"No. A motorcycle."
"A motorcycle?" She jerked her head to see if he was kidding.
"Watch out for that Blazer!"
"Oh. Yeah."
Ignoring the blare of an angry horn, she scooted the van down an aisle lined with parked cars, then suddenly swerved into an empty space that had been hidden by a massive custom van until they were practically past it.
"Do you really drive . . . ride a motorcycle?" she asked.
Matt nodded, pulling his gloves out of his jacket pockets, and amused by what it took to impress the almost-post-teenager these days. "It's on loan from a friend"
"What kind? A Harley? Hardly."
"It's a British make you wouldn't know. Hesketh."
She shook her head. "What color is it?"
"Silver."
"Cool." Krys tossed the van keys into the tiny purse she wore slung slantwise over her bulky jacket and hopped out of the vehicle.
Matt climbed out in his own good time, beginning to appreciate the ease of getting onto a motorcycle versus entering and exiting one of these sliding-door rolling warehouses.
"Does it go fast?" she asked over the van rooftop.
"The motorcycle? Sure, if I let it."
"Oh, that's too cool. You're the only priest I know who rides a motorcycle."
Matt had come around to the driver's side. Bo's daughter was a deceptive five feet eight inches tall, a big girl with a mature look way beyond her behavior. Her easy energy and naive enthusiasms were going to wear him out in an hour, but he couldn't spend the entire afternoon lying to her by omission.
"Listen, Krys. Nobody else knows this yet, but I left the priesthood several months ago. And although I'm sure some priests do ride motorcycles, I'm not one of them and they don't ride Hesketh Vampires."
"Vampires? Your bike is called a Vampire? Why?"
"It, um, howls when the engine gets up to speed."
"Oh, I want one! Too cool. So."
She clicked the control to lock the van's many doors, then slid him a wary glance. In it, Matt could read speculation about the stir his news would cause in their thoroughly Catholic family.
"I never heard much about you when I was growing up," she said, turning and maneuvering over the ice-rutted parking lot with mountain-goat delicacy. Matt fell into the same surefooted step with her. "Just that you were a priest, the only priest the whole darn family has produced. They kept looking at my brothers and sisters and me like one of us should be a sacrificial virgin or something." Krys glanced down, then the toe of her flimsy ankle boot stamped flat a ruffled rut of snow. "I'm getting read the riot act just for thinking I might not want to go to a Catholic college."
At the mall entrance, Matt opened one of a rank of glass doors for her. "That's not exactly written into the Council of Trent. There are other good schools. Still, you can't beat the quality of education."
He had forgotten about store vestibules in the north. Here, out of the wind, everyone paused to stamp snow clods off their boots, and stuff their pockets with the gloves and scarfs that would soon become suffocatingly hot inside the mall, then advance through a second barrier of glass doors.
"What exactly do you want here?" Krys asked as he ushered her through a second door.
For a moment, Matt paused, interpreting her question in the global sense. What did he want here in Chicago, among this family of strangers? Then he realized that her world was the here and now, and at this moment, that was the mall.
"Presents for my mother. I brought the usual boxes of candy, but I wanted to get her something more personal. It's been a long time since I was home for Christmas." He smiled at Krys. "Actually, I'm kind of glad you're my escort today. I could use a personal shopper."
"You got it! I adore shopping, especially when it isn't with my money, which there's darn little of." She studied him again. "I thought the minute I saw you that you didn't look like a priest. You don't even look like the rest of the family."
He wasn't going to touch that one. "I look like my mom, don't I?'
"A little, maybe, but she's so--" Krys visibly reined in her tongue.
They paused in front of a huge, two-sided display of the mall's layout of stores.
"I know what you mean about Mom. That's what struck me," Matt said. "The old house is so plain and dreary, all the colors faded to the same nothing tone. I'd forgotten how it looked here in winter, not like the Christmas cards with fresh snow mounding over everything. Old snow gets packed with dirt and cinders and turns into ice, like a comet."
"All the houses in our old neighborhood are like that. They're old and everything in them is old-fashioned. But I just don't like the winter, period. That's why I'd like to go to school someplace on the West Coast."
"That kind of atmosphere can get old in its own way," he warned her. 'Anyway, I was thinking about getting Mom something pretty to wear, but you know her better than I do, and you know what women would like way better than I would."
"Yeah." She eyed him, laughed, blushed, then met his glance again. "I can do it. Personal shopping, I mean. But your mom's a tough case. Aunt Mira doesn't seem to have any preferences, for anything."
"Well, I know what we can't get her: nothing ... too radical. Too bright, or what she'd consider too young. With a restaurant hostess job I'd think clothes would be more of a concern, but--"
"Look at where she's a hostess! A neighborhood family-style place that's been there for years. Nobody under forty goes in there," Krys added with intense disdain.
"Well, then take me to where people under forty go to buy nice things for people over forty."
"Gee, I don't know that territory either. Matt." Obviously, using the first name of an older cousin, and older ex-priest cousin, was a kick. Krys (maybe short for Krystal) frowned at the colorful blocks representing various stores. "I guess I'll just take you where I never go! What's your budget?"
"I have no idea. But I do have a credit card."
"I love credit cards!"
"With a very modest credit limit. You don't build up an impressive financial history in my former line of work."
"No, I guess not."
They joined the streaming aggregates of people cruising the mall's brightly lit but still vast and institutional corridors, despite the plastic fir boughs and Christmas lights frosting shop fronts, escalators and the high glass atrium ceilings.
