Blessed Margaret of Castello was a blind, hunchbacked dwarf whose aristocratic parents could barely stand the sight of her. Born in Metola, Italy, in 1287, she spent her childhood isolated from the world because her parents found her so repulsive that when she was six years old, they had a small cell built in the forest next to their chapel and locked Margaret away like a lunatic. The family priest protested this, to no avail, but he had taught her the faith from her earliest days and so she advanced in holiness even while in the cell, and as an adult living in the city of Castello, where at sixteen her parents finally abandoned her, she was known to levitate during prayer and work miracles through her intercession. On the day of her funeral in 1320, a mute, crippled girl was carried in and laid next to Margaret’s corpse, and as the child’s parents beseeched God for a cure, Margaret’s left arm reached out and touched the girl, who instantly stood and spoke.

More than six centuries later, in September of 1990, an atheist named Margaret Buckholtz, who enjoyed excellent vision and at 6’1” had been a fearsome spiker for her high school volleyball team in Edson, Michigan, would, when sorrow assaulted her with the force of one of those spikes, still identify with the dwarf she’d read about as a young girl—not because they shared the same first name, but because of what she considered her own deformity: a birth mark resembling Florida that descended from the outside of her lower left nostril. Brown like swamp water and smooth as the finish on a gymnasium floor, the little icon of the Sunshine State was, Margaret believed, despite her height, the most substantial thing people noticed about her. And even if with time they came to appreciate her intelligence and honesty and yes, the positive attitude she managed on most days to maintain, how could they not, at least subconsciously, be repulsed by the way the southern part of the state rested on the soft skin above her upper lip, a grotesque abomination that seemed to have leaked from her nose?

She’d been baptized Margaret Anne in honor of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, the mystic who started devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as well as St. Anne, whom Catholics believed was the mother of the Virgin Mary, and therefore Jesus’ grandmother. Her father used to joke she was named after Ann Margaret the actress, and that her brother Francis, who always went by the more masculine Frank, received his name not as a tribute to St. Francis of Assisi, the stigmatic who founded the Franciscans, but rather, in honor of Francis Albert Sinatra, the not-so-holy pop singer. She had another brother, Norbert, plus two sisters, Teresa and Joan—there were no jokes for their names—and now her father had been dead for nearly a year, killed on his way home from a dental appointment in Flint by a drunk driver, a woman who had already lost her license, and he would never laugh about anything again.

After the initial shock, her mother adjusted well to his passing, fortified by her religion and her many friends in the village of Edson, forcing Margaret to admit the benefit of belief and community—even though belief was just a placebo—but then this past spring, as if the old woman needed more testing, her faith, like gold, requiring additional purification, she fell off a ladder while cleaning her eave troughs and broke her right arm and leg. So Margaret, the youngest Buckholtz child and the only one not married, took a leave of absence from her job as a secretary with a mid-sized law firm in Lansing and moved back home to help her mother convalesce.

It hadn’t been easy returning to a small town with small streets and, as far as Margaret was concerned, small minds, but it was the right thing to do, and she secretly enjoyed demonstrating to her mother how an atheist could lead a moral life. Of course, the two of them disagreed about sexual morality. For a while Margaret had lived with a man in Lansing, and more recently she’d started dating Dante Osterlund, a history teacher at Edson High School who, at forty-three, was thirteen years her senior. She had even stayed overnight at his house a couple times, coming home in the morning like a defiant teenager and grieving her mother considerably.

And she would grieve her again today, because it was Dante’s birthday, and she had baked a cake to take over to the high school at noon, to the teachers’ lounge, to surprise her lover and maybe shock some of his bourgeois colleagues.

“Why don’t you take the cake to his house when he’s done working?” her mother asked, sitting at one end of the kitchen table with the lower part of her right leg, now in its second cast, propped up on a chair. Her right arm was no longer in a cast, but even with the use of both hands she remained a slow eater, and had barely touched the bacon and eggs Margaret had fixed for their breakfast.

“Because then it wouldn’t be a surprise,” said Margaret, sitting on the side of the table opposite the cast.

“You didn’t tell him you were baking a cake, did you?”

“No.”

“Then it would still be a surprise if you took it to his house,” said her mother, raising her eyebrows hopefully.

