Sacred Time Read Online Free

settled?” my father asked.
    â€œFlicker…No, the fourth letter has to be M. …”
    â€œIf my sister hadn’t married Malcolm,” my father said, “we wouldn’t even know the bastard.”
    I sat there, stunned, and for years from then on I would believe that—without marriage—men simply were not there. My father certainly proved that, because my mother kept him real during his absences by cooking his favorite meals, washing and ironing and mending his clothes, and, above all, talking about him when she picked me up from St. Simon’s after school, so that, when my father came home at night, I’d feel surprised he’d been away at all because all day he’d felt nearby. Women were there without marriage, even Great-Aunt Camilla, who didn’t have a husband. Women I saw all the time. In my mother’s kitchen; at the beauty parlor, where the stink of permanents tickled my nostrils; at the Hebrew National Deli; at Joy Drugs; or in Ce’Bon, where a sprayer above the window filled the air with perfume. But men I only encountered when they were married to women I knew. What would happen if I couldn’t get someone to marry me? Would I just disappear? And where would I be then?
    I sat up tall. “Can I marry the twins?”
    My mother turned and smiled at me as if I were still in first grade. “Both of them?”
    â€œMaybe just Bianca. Belinda is funny, but I don’t like her ugly boogers.”
    â€œI have asked you not to say ‘ugly boogers,’” my father said, though he, too, knew to get away from Belinda when she sneezed because chunks of snot burst from her. “It is called a sinus problem.”
    â€œMarrying one’s cousin is not a good idea,” my mother said.
    But if I married Bianca, she would have to let me wear her Superman cape. She used to leap off furniture with a bedsheet knotted around her neck, shouting, “Suuu-per-mannnn,” until Aunt Floria sewed a cape from satin remnants with straps for Bianca’s arms to fit through so she wouldn’t strangle herself.
    â€œWhy is it not a good idea to marry a cousin?”
    â€œLast week you wanted to be a bishop,” my father reminded me.
    â€œI can be a bishop first and then get married.”
    â€œYou can’t do both.”
    â€œBesides,” my mother added, “you’re too young to think about marriage.”
    My father slowed our car at the corner of Southern Boulevard, where the orange roof of the Howard Johnson glistened in the downpour, and the neon boy pointed to the tray of neon pies that the neon pieman offered him.
    â€œTwenty-eight flavors,” I read aloud.
    â€œAlways out of season,” my mother said.
    â€œCoffee is their most disgusting flavor.” Whenever we went there, they’d just have vanilla, chocolate, coffee, and strawberry. Any other flavor we’d ask for was out of season.
    â€œIt’s disgusting, all right.”
    My father glanced at her. “Malcolm probably considered those stamps another fringe benefit.”
    Fringe was the slinky stuff around the edges of my Ossining Grandma’s piano shawl. She was my mom’s mother. Rough and loving, she was sorry as soon as she slapped me or yelled at me, and she’d pull me into her arms; but it was the sting of her palm that lasted—not the kiss on my forehead. We didn’t see her often, but when we did, I liked driving past Sing Sing, where my Ossining Grandpa had worked as a guard till he died from a burst appendix when my mother was ten. My Ossining Grandma prayed a lot for her dead husband. Each prayer, she said, was a parking voucher for God. She got one extra parking voucher for each votive candle she burned in the red glass by the picture of Mother Cabrini, a new saint who got to be a saint by working with emigrants from Italy.
    But ever since last summer, my parents hadn’t driven past Sing Sing. Because of