The Chapel by Michael Downing Page A

was due back at the chapel to meet T., and I knew Anna would be eager to have confirmation of my proposal, so I briefly rehearsed my plea and dialed Lewis Thayer at EurWay Travel. The first message I left was a series of halting preambles assuring him that I did not want a refund or a ride to the airport, so I called a second time and exhausted his voicemail’s time limit with a biographical portrait of Anna and a disquisition onthe difficulties for a widow traveling alone, and when I replayed that message in my mind, I worried that Lewis might think I was actually angling for a refund. My third message was, I thought, a triumph of clarity, though I did end up feeling like one of those women who try to return a pair of absurdly expensive shoes after wearing them to one black-tie event.
    And I still had forty-five minutes to kill.
    I pulled my door prize out of the white bag. It was not honey. The little glass pot was outfitted with a complicated printed label that meant nothing to me until I read these words: La colla più affidabili! Not cola, but colla ! I opened the jar, and the familiar scent confirmed my delight. It was a jar of amber glue with a bristled brush attached to the inner lid of the tin screw top.
    I opened my journal on the desk beside the window and found the six lines of poetry curling away from the second page. I pulled them up, rubbed what was left of the lip balm into the page, and painted a square of glue around the stain. I pressed the Dante down and smoothed the patch of poetry several times. This small victory was so gratifying that I scanned the room for something else to glue into the journal. From a pocket of my dress, I rescued one of Sara’s maps of the chapel and evened out the worst of the wrinkles and folds. I placed it on the next blank page of the journal. It fit, but just. After a quick trim with my nail scissors, the map could be more elegantly centered on the journal page. In the drawer of the desk, I found a pen and made a few dots to mark the perimeter of the cut-out map, and then I painted a thick frame of glue, and, within the frame, I added three very delicate vertical brushstrokes to hold the center portion flat, but before I laid the map down, my cell phone rang.
    I didn’t recognize the number on the screen. If it was Lewis politely turning down my request, I knew I wasn’t prepared. I decided it was best to let him leave a message. Within the hour, I could enlist T.,and together we could surely come up with some way to pressure Lewis into accepting Francesca as a substitute for me.
    I waited a few minutes to give the new message a chance to register, and then my phone rang again—Rachel. This sent me into dead panic. Had Lewis called her to report my unstable behavior? I dropped the ringing phone on the bed, as if that would serve as an alibi when Rachel later asked why I hadn’t answered.
    I returned to the journal, but the glue had already hardened, spoiling a whole page. I turned to the next page and made another glue frame and hastily pasted in the map. Then I checked my messages.
    Lewis was noncommittal, but he had a British accent, so he sounded amused, which gave me hope. He was tied up until five and promised to ring again. Rachel had called to say she was on her way to an all-day deposition and guessed I would be asleep by the time she was free, so she promised to call again on Tuesday. She’d also picked up my newspapers and arranged to have delivery of the Times and the Globe suspended until the end of the month. She didn’t mention that she’d done this once before, after my first false start. Rachel wasn’t argumentative, but she was persistent. It occurred to me that I could get through the week in Cambridge without her knowing I had come home if I was willing to live without the daily papers—the only reason I ever turned on the lights.
    And just like that, I teared up again. I could feel myself sliding down from panic