Because Margaret had been conceived when her mother was forty-five, the woman whose hair was now the same color as her off-white cast had seemed old for a long time. Even though she’d been spry until her fall from the ladder, as Margaret neared adolescence it began to feel like more than one generation separated them, and as Margaret increasingly embraced atheism during her high school and college years, her mother’s unwavering faith made her, at least on an intellectual level, a relic from the Middle Ages.

“I’m driving you to the noon Mass, and then taking the cake to the high school,” said Margaret, who had already finished eating. “If this embarrasses you, I guess you’ll just have to ‘offer it up,’ as you always used to tell me.”

“Oh, I will... You can be assured of that. No suffering is ever wasted when joined to the Cross of Christ.”

Margaret sighed. How could the woman believe such nonsense? “Anyway,” she said, “I might not be there to pick you up right away, so just stay in the church, and when I get there, I’ll come in the side door. Please don’t stand outside on your crutches waiting for me, like some forgotten pilgrim from Lourdes.”

“Okay.”

“Just this once, I’ll probably be a little late.”

“That’s fine. I’ll pray the Rosary. Remember how we used to pray it together?”

“Mother...”

“Saturday is the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows.”

“I know... you already told me. And I’m still not going.”

“You used to be so devoted to Our Lady.”

“I was a child. I hadn’t learned to separate myth from reality.”

“Oh, Margaret...” said her mother, visibly pained.

“We’ve already had this discussion. We agreed to respect each other’s beliefs, or lack thereof, so let’s leave it at that.” She pushed her lanky frame up from the table, her shoulders as always, a bit stooped, and carried her dishes to the sink.

***

Suddenly it was 1972 again, and Linda was a high school senior nervously fingering the pale brown hair that fell across her shoulders like a janitor’s mop, telling her parents she’d gotten pregnant at a party following a Grateful Dead concert in Ann Arbor, by a boy she’d just met. She didn’t tell them the boy was handsome or that he sported a greasy black pompadour that hadn’t been in style for over a decade, and of course she didn’t mention they had smoked marijuana and dropped acid, only that they’d drunk some beer, but these omissions did little to lessen the shock. And now, eighteen years later, she had to tell them this same boy, Luther Williams, who still wore a pompadour and who’d married her and helped raise their son T-Bone—everyone called him T—had quit his job as an accountant for Saginaw Steering Gear and, after breaking the news to T, had walked out of Edson with his suitcase in one hand and his guitar in the other, on his way to Chicago, where he hoped to become a famous bluesman.

She and her parents were sitting in her living room on a bright September morning that belied her tension the way an upbeat blues melody can contrast with the song’s mournful lyrics. Her parents had risen before dawn and driven from Tecumseh to Flint to see her Aunt Sophie, her father’s sister who was in the hospital recovering from a hysterectomy, and after a brief visit there had, without warning, continued to Edson and appeared on her front porch like a couple of Mormons—and for Linda, the well-dressed followers of Joseph Smith would have been more welcome.

It wasn’t that she didn’t love her parents, but that she was unprepared to tell them about Luther. He had left the previous month, and in the ensuing weeks she’d debated different strategies for breaking the news, even contemplating writing them a letter, which felt a bit cowardly, though since her father was a retired postal carrier, also seemed ironically appropriate. Neither of her parents ever warmed to Luther, and her iron-jawed father had grown a bit distant from Linda after she disappointed him and set such a bad example for her younger sisters. A man of convention rather than religion, he never talked about that fateful Ann Arbor night following their initial, and for his part, rather heated discussion; it was as if he’d put the whole sordid episode inside an envelope, pasted on a bunch of postage and mailed it to the other side of the world.

Her parents had plopped themselves on the couch facing the picture window and its view of the small, tidy front yard, but her father, as usual, couldn’t keep from glancing to his left where the multi-shelved wall of albums stretched nearly floor to ceiling, from the coat closet by the front door, to where the wall turned into hallway. Over the years Luther’s album collection had expanded like a guitar solo, and it always seemed to disorient her father, to furrow his brow and make him wonder, sometimes aloud and no matter who was in the room, what kind of man buys so much music? The kind who walks off and leaves his family, Linda would soon tell him.

