. I slid into a pew in the back and allowed my vision to adjust to the candlelight. The only other person in the sanctuary sat in the front. The round head looked familiar. I stood and approached him.
“Iker?” I whispered.
“Molly.” Iker stood up and clasped my hands, his plump fingers squeezing mine with enthusiasm. Iker is probably around my age, but with his shiny side-parted helmet of brown hair and his plump, pink face, he seems both old and baby-like: ageless. I wondered whether he was uncomfortable in his red sweater vest and long-sleeved madras shirt. St. Damien’s isn’t air conditioned, and the air was sticky and warm.
“I have not seen you in Mass,” Iker said.
“I know,” I said. “I’ve been sleeping in. I need to be better about my attendance. What are you doing here?”
“At the start of the school year, we are distracted by so many things. It is good to rest and worship and remember. These things are not for the Sabbath only, yes? Molly, you are troubled. Please sit with me.”
Iker Legazpi is one of my favorite colleagues, despite his sunny attitude. He must get the same underachievers, plagiarists, and grade-grubbers in his accounting classes as the rest of us have, but he never complains. He gives every student his full attention and the benefit of the doubt.
“Did you go to the Student Retention Office meeting this morning?” I asked. “I couldn’t make it. I was doing late registrations.”
“Yes,” Iker said. “It was a long meeting of many hours.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Oh, Molly, these meetings, they are as dull as a dishwasher. Many people stood and left.”
“But you stayed until the end?”
“I did not wish to be impolite,” he said.
Iker is a saint. Not a real one, of course. You have to be dead for that. But close enough.
“So Iker,” I said, “You’re right. I do have something on my mind. Could I ask you about it? I’d love to get your perspective.”
Iker studied my face. “Perhaps this is a matter for Confession?”
“No. I mean, this is a hypothetical situation.”
Was that a lie? I just told Iker a self-serving lie. Great. Now I really was going to have to go to Confession. Not all lies are bad, of course. Some are deployed to spare feelings and soften hard truths: I'm so sorry you have to leave; that was such an interesting story; there's no such thing as a stupid question.
“Molly, if you do no wrong, you need not to be afraid."
“How do you know I did something wrong?”
“It is only a proverb. I mean to say that you should not be worried over something that is hypothetical only. Perhaps you can explain me the situation.”
I inhaled deeply.
“Okay. What if, and I’m sure you’ve never experienced this, but bear with me. Imagine there was someone you really didn’t like.”
“What a terrible thing!”
“Well, wait. What I just told you wasn’t supposed to be the terrible part. So it occurs to you that the world might be a better place without her. Them. Without them, I mean.”
“Oh, Molly.” Iker clasped his plump hands together in dismay.
“It gets worse. Suppose in this hypothetical example, the person actually goes and, um, passes away.”
Iker’s silence made me uncomfortable, so I continued to talk.
“In this fictional case,” I asked, “am I, I mean, is hypothetical person A responsible for hypothetical person B’s, uh, demise? At all?”
Iker’s sigh was compassionate, rather than impatient. “Molly, you know First John 3:15, yes?”
“Um, sure, it’s, uh...” No. I wasn’t going to sit here in church and lie to Iker’s face.
“I don’t quite recall the exact verse,” I said.
“It is simply this. Everyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer.”
“What? Seriously?”
“Yes. The main character of your story, Person A as you say, is already guilty of murder. This is even before someone dies.”
“Does it really say that?”
Well of course it did. Iker wouldn’t make it up. This conversation wasn’t going at all the way I had hoped it would.
“And Matthew 5:22,” Iker continued. “It is also like that. One who is angry at his brother, it is the same as a murder.”
Iker must have been raised Catholic, as I was. So where on earth had he learned all these Bible verses?
“I’m so sorry I bothered you with this, Iker.” That was no lie.
“I believe you know the answer to your question,” Iker said. “You already knew it before you asked me.”
I shook my head, hopeless.
“But what if it’s too late to fix it?”
“No. It is not too late, Molly. It is never so late that one must abandon what is right.”
I walked out alone to my car. I should have invited Iker to join us at the Maritime Club, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Pat and Emma both like Iker, so they wouldn’t have minded. I was the problem. Although I knew Iker had only meant to be helpful, my conversation with him had felt like a reproach. I couldn’t face sharing a meal with someone who thought I was a murderer.