What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay Read Online Free

them, and agreed to raise the kids Catholic. That’s okay with me. I figure that with a background like that, you either have to be an atheist or just pick something. And I wouldn’t be a good atheist. The idea of random chaos is too scary.
    Grandma Alice made matzoh ball soup with homemade chicken broth. I would be Jewish just for matzoh ball soup, but tonight at first it felt like eating lead slugs. Or real ones. I didn’t know Jesse Francis, not really. He dropped out the year before last and he’s four years older than me. But all I could think of was what it would feel like to have your leg explode. After dinner, I went back to St. Thomas’s and slipped down the stairs.
    “You were right,” I said to Felix. “How could they let a seventeen-year-old kid volunteer to go to Afghanistan?”
    “Same way they always have. Wars are fought by kids. Kids are who’s expendable.” He looked really sad in the light from the one dusty bulb.
    “His father signed so he could go!” I was indignant. “How could somebody’s father do that?”
    “He thought it was the patriotic thing to do.” Felix’s face had gotten closed up, like a cupboard someone had locked.
    “How do you know?”
    “I know.”
    I sat down on the stairs again. I hated to admit it, but it was kind of nice having him talk back to me. And weird. I found myself wanting to say things to him, as if he really was St. Felix. Maybe Mom felt that way about him. I didn’t like that idea much. “Mom is going to get back with Ben, you know,” I said.
    He looked up at that. “Yeah, probably.”
    “That hot plate will blow the fuses here,” I told him. “This place has wiring that’s really scary.”
    “You know about wiring?”
    “Wuffie got my Grandpa Joe to come look at it, and that’s what he said.”
    “Is your grandpa an electrician?”
    “He’s a history professor, but he’s retired.”
    Felix smiled then. “We all want to fix stuff we don’t understand.”
    I had to laugh. “Grandpa Joe exploded a toaster once.”
    “I’ll try not to explode the basement. You figure God’s got his eye on it, he’ll put the fire out?”
    “I hope so,” I said.
    Walking back to Ben’s in the dark, I wondered how much God really keeps an eye on things like that. I got the feeling that there were layers of things I couldn’t see, floating on top of each other. Maybe it was the live oaks. They have strange gnarly branches and are mostly really big and old. They look like something might be living in them—dryads or something, not just owls. Once I saw a peacock in one. The Chumash, the people who lived here in the valley before the Spanish came, lived on the acorns. They believed their dead people went away over the Channel Islands off the coast in a blue light and you could hear the door of the Underworld banging closed behind them if you listened. I wondered if that was what the explosion had sounded like to Jesse Francis.
    On Sunday I went to church because Wuffie came and picked me up. At least she hasn’t tried to get me to come live with her and Mom. She doesn’t approve of the divorce, either.
    It was the Sunday before Labor Day, and Father Weatherford was dedicating the Mass to the new school year to get us off on the right foot.
    “There’s someone living in the basement here,” I said to Wuffie as we settled in our usual pew.
    “I know, dear,” she whispered back. “Your mother told me.”
    “ She knows? And you haven’t said anything?”
    “Poor man. I think Father Weatherford may know, but the parish council won’t like it so he pretends he doesn’t. But haven’t you noticed how clean everything is?”
    I hadn’t, but now that I looked around, I could see that someone had painstakingly cleaned all the separate panes in the stained glass windows. You have to do that with a Q-tip to get the edges. And the statues of the Virgin and St. Thomas looked brighter. The Altar Society at St. Thomas is all old ladies; their eyesight