A Quiet Belief in Angels by R. J. Ellory Page A

where you can sleep.”
    “I don’t want you to go, Reilly,” I said.
    Reilly walked across the kitchen and sat down beside me. “I gotta go tell her, Joseph . . . she’ll be worried half outta her mind, you know?”
    “I don’t care.”
    He smiled understandingly. “Now you say that, but in the morning you’ll be sorry for thinking such a thing.”
    “Thinking and doing ain’t the same thing.”
    “No, they’re not, but nevertheless it isn’t good to think or do something you’re gonna be sorry for later.”
    I let Reilly go. He was away a good half an hour, and when he returned my mother was with him. She looked like she’d been crying, and when she stepped into the room I steeled myself not to look at her. Not directly. I wanted to cry too, but I didn’t dare. I knew if I cried I’d be sorry in the morning.
    “Joseph,” she said, her voice soft like a breeze, like the feeling of a clean cotton sheet billowing over you as you lie down to sleep. “My God, Joseph, I don’t know what you’re thinking now, but I’m sure it can’t be good.”
    I turned my head even further away from her. I felt the muscles stretching in my neck. I wanted to cover my head with something. I was mad at Reilly for bringing her to his house. I felt like he’d betrayed me.
    My mother sat facing me, right there at the kitchen table. She reached out her hand toward me and I tried to withdraw further even though there was no place for me to go.
    “You want to tell me what you’re thinking?”
    I shook my head. I closed my eyes and wished she would disappear.
    “Joseph . . . I’m speaking to you. It’s disrespectful to ignore people when they’re speaking to you.”
    I turned suddenly, my eyes wide. “Disrespectful to take your clothes off and do those things with someone else’s husband!”
    She looked shocked, stunned. She blinked several times. After a moment she rose from the chair and stood there looking down at me.
    Reilly was there too—I could sense him just outside the kitchen door.
    “Is that what the money was for?” I asked. “Is that what the seven dollars was for every week? So he could come and do those things?”
    My mother lowered her head, but not in shame. She was too proud to be ashamed. She lowered her head as if acknowledging a small defeat, the beginning of a war she knew she could not win at such a time.
    “When you are ready to speak to me . . . like a grown-up . . . like a young man, then I will listen,” she said. “You can stay here as long as Reilly Hawkins is willing to have you, and when you are ready to come home the door will be open. I am not going to apologize to you, Joseph Calvin Vaughan, because you do not have the right to judge me. I am sorry that I have upset you, but that is all I am sorry for.”
    She nodded once and left the kitchen. I heard her share a few words with Reilly Hawkins, and then the back door closed and I knew she was gone.
    Reilly appeared in the kitchen doorway. “I have a spare room upstairs,” he said, his tone compassionate, infinitely understanding. “You can sleep here tonight, and then we’ll figure out what we’re gonna do tomorrow.” He paused for a little while and shook his head. “Or maybe the day after.”
     
    Three days later—Thursday, twenty-sixth March, the same day that the Nazis started deporting huge numbers of Jews to a place called Auschwitz in Poland—I spoke with Miss Webber.
    “How heavy is it?” she asked.
    I looked at her askance.
    “The weight you’ve been carrying,” she said. “How heavy is it?”
    I smiled and shook my head. “As much as a house,” I said.
    She looked at me in a manner I would see in years to come, a way that only girls looked at you: her eyes, her entire expression carrying more complex messages than words could ever convey.
    “It’s good to talk at times like this.”
    “Reilly Hawkins said it was good to eat.”
    “I imagine Reilly Hawkins is right enough, but right now he knows an