Good to a Fault Read Online Free Page B

two feet away. It was not possible for her to send them to a shelter. During the Hosanna, in the high cascading descant, she’d known what she had to do. If any of this was true, if there was God. She had wanted useful work; this was it. And if there was no God, then even more, she had to do it.
    “I don’t want them in my house,” she said. But maybe she did.
    “No one could plausibly expect you to take them in,” the priest said. “There are agencies…”
    “It’s not what’s plausible, it’s what I ought to do.”
    “You’ve visited them,” he commended her. “Many would not think to do as much.”
    Many would not think to do as much, she thought, almost laughing. What a convoluted construction. A life in the pulpit. Except there was no pulpit in their church, he just stepped forward, with his tiny chest-hung microphone waiting to catch every word as it dripped from his lips. She stood up, needing to move, and put her coffee cup down on his overflowing desk.
    “Visiting the hospital is—nothing! My life does not seem very worthwhile,” she said. “Or even real.” And that just sounded stupid and self-involved.
    He looked thoughtful. Or was honest enough not to argue with her assessment.
    With a sudden welling of defeat, Clara left.
    The priest shifted her cup to a more stable spot, and rubbed his thumb along his smooth desk-drawer ledge. Her dress, deep indigo or iris purple, seemed to stay hovering in the room, filled his eyes still.
    Clara Purdy: single, childless of course, took care with her appearance; fortyish, and not in good spirits for some time since her mother’s death. He’d never had to deal with the mother. English, some cousin of an earl’s, wasn’t she? A piece of work, by all accounts. ( “They fuck you up, your mum and dad.” ) Her funeral had been his first duty at St. Anne’s, the week he and Lisanne had arrived. In parish archive photos the mother was aloof, fine-boned, with a 30s filmstar glamour even in old age. Clara must take after her father. Odd to think of a middle-aged woman chiefly as a daughter. Pleasant enough, quiet, careful. Insurance, at Gilman-Stott—but then the contradiction of that flower-petal colour. Lisanne admired her clothes, or envied them, depending on the mood of the day. Almost-Easter, true violet, perfect purple. Porphyry, periphery, preface…He drew back from the precipice.
    Carnelian, or more than red—true coral for Lisanne, who would be waiting for him at home, fretful muscles sharp behind her black-wire eyebrows. The hospital chaplain was away all summer in England, locum at a parish in the Lake District. Maybe Lisanne would have liked that. Cerulean. Paul wondered how he could bear another hospital visit.
    He took both cups and emptied them in the meeting hall sink. All the other cups had been bleached and dried and put away. He rinsed these last two and stacked them in the cupboard damp—rebellion.
     
    Clara walked through her three-bedroom bungalow, working out where to put everyone. The grandmother in the guest room, the baby with her, in a wicker laundry basket padded and lined with a flannel sheet. The father: the pull-out couch in the small bedroom that had been her own father’s den. The grandmother couldn’t sleep on that thing. Nowhere left to put the children but her own bed. She cleared the soul-help books off the bedside table and piled them in the garage; she pulled off the linen cover and replaced it with a striped one, made up the other beds, and found towels for everyone, as if they were guests.
    She looked around at her light, orderly house. Then she went back to the hospital to pick up the family. What was left of them.
     
    Trevor was not in the lounge, but Darlene knew where to find him. She ran up all the stairs and let herself out onto the roof. Where was he? There, around the side of the little hut. She ran across the melty roof floor, pebbles oozing sideways under her feet.
    “Look,” Trevor said when she