Curled in the Bed of Love by Catherine Brady

thrilling chance to show them off like two perfect jewels.
    â€œYou know I have to go,” I say. “Besides, a lot of people count on me for a ride.”
    Jay laughs. “You’re always so ready to feel guilty.”
    Guilty
is one box among many, clearly labeled, conceivably avoidable if only one can answer
no
on the previous step. Jay likes to tease me about my Catholic guilt, cull it from the bundle of emotions I call my own. But even my name is a contraction of theIrish Mary Elizabeth that leaves nothing out, only collapses the catholicity of my being so that it is more dense.
    Roberta and I are crying again when the door to the church bangs open and Walter steps out. “Can I bum a smoke?”
    Everyone else more or less grants us the right to this snatched privacy, but not Walter. He steps up too close to Roberta, as if to intimidate her into giving him a cigarette, oblivious to the tears streaming down her face.
    Roberta brushes her open hands across her cheeks to smear tears, and then she fishes in her purse for a cigarette and a lighter. “You always bum.”
    Walter holds Roberta’s wrist steady while he lights his cigarette from the lighter in her hand. When he straightens up, he exhales noisily. “How can you grudge me?”
    He can’t stand still. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, moves down a step, then back up. Walter looks like everything that made me afraid to sign up for AA . His dirty hair is pulled back from his face in a careless ponytail, his shirttail hangs out, his face has
wreckage
written all over it. Our AA group doesn’t have exactly the same composition as the mother’s play group I used to belong to, but it’s close. Just about everyone but Walter seems to be trying to lead a nice middle-class life. And Walter won’t let any of the rest of us forget it, makes a point of coming to meetings in his work clothes—the grease-spotted shirt with the Chevron logo on a patch sewn over the pocket. He thinks he’s the only working-class slob who ever walked the planet and enjoys telling the rest of us how coddled we are.
    â€œListen, Maizie,” Walter says. “Can I have a ride home?”
    â€œSure,” I say. “The more the merrier.”
    â€œ ‘Sure,’” he mimics in saccharine tones. “When are you going to drop this Girl Scout persona?”
    â€œTell him to take the bus,” Roberta says.
    Walter looms toward me, and it’s all I can do not to step back from the assault. But he thumbs a tear from my cheek with astonishing gentleness. “Look at her,” he says. “She’s so precious, she cries little diamonds.”
    To get Nathan to stop reading so we can turn out the lights, Jay has to pull the paperback from his hands, and then he must take the book out to the living room so Nathan won’t get up to read on the sly after we leave him.
    While I smooth the covers and toss extra pillows from the bed, Nathan talks to me. He always wants to talk when we are about to say good night. He tells me that he’s already memorized five prayers for his bar mitzvah. Even the morning prayer.
    â€œI bet Dad doesn’t even know that prayer,” Nathan says.
    Jay had a fairly secular Jewish childhood and probably knows very little more than I do about Jewish tradition. It was Hannah, with her religious little heart, who wanted to join a temple, and then I thought it wouldn’t hurt Nathan, Mr. Fact and Reason, to nurture that side of himself. There’s so much I love about Jewish tradition, starting with Jay and his family, their exuberant Passover dinners, and it’s never crossed my mind to raise the kids Catholic, since my own religious upbringing has an aura of punishment to it, my mother pinching me in the pew for fidgeting, the audible hiss of someone’s voice in the confessional, an insinuating, frightening sound.
    â€œYou know what the morning prayer is