At the moment, however, her pear-shaped mother, wearing a blue calico dress and white, orthopedic shoes, and who had undergone her own hysterectomy several years before, was forecasting Aunt Sophie’s recovery: “She’ll be uncomfortable for a while, but after that, she’ll feel like a new woman!”

“Was she in good spirits?” asked Linda.

“Oh, you know Sophie... the glass is always half full!”

This was her mother’s second-favorite expression, used with the same fervor as, though less often than, “That’s rich... That’s just about as rich as it gets!” Linda disliked both idioms, especially the latter, which when exasperated she often said herself, but right now she simply nodded because the good thing about her parents’ arrival, if she chose to look at it that way, is how it was forcing her to confront them, and since Luther recently paid off the mortgage—at least he’d been a reliable provider—she could ease into the discussion by telling them they were sitting in a free-and-clear house.

***

After rinsing her breakfast dishes, Margaret went into the bathroom and brushed and flossed her teeth, then returned to the kitchen table and read last night’s Flint Journal while waiting for her mother to finish eating so she could wash, dry, and put everything back in the cupboards. She loathed a messy kitchen as much as she loathed food between her teeth; in fact, disorder of any kind, irritated her. This trait she couldn’t help inheriting from her mother, a woman who cleaned the inside of her cupboards twice a year because they weren’t hermetically sealed. As a teenager, Margaret or one of her siblings would stand on a chair and wipe the upper shelves with a damp rag—heights made her mother dizzy—and so they were all shocked to learn she had been on a ladder clearing leaves from the eave troughs. In the hospital her mother explained to them how it hadn’t been done the previous autumn due to their father’s death, how the neighbor boy who agreed to do it this spring hadn’t shown up, and finally, how although in her heart she knew better, she convinced herself if she leaned against the ladder and never looked down she could complete this chore, which, neglected, had annoyed her all winter. The doctor said she was lucky to have broken an arm and a leg rather than a hip, or worse, her neck, and their mother replied luck had nothing to do with it, that despite her foolishness, she had been protected by Our Lady of Sorrows.

With her chair turned sideways from the table and one long leg crossed atop the other, Margaret skimmed an article about Iraq’s recent invasion of Kuwait and the troops America had sent to Saudi Arabia—experts predicted the U.S. would intervene to protect its oil interests—and recalled how Dante, a Vietnam veteran with a war-damaged right ankle, had been following the conflict. He feared military involvement in the Middle East would be as pointless as it had been in Southeast Asia.

A different article held her attention, however: one claiming here in the States, a woman over thirty had a better chance of being attacked by a deer than of getting married. Growing up in a rural community with a father and brothers who hunted, Margaret knew deer sometimes, though rarely, attacked people, but she had turned thirty in July and this milestone, while expected, upon reflection could leave her baffled. Where had the years gone? It seemed only yesterday she was a young girl who, after two dermatologists said surgically removing it would leave a scar just as obvious, had knelt by the side of her bed in her pajamas and prayed the birth mark would miraculously disappear, her petition so intense she sometimes imagined herself levitating like Blessed Margaret of Castello. She thought if she only prayed hard enough her request would be granted. But months passed and her face continued to be marked like Cain’s, although she hadn’t killed anybody, and she longed for a cell of her own where she could hide away and not have to mingle with the girls of Edson Elementary School, so many of whom were attractive and would, after puberty, be downright beautiful.

She folded the newspaper, set it on the table and, estimating it would be another fifteen minutes or so before her mother finished breakfast, said, “I’m going outside to weed the flowerbed. Just leave your dishes where they are and I’ll take care of them as soon as I come in.”

“Thank you,” said her mother, using her fork to carefully place a piece of egg on the edge of her toast. “It’ll look so nice when you’re finished.”

