On Sunday morning, Justin got up stealthily and tried to conceal his vomiting from his father. It didn't work, the simple layout of the house defeated him; the only bathroom was in between his bedroom and his father's.

"Are you okay, son?" Harold Bock asked.

"Yeah, Dad, I'll live." The nausea had seized him as he lay awake in his bed wondering if he would ever talk to Zoe again, talk to her alone. He'd probably see her at school, though she was a senior and he a sophmore. Their schedules would not naturally intersect that often.

And then he had had to run, stumbling over Tom, the big white dog who insisted on occupying the short hallway that connected the two bedrooms and the bathroom with the rest of the house. Then he had sat on the floor for sometime, waiting out two more waves of intestinal discomfort before he'd finally had to throw up again. And his father asked if he was okay....

"Son," his dad said, "if you keep throwing up like this, we need to take you to the doctor."

"Okay," said Justin and his listless tone worried his father even more. "Tuesday, then, I'll call them first thing. But I don't want to go to Urgent Care on a holiday weekend just for being sick at my stomach."

"Is there anything I could fix for you?"

Justin shook his head but his father couldn't see him with the door closed. "No," he said out loud. "I'll be okay in a bit." He belched, a wind from a sour version of hell, and the taste in his mouth induced shudders. "I'm okay," he quavered.

"Christ," muttered Harold, not a man who normally used bywords. "Bad as his mother," he commented to himself and the dog as he wheeled on through the central interior arch into the dining room. "No, I'm not sick," he continued. "I'll just lie here with a fever of 103, sweating like a horse and throwing up when the wind changes...." He missed Olivia like he missed the use of his legs, constantly and never without the memory of pain and loss.

Tom suddenly got the idea that Harold was going through the kitchen to open the back door. "Urf!" he said, scrambling around the wheelchair and almost upsetting it. He waited at the door, yard-long tail banner waving as Harold tried to maneuver the chair passed him in order to reach the door locks.

"All right, all right," said Harold. "You have an appointment to see a horse about a man, I know." The big dog disappeared out the back door in a bound, leaving behind little whirlpools of white and tan fur. Harold knew he wouldn't fail to come back in for breakfast so he didn't go outside to watch or attach the thirty-foot retractable cable to the dog's collar. No fence could keep in a dog who measured nearly four foot at the shoulder and Great Poofy's are natural wanderers but Tom would never miss a meal.

"No problem with his appetite, at least," said Harold, still talking to himself as he closed the door. "We need to brush him more often in this heat. He does hate it when the boy uses the vacuum." He grinned to think of it.

From the crisper bin he selected a ripe tomato, one of the ones given him by Mrs. Pollard from her garden. No reason in the world to buy cold storage tomatoes from the supermarket in a place like Riverside where some neighbor or another surely grew more than they could eat themselves. He cut the tomato into firm, meaty slices onto a yellow earthenware plate an put it onto the dining room table next to the bowl of apples and bananas. He remembered his wife craving fresh fruit and tomatoes when she had an upset stomach.

Back in the kitchen, he filled a pan with water and a pinch of salt and set it on the stove to boil. Then he spent a couple of minutes searching for the box of Cream of Wheat that he knew he had bought a few weeks ago. Finally finding it behind the popcorn and tortilla chips, he set it out along with a measuring cup and a carton of milk from the refrigerator. He found the brown sugar in the lower cabinet and got down the cinnamon and ginger bottles from the spice rack with the aid of his Ben Franklin grabber.

He measured the hot cereal mix into the water just as it came to a boil and added the proper dollop of milk before turning down the heat. Two slices of whole wheat bread went into the toaster and two of bacon into the microwave as Justin emerged from the back of the house, pushing his damp hair around with a brush. Tom, the dog, rattled the back door at about the same time.

"I'm not very hungry," Justin said but he eyed the fresh tomato slices on their earthenware plate with some interest. Harold had worked for a caterer while going to college and he knew that color and presentation are at least half of the feeling called hunger.

"Milk or apple juice," asked his father, turning the chair to head back to the refrigerator.

"Juice," said the boy who was sometimes called that by his friends.

"I thought we might go to church this morning," said Harold, pouring both of them tall glasses of apple juice.

Justin let Tom, the dog, in the back door and endured a typically enthusiastic greeting. "Um," he said, avoiding getting a nearly foot-wide tongue shoved into his mouth. He opened the kitchen broom closet and used the scoop to take a cup-and-a-half of dry dog food to pour into Tom's bowl.

"I don't think we've been in church since...May," Harold said. He'd almost mentioned Olivia's birthday.

And now Justin knew why the thought of church had come up. In just a few days it would be his sister's birthday. Evie would be thirteen on Thursday if she had not died at age ten. "Okay, Dad," he said. "Can we go to Mom's church?"

Like many Americans of Danish extraction, Harold Bock had been raised Lutheran. Olivia Keaton Natali had been Irish-Italian and Catholic. For much of their married life they had "compromised" by attending an Episcopal church. But after Evie's birth, Olivia had asked to return to the comfort of the church she had been raised in and the family had frequently attended nearby St. Thomas the Apostle.

Harold smiled. "Sure," he said. He too felt the need to reinforce the feeling of having his wife's and daughter's spirits nearby. They both glanced at the clock and relaxed. They had plenty of time to make it to mid-morning mass.

#

Less than three hours later, Justin knelt in the confessional and told the priest what had happened between himself and Zoe. A modern young cleric originally from Argentina, Father Sergio gave the boy a moderately onerous penance and in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, affirmed his forgiveness.