REGINA 22 | Page 73

“Well, honey,” she said sheepishly, and hung her head again. “I got sick, just about the time Jack left me.”

Jack was a hospital worker she’d been dating when I’d moved out two years ago. The guy was divorced, and never had any money. Last I remembered, he was hinting around that he wanted to move in, which of course was the impetus for me to move out.

“Sick?”

“Yeah, it started as a cold and went to pretty bad pneumonia,” she held up her palm to forestall my protest. “No, no, I wasn’t going to involve you in this. You were pretty mad, and you had a right to be when you moved out. When I got sick, I actually thought Jack would help me.”

“And he didn’t?” I asked, even more incredulous.

“No,” she responded ruefully. “Oh he ‘visited’ me a couple of times. But when I was too sick to cook, there weren’t any free meals anymore. And of course, I wasn’t any fun, sleeping 75% of the time.”

“Oh my God, what a jerk,” I fumed.

“How did you manage?”

“Well, my neighbors shopped for me. And a girlfriend stayed with me when I was really bad. But Jack, well, Jack sulked because he wasn’t getting any ‘benefits’ from the relationship, you see,” she sighed. “And I was too wiped out from the pneumonia to argue with him. But I can tell you, it gave me plenty of time to think.”

“So then you went to church?”

“Not right away,” she laughed. “You don’t get over 20 years of staying away, just like that.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well I watched a lot of TV, mostly EWTN, in those long weeks in bed. And when I finally got up enough nerve to ask Jack if he would take me to church, he laughed at me.”

“A true jerk,” I repeated.

“He said that the Catholic Church was the worst of all the churches because of the pedophile priests who were freeloading off the stupid, gullible Catholics.”

I nodded. This line of argument was pretty familiar to me from my hipster friends.

“Well this made me think about how Jack must see the world. In his eyes, there were the smart freeloaders with a sexual agenda, and the stupid, gullible people who allowed this.”

“It’s a life lived in the Devil’s clutches,” she nodded. “And of course the saddest thing is that they choose this life.”

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