His dad frowned as though he had some vague memory of this. “What’s the matter with you?”
“My head,” Anthony said.
There was a silence. Somewhere a radio was playing. A woman whose name Anthony couldn’t remember sang, I haven’t got time for the pain. He wondered if the song was part of a special pharmacy playlist, each song chosen for its special relevance to the Rite Aid customer.
The old man jammed an index finger into one ear and twiddled violently, as though he had an itch in his brain. “How’s your mother?”
“She’s all right. She’s in Florida with Aunt Doris.”
“Good for her.” He turned his head and Anthony saw, then, the reason for the twiddling: a hearing aid, flesh-colored plastic, the size of a lima bean. It looked like a wad of chewing gum jammed in his ear.
No, I haven’t got time for the pain.
“There’s a storm coming,” Anthony said.
“There’s always a storm coming.”
Another silence.
There was more, much more, to say: about St. Dymphna’s and Quentin the Quick, the inexplicable betrayals of the Boston Archdiocese. Anthony couldn’t imagine saying any of it—or anything else, really—to his father.
“Anthony Blanchard!” the pharmacy clerk called from behind the desk.
“That’s me,” Anthony said to the man who had, in fact, given him this name.
They stood there staring at each other. In roughly two minutes, they’d run through all their material. After two minutes, there was nothing left to say.
“They’re closing St. Dymphna’s,” Anthony blurted.
“The church?”
“Effective immediately. They want us all to go to Sacred Heart. In Dunster.”
“It happens,” his father said.
Anthony was dumbstruck. His father had been baptized at St. Dymphna’s, made his First Communion there. He seemed not to remember or care.
“What do you mean, ‘it happens’？”
The old man looked disgusted, or maybe he didn’t. Maybe that was just his face.
“Jesus, Antny. I mean it happens for a reason. They’re selling off the churches to settle the lawsuits. The kids who were abused.”
THERE WAS NOWHERE LEFT TO PUT THE SNOW.
Five nor’easters in five weeks. Boston was up to here with this shit.
Life had ground to a halt and would stay ground. Until further notice, everything was suspended: deliveries, trash pickup, mail service, bus service. Animation, judgment, disbelief.
Six feet in thirty days. The volume was unimaginable. At undisclosed locations around the City of Boston, snow farms were established. Fourteen hundred truckloads were dumped at a vacant lot in Southie. The snow was compacted dense as cement, twenty-five thousand cubic yards of snow. At city hall a plan was floated: load it into dump trucks, to be emptied into the Boston Harbor. Environmental activists cried foul. It was rumored that the snow was flammable. Spontaneous combustion was considered a danger. A hazmat team was dispatched.
Freak accidents were reported, the season’s morbid fascinations. The elderly frozen in their beds, the children speared by icicles. The doomed family sedan, crushed by a falling tree.
Anthony read of these developments on his computer screen, courtesy of a satellite signal that came all the way from space. It was easier than putting on his boots and parka and trudging out to investigate; quicker, in point of fact, than stepping out onto the porch.
Because what was out there, really? Where did people actually go?