Prayers for the Living Read Online Free Page A

concudante ? Like the confessor?”
    â€œYou mean like the Catholics? God forbid.”
    â€œIf He forbid we wouldn’t have the Catholics.”
    â€œDon’t joke when I’m thinking about this.”
    â€œThinking to you is like praying? I shouldn’t disturb you?”
    â€œI’m just trying to get it right.”
    â€œLook, darling, sip a coffee, calm a little, and tell me what happened.”
    â€œWhen he fell? It was awful. Remember, it was the high holidays, Yom Kippur, the very last day of the ten days of penitence, when it comes time for God to decide which book He wants to write ournames in for the coming year—the Book of Life or the Book of Death .”
    â€œStop with the Sunday school lecture already and tell me what happened.”
    â€œSo I’ll tell. So Manny woke up that morning, he told me later in the hospital . . .”
    â€œHe tells you everything? Ah, I should be so lucky. My boys, they never talk. And you know why?”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause they are terrible talkers. They are like . . . like Moses’s brother Aaron, he talks with pebbles in his mouth. They have stories, believe me they have stories just as good as your Manny’s, but they can’t say them because they can’t talk so good. Book of Life, Book of Death ? They could write books themselves, believe me, if they could only write.”
    â€œNow your turn to stop.”
    â€œSo I’ll stop. You want me to stop? I’m not offended. So. I stopped.”
    â€œYou better keep stopping or I can’t tell you.”
    â€œAll right, all right, so go on.”
    â€œI’ll go on. Please. Let me clear my throat. Aherm. Aherm.”

    S O HE WOKE up that morning feeling, he said, very very strange, not in the usual way as though something is going to happen—because you know when you feel that way it never does—but strange because he had the idea that something already had taken place, that something in his life had been decided for him. Do you know? As though God had written in the book already, and he didn’t know which one. Except he didn’t think of it that way except to explain it to himself, the feeling that something had already gone past him. Or something had been lost.
    He went looking, first for his good soft-soled shoes because this was another day of standing all morning and afternoon and he wanted to be as comfortable as he could make himself, and theseit appeared he had misplaced. He went up to the top of the house, and down to the study, his library, even to the basement, and he couldn’t find the shoes. It got so he was cursing, because who wants to stand all day in uncomfortable shoes on top of everything else—the fasting, the hard work of leading the service, the looking down into the faces of the congregation and feeling his fatigue rise in him like water crawling up to the brim of a glass—and then of course he felt terrible because he was cursing over nothing but a stupid pair of shoes. When he had so many other more important things to worry about, I don’t have to tell you, he was worrying about her, about both her s, the mother with the problem in the store—you didn’t hear? I can tell by your look you never heard, well, so later I’ll tell you, but not now because I don’t want to be distracted—and the other her, the daughter with the problem with the boy—both her s, her and her . To think, women give him such trouble when all his life while growing he didn’t have no problem with me . . . don’t laugh, don’t laugh or I’ll close my mouth!
    So . . . down the stairs, up—he can’t find the shoes, and then he feels a headache coming on, from the fasting probably, he figures, an ache so big it’s like one of those dark summer thunderstorm clouds you see blowing in over the water at Bradley Beach, and he shudders when he thinks what he’s doing with