Tuesday Night Miracles by Kris Radish Page B

not that he would offer her any solace. He’s been gone more and more lately and has switched shifts at the firehouse more often in the past two months than in the past twenty years. Anything, she imagines, to be away from his wife.
    Damn it to hell!
    Kit pushes herself away from the table and lets the envelope slip out of her hands. She needs to think for a moment before she finds out what happens next. Those women and that chick dipped in cotton who belongs on some kind of commune in California, a car assault, and disgusting high heels—those things make a broken wine bottle seem like a popgun, don’t they?
    She’s mostly angry about having to reveal her real name. Shit, shit, and more shit. When was the last time she said it out loud? How many years has it been since one of those asshole brothers held her down and drew her name all over her face and arms with Magic Marker? Was it really that long ago when one of the nuns at Holy Name made her stand up and read from Lives of the Saints in front of the class because she said she hated her name?
    “Agnes my ass,” Kit says, raising her voice. “My parents must have been out of their minds.”
    It has been so long since Kit has thought of herself as Agnes that her head hurts. The brave and brilliant day when she erased the dowdy, small, baby Agnes from her life was the day she told the world she was Kit. Kit was strong and tough, not the patron saint of chastity and gardeners. No one would ever push Kit around the way they had pushed Agnes around. What kind of mother would let her daughter be called Agnes? What kind of mother would never intercede? Who cares if that was her great-grandmother’s name? An Agnes at a Catholic school was like a moving target.
    “Your name is an old lady’s name,” the kids on the playground would remind her. “Agnes-Pagnes is an old lad-iee,” they would chant.
    Remembering anything about Catholic school makes Kit roll her shoulders, while an invisible but totally physical shudder rolls through her body like a wave on Lake Michigan. I’ve worked so hard to forget all those horrible experiences—the way I was treated, my brothers, one horrid brother especially, she thinks. There are some things I refuse to remember.
    And now this. A secret envelope? No way was she going to open it in front of strangers.
    Kit finally takes off her coat and throws it on the counter, grabs a beer out of the refrigerator, and walks through the house to make certain the doors are locked. There is no reason to leave the porch light on because Peter won’t be home until morning, maybe later if he does another shift.
    Thoughts of Peter still make her heart thump. He’s been a wonderful husband, and the kind of father who still has a relationship with his grown daughter. When he’s not home, Kit misses his energy bouncing off every wall in the house.
    The house. Their house. For so many years the mid-size two-story Colonial had mostly been hers. From the outside the black shutters, low bushes, and the gorgeous towering evergreen trees made the house look like a suburban postcard.
    Kit had inherited tons of beautiful antique furniture from a variety of aunts and uncles, and somehow through the raising of one daughter, various family functions, and a parade of teenagers most of it was still half-beautiful. Underneath the throw rugs it was obvious that the wooden floors needed to be redone, and the last time a new appliance came through the front door her daughter was in middle school.
    An interior decorator would have a heart attack up there on the second floor, where Kit refuses to empty her daughter’s room. It’s as if Sarah has just walked out to get a glass of milk. The bed is half-made, old shoes are all over the place, the desk is littered with papers. Kit can’t bring herself to change a thing, even though her daughter has graduated from college and has a job halfway across the country. The other bedroom was supposed to be for the brother Sarah