The flowerbed wrapped around the front porch and weeding it initially proved therapeutic for Margaret, as she had hoped it would, as physical labor and sports always had. The repetitive kneeling and bending, using the same muscles over and over, the small visible progress as she worked her way from left to right: in general, it kept her mind occupied. She resented, however, the need to keep her mind occupied—that she had let that stupid article about marriage bother her. Why, she didn’t even want to get married! And then she reached the middle of the flowerbed, where a blue-and-white statue of the Virgin Mary stood in the center of two rectangular paving bricks... not much of a throne for the Queen of Heaven, she joked to herself. Yet as she weeded around the bricks, careful to avoid scraping her fingers on their rough edges, she found herself thinking about the Seven Sorrows of Mary she had learned as a child. This, too, she resented, this coercion of memory that no doubt was the purpose of statues and crucifixes, of holy cards and rosaries and other Catholic accouterments, a litany of reminders to keep people in bondage to medieval myths. Not wanting to give in to resentment, especially on Dante’s birthday, she decided to make a game of it, to see if she could remember all Seven Sorrows.

First she thought of the crucifixion, and of Mary meeting Jesus on his way there as he carried his cross. Those two Sorrows were easy. Then, as Margaret continued to her right, away from the statue, her fingers pulling up weeds and dropping them in a metal bucket, she recalled that Jesus being taken from the cross and placed in Mary’s arms was a third Sorrow; she imagined Michelangelo’s Pieta, another statue! The next Sorrow was Mary watching Jesus being put in the tomb. That made four. And there were earlier Sorrows... What was the first? The Annunciation? No, that was a joyful occasion; it was the First Joyful Mystery of the Rosary. The First Sorrow... Margaret stopped weeding for a moment, straightened her back and looked at the wooden porch railing, trying to recall what her mother had taught her. Sometimes it was hard to believe she’d been such a naïve, malleable ball of clay, allowing herself to be conformed to her mother’s superstitions. Of course, in those days she was only a child and couldn’t be blamed for... the Prophecy of Simeon! Yes, that was the First Sorrow. The old man said a sword would pierce Mary’s heart; he even, according to Margaret’s mother, revealed details about Jesus’ scourging and crucifixion. Simeon should have, Margaret remembered thinking when she was in high school, told Mary to keep an eye on Jesus when he was twelve years old, so she and Joseph wouldn’t lose him in Jerusalem after the Passover: that made six of the Seven Sorrows, when “God” was lost for three days. Good thing Child Protective Services wasn’t around back then!

Margaret laughed to herself and resumed her weeding, trying to recall an additional Sorrow. She put the ones she had in order—the Prophecy of Simeon, Losing the Child Jesus in Jerusalem, Mary Meeting Jesus on the Way of the Cross, the Crucifixion, Jesus’ Body Taken Down from the Cross and Placed in Mary’s Arms, and Jesus Placed in the Tomb—but still, Margaret was stymied. All she could do was repeat those six Sorrows. What was missing? So when she reached the end of the flowerbed on the far side of the porch, grabbed the metal bucket and walked across the front yard and up the driveway and into the garage, she felt, despite her significant, productive labor, irritated rather than calmed.

***

They’d all drunk two cups of coffee and eaten some store-bought cookies Linda had arranged on a serving tray and set on the coffee table next to the small, black metal bank shaped like a cash register, and still she hadn’t told them about Luther. Sitting in a chair across from the couch and her parents, she felt like cursing Luther and putting a dime in the bank. Years ago, after she’d bought the bank at a rummage sale in Tecumseh, she and Luther decided that in order to help T learn to speak well of people or else say nothing at all, they would start a family tradition: Whenever one of them gave in to unflattering gossip, even if true, he or she had to put a dime in the bank; when the bank was full, Linda would empty it, count, roll, and deposit the money, and then write a check to a charity. Neither she nor Luther was religious, but they believed all people on the earth were brothers and sisters and should be treated as such.

In the month since Luther left she hadn’t touched the bank except to dust it, yet it was getting heavier day by day, thanks to T, whose heartbreak often gave way to fury, and who hadn’t brought a book home since school started.  Other than showing her how he’d learned to walk on his hands in gym class, he never mentioned school at all. Linda was relieved when Luther finally picked up his suitcase and guitar and strolled out of town—they hadn’t made love in nearly a year—but she thought she would eventually share T’s anger and had bought some dime rolls and stored them in the coat closet, wanting to be prepared for the day her emotions let loose.  Thus far, however, that hadn’t happened. And right now, she was only upset because Luther had put her in such an awkward position with her parents.

Oh, how could she tell them? She would have to leave out the worst details of that fateful morning, how eighteen-year-old T had stood by the screen door crying, watching Luther walk down the driveway wearing a white T-shirt, faded blue jeans and brown cowboy boots, his greasy pompadour glistening in the sun, his suitcase and guitar apparently a much lighter burden than his family; how T opened the door and followed after his father, followed him down their road and across Main Street to the sidewalk that went by Fin’s Garage, Richemier’s Hardware, Maxwell’s Grocery and Roxie’s Restaurant. It would be pointless to tell her parents what she hadn’t witnessed but could see clearly in her mind, how T followed Luther past Roxie’s to the Edson Tavern, which sat at the corner of Main Street and Ditch Road, an intersection of four faded stop signs, and how when Luther crossed the intersection to where there was no sidewalk, only cornfields bordering both sides of the road, and then continued on towards the highway, never looking back, T stopped and let out a long string of curses that must have been heard all the way to Chicago. The curses were surely heard in the Edson Tavern, where a group of old men always gathered for breakfast, because they hastily filed outside and found T at the corner, gasping for air, and when they peered down the road they saw Luther with his suitcase and guitar, and realized what was happening.

She wished she could have spared T that awful morning, but it was beyond her control as surely as the bags beneath her eyes or the loose skin at the back of her arms. Luther had grown more attractive over the years while she... well, truth be told, she was looking more and more like her mother. Sometimes she marveled he had stayed as long as he did, a man so handsome and talented, and who’d never planned on marrying. It was hard to be angry with him when he’d done the best he could, even if, for the past month, she and T had been the main topic of conversation in Edson.

Then the telephone rang, and after Linda rose from her chair and went to the kitchen and answered it, she learned T was in the high school office—drunk on vodka and Orange Crush, the principal said—and she needed to pick him up and take him home, where he would serve a three-day suspension.

When she walked back into the living room and told her parents she had to go get T, her mother’s face blanched above the blue calico dress and she blurted out, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing...” said Linda, raising her palms.

“Nothing?” scowled her father.

“What I mean is, he’s okay. He’s okay... He’s just... Oh, he’s drunk.”

“Drunk?” said her father. “It’s not even noon.”

“He’s been under a lot of stress lately.”

“Stress? What kind of stress does a high school kid have?”

So then Linda had to tell them, quickly, clumsily, forgetting to mention Luther had paid off the mortgage before deserting his family.

***

She sat in the first pew right of the center aisle, on the far-right end, her leg in its off-white cast sticking out into the right aisle. On the far left of that first pew, several feet past where she had leaned her crutches, sat Jakub Laska, a middle-aged man blind from macular degeneration, and across the center aisle from him, in the other first pew, were some old people who had difficulty walking up for Communion. Father Al would bring the Eucharist to all of them.

Margaret’s mother didn’t mind sitting in one of the first pews at Queen of Angels Parish, both of which had handicapped signs on them, but she was distressed that her cast prevented her from kneeling to pray, especially in church where Jesus was present in the tabernacle, and so she offered up her frustration for Margaret’s conversion. After Mass she would pray the Rosary, asking Mary to intercede like she did at the Wedding Feast at Cana. Now, in these minutes before Mass began, she took her case directly to the Lord. Staring ahead at the gold tabernacle, she begged Jesus to fill Margaret with grace.

She thought she knew what love was when she married. Her desire to be united to her husband, to give herself to him and care for him, it surpassed any emotion she had ever known. In those first few months her fulfillment seemed complete; even adjusting to his quirks gave her joy. Then she got pregnant, and she figured motherhood would be a similar if distinct experience, just love upon love, like the rows of a crocheted blanket. Yet as the baby grew in her, she gradually felt something different, something stronger, and when Norbert was born love infused her in such a way she could only think of it in biblical terms. She wasn’t Moses, but her love had the qualities of that burning bush in which God had appeared to him: a love that enveloped her, yet left her intact, free to love still more. And she did love more! She loved her husband more, she loved her neighbors more, and she loved God more for having poured this love into her.

Then she learned that to love means to suffer. She had known this in small ways for most of her life, such as when she was a child and the family dog grew old and died, or when she was a teenager and her dad needed a heart operation, or each day when her husband drove the highways to and from Flint where he worked at one of the Buick City plants, but with Norbert, this baby who filled her life with both joy and dirty diapers, her worry multiplied like the Israelites under Pharaoh. Her fear became almost as consuming as her love. It’s exhausting when every cough might be croup and every fever a deadly pneumonia. What did it mean if, on a given day, Norbert wasn’t as hungry as usual? What if the pacifier broke and he started choking? What if he stopped breathing during the night and, despite the extraordinary hearing she had developed since his birth, in her fatigue and lying next to a snoring husband, she didn’t notice? There was no limit to the dire possibilities. Eventually, she realized she had to pray more. And the more she prayed, the calmer she became. And then, with time, she learned to trust.

As she would trust now.

Somehow, God would guide Margaret back to the Church. This last child of hers, the one who grew up in the 1970s after Vatican II and the ensuing, disastrous changes to the liturgy, would not be lost. She believed it as firmly as she believed that standing to receive the Eucharist, and receiving in the hand, had killed the faith of countless Catholics—had made the Real Presence seem as artificial as a lava lamp. Margaret’s atheism surely had many causes, including her birth mark, but would she have lost her faith if the liturgy hadn’t changed so radically?

It didn’t help to focus on that, and so she tried not to. The important thing was to trust, to pray, and to thank God in advance that this greatest and longest suffering of her life would one day end. She thought of St. Monica, and all the years she suffered and prayed for St. Augustine’s conversion; God had answered Monica’s prayers, and eventually, He would answer hers; she would not stop pestering Him until He did.

Then, still staring at the tabernacle, she started thinking about women who had suffered not only emotionally, but also physically for their faith, martyrs such as St. Agatha, whose breasts were cut off one day and who was rolled on hot coals another; Saints Perpetua and Felicity, who were mauled by a wild heifer before being stabbed with a sword; and St. Joan of Arc, who was framed by evil churchmen and burned at the stake. She thought too of that group of Carmelite nuns who were beheaded during the French Revolution and, amazingly, sang on their way to the guillotine.

Thinking about these women reminded her how absurd it was to suppose, as her daughter did, that only weak people took faith seriously. Just the opposite was true. For even if you weren’t called to martyrdom, you were called to die to yourself every day; you were called to put God first, other people next, and yourself last. You were called to forgive and forgive and forgive... everyone, including the drunkard who killed your husband. You were called to pray when you didn’t feel like it, and you were called to continue praying when God seemed to be asleep in the boat. On top of all that, you were called to thank God for your crosses. St. Therese of Lisieux, dying from tuberculosis and enduring a dark night of the soul, fortified her faith by writing out the Apostles’ Creed with blood she coughed up from her lungs. Was that the act of a weak person?

Beneath the cast, her leg started itching, and this she also offered up for Margaret’s conversion. By itself the itching wasn’t much, but when joined to Christ’s suffering and death and, with love, offered to the Father, it had great value. Of course, she would gladly suffer more to see her daughter reconciled to God. She would fall off that ladder a hundred times if necessary. Or a thousand times. She would even be a martyr if it would secure the graces for Margaret’s salvation. She would do anything, because she loved her.

***

Margaret pulled into the high school parking lot for the first time since her graduation twelve years before, and after shutting off her car and retrieving the cake from the back seat—a strawberry cake with strawberry frosting, in a 9” by 11” pan for easy carrying—she headed, a little stoop shouldered and self-conscious, of course, but with a sense of triumph, toward the front doors. She wore a white blouse with white embroidered flowers, and green shorts that accented her long, still-athletic, not-an-ounce-of-cellulite legs.

She had helped her mother up the handicapped ramp and in the side door of Queen of Angels, and then driven over to the school anticipating the reactions of Dante and his fellow teachers. In frustration she had almost asked her mother about the missing Sorrow, but there’d be no way to do it without the pious woman taking the question the wrong way, thinking it was a sign of conversion, and Margaret didn’t want to mislead her. She even congratulated herself on this act of charity, while simultaneously resisting the urge to go back to the house to please her mother, whose sadness had been palpable. Margaret wasn’t going to be bullied into conformity! Plus, she was confident her lover would be happy she had brought the cake, even if, as she hoped, some of his colleagues were scandalized.

She walked into the school holding the cake in her right hand, surprised everything looked smaller than she remembered. The ceiling seemed lower, the carpeted hallways narrower, and the bottom row of lockers appeared to have been built for dwarfs like Blessed Margaret of Castello. What didn’t surprise her was the blonde teenaged girl walking out of the office some twenty yards ahead of her—one of those beautiful girls as common to Edson High School as the rows of corn surrounding town. The girl turned to her right and headed down the hallway in the direction of the teachers’ lounge, and then three more people emerged from the office, first a dark-haired teenaged boy, and following a few feet behind him a middle-aged woman and an older man, all of whom turned left toward the front exit. She recognized the woman as Linda Williams, and figured the boy must be her son, T, although she hadn’t seen him since he was a child. Who the man was, she couldn’t say.

Margaret felt sorry for Linda and T because Luther Williams had deserted them the month before, but she also felt vindicated because Luther had proven what she believed: a marriage certificate, a piece of paper, meant absolutely nothing.

The two-tiered lockers lining the entrance hallway had been added in the early 1970s when the school’s population was booming, and Margaret, now holding the cake pan with both hands, moved closer to the ones on her right to make room for the group coming her way.

Then T stopped and said, “Hey, Grandpa, watch this... I learned how to walk on my hands!”

“T...” said Linda, shaking her head.

The boy paid her no attention, and in one smooth motion flipped himself over onto his hands and, not so smoothly, started walking on them down the middle of the hallway. This amused Margaret even as she edged closer to the lockers and continued forward, but then T started lurching in her direction, his blue-jeaned legs and tennis shoes waving out of control, and the instant she should have quickened her pace to give herself a chance at slipping by him, she instead froze, transfixed on his inverted shoes, so that when he tipped over, his legs flying through the air, one shoe crashed into the bottom of the cake pan she raised for protection, plastering it against her chest, and the other shoe thumped her collar bone, the combined force knocking her head against the lockers with a loud metallic bang and causing her to lose her balance and fall to her side on the floor.

Stunned, but still retaining the reflexes of an athlete, she pushed herself up to a sitting position, and then leaned back against the lockers. She blinked her eyes and looked around: T lay sprawled on the carpet alongside the damaged cake, both of which faced the ceiling; her blouse was covered with strawberry frosting.

There were four legs standing in front of her, and she could hear Linda and the man asking her if she was okay. Margaret managed to wave her hand and nod, in order to put them at ease, but she was thinking about T’s shoes, and the way they’d come flying at her. She felt as though she’d been attacked by flying shoes. In her daze, it seemed no less remarkable than a woman levitating in prayer, or that same woman, once dead, reaching out her arm to heal a child. Flying shoes... how amazing! Why hadn’t she been told of this invention? Just think if she’d had a pair when she played volleyball for Edson! She almost giggled.

“T!” cried Linda. “Look what you’ve done!”

“He’s his father’s son, all right,” added the man.

The boy pushed himself onto an elbow, looked up at Margaret and said, “Sorry, lady.”

She didn’t reply, because she was still thinking about those shoes—those marvelous, rubber-soled, beautiful-but-dangerous flying shoes!

Then the lunch bell rang, startling her and clearing her mind, and students poured into the hallway. Soon she was surrounded by a sea of blue jeans and a multitude of voices, one of which she recognized as Mr. Pelham, the principal. She knew Dante and the other teachers would quickly hear about this fiasco, and by the end of the day the whole town would be talking about Margaret Buckholtz, sitting on the floor of Edson High School with frosting on her shirt.

She wanted to run away, not just to another town like Lansing, or even to another state, but to another country, someplace where she could... And then she remembered... Why, yes, how could she have forgotten? The Sorrow that had eluded her all morning was the second one, when Joseph and Mary had to take the Infant Jesus and flee to Egypt; King Herod wanted to kill the child, and Joseph had been warned in a dream. Now that Margaret remembered, joy began welling up in the midst of her embarrassment.

Her relief was short lived, however, because as soon as she recalled that elusive Sorrow, before she even had a chance to visualize it properly, T, who had risen to his knees, leaned over, glassy eyed, cupped a hand to the side of his mouth and said, “Hey, lady, you’d better wipe your nose.”