A medley of Christmas music filled the air above them, and overpowering bursts of scented candles exhaled from shop entrances.
"Crazy, huh?" Krys obviously didn't expect an answer. "Okay. Here's Chessey's. Let me do the talking. I'm sure these witchy old bats will jump on us the minute we enter, they're so anxious to make a sale."
Krys angled toward a shop whose windows featured mannequins in expensive dressy suits, quite different from the merchandise-crowded, glitzy shops bristling with holographic accessories and lots of imitation black leather that drew her like a magnet.
In her taut black tights--leggings, Matt had seen them called now--and the short bronze vinyl anorak, Krys resembled a gilded pumpkin on stilts, a kind of Cinderella's coach before the fairy godmother had gotten to it.
The middle-aged saleswoman who headed toward them with lacquered hair and heavy gold jewelry clanking like Marley's chains would probably have glowered Krys out of the shop, had she not been accompanied by that moving target in any mall: a man who needed to buy something for a woman for Christmas. In other words, a man who had money and needed help spending it.
"May I assist you?" the saleswoman crooned in the impeccable grammar that always seemed so phony.
Matt wasn't used to such catering, but Krys acted as if she'd been thirsting for it all of her life.
"Yes, please. We need something for an older lady. Nothing too frilly, too glitzy or too impractical, but pretty."
"A relative?" the saleswoman asked.
"My mother," Matt put in.
"Oh, good. Is her coloring similar?"
He nodded.
&n
bsp; "And she can't be much over forty-five--" The woman's permanently smiling face was turned to Matt but her eyes wandered to Krys with a certain admonishment. "Older lady" was hardly the phrase for one of her and Matt's mother's age, the tone implied. "Had you any idea what you wanted? A dinner suit? A good blazer?"
Krys had been looking around like a kid in a whirligig factory. "A blouse!" she said triumphantly to Matt, lifting her eyebrows in search of approval.
He nodded. "Great idea."
"But nothing polyester," Krys declared sternly.
"We don't carry any polyester," the woman said. "This way."
They wove through racks and glass cases, Matt catching glimpses of foreign glitters. He felt like he was plunging deeper into a jungle of feminine snares, alien and intimidating.
"Her size?"
Matt and Krys exchanged a helpless glance. "Medium," he suggested.
Medium would never do for a salesperson at a finer store. "How tall is she?"
Matt nodded at Krys.
"And the same size?"
He was forced to consider his cousin's daughter as a womanly form. Given her sturdy frame, she probably played ice hockey as well as lusted after motorcycles and the mock-leather bustiers he'd seen highlighted in the teen-punk shop windows.
"Slighter build," he said.
The saleswoman eyed Krys significantly.
"I'm an eleven. Or sometimes a thirteen," she confessed as if forced to.
"Ten, then. For your mother, sir."
They were led to a rack of silky garments, and then the saleswoman left them to the private misery of selection and price comparison.
"Anything too fancy will turn her off," Matt said.
Krys nodded. "I'll try not to swoon over the cut velvet and laces, or the absolutely dishy snakeskin metallic print over there."
Matt eyed the reptilian blouse in question. "Thank you. Well, we know what not to get her now."
"I guess I'm useful as a warning sign: bad taste posted here."
"Not true. But you're younger and can get away with it. Besides, Mom seems too subdued. I want something that'll make her want to wear it."
Krys pulled out an ivory satin blouse dripping old-fashioned crocheted lace. She ran her fingers down the silky sleeve to the frilled cuff, then lifted a small white tag and wordlessly showed it to him. Ninety dollars.
Matt nodded. "For the right blouse." But secretly, he was shocked.
They made a round of the circular stand. "No prints," Matt said. He had read somewhere once, long ago, that Jackie Kennedy only wore solid colors. His mother, he figured, shared the same rigorous taste.
They debated at last between the ivory blouse and a gray one with white satin ribbon detailing. Still muted, neutral, recessive colors, Matt thought with dissatisfaction. She needed ... he wanted ... something that would lure her into the light of the present day. Something for rebirth, something she couldn't resist even as she suspected it was a trap.
His eyes paged through the fifty-some blouses circled like fashion soldiers with their backs to the wall. And then he spotted it ... a swell of color like an ocean wave.
He reached in, drew the hanger off the rod.
"It's . . . pretty." Krys sounded surprised.
He held it up to the light. A modest, feminine article that no woman he knew would wear--not Temple, or Electra, or Sheila at work, or Carmen Molina ... or especially the woman who called herself Kitty. Full sleeves, a tailored softness and yet a sense of feminine frill here and there, more felt than seen.
Krys held it up against herself, a question on her intent, girlish face. Then she frowned. "You have brown eyes. Your mother's are blue."
He nodded, took the blouse from her and smiled like a saint who had found salvation. For the particular blue of this blouse vaguely alternated between aqua and powder-blue, like pictures he'd seen of Caribbean waters. It was a rather indescribable blue, except that he had defined it long ago, and knew it was the one color his mother could not resist liking, from years of preconditioning.
Chessey's had surprised him, and itself, by carrying one blouse, size ten, in true Virgin Mary Blue. His mother was lost.
Krys had been impressed. "A hundred and ten dollars," she whispered loud enough for every passerby to hear when they rejoined the mall traffic, a fancy paper shopping bag lined with colored tissue dangling from Matt's hand like a door prize. "You are a big spender for a religious guy."
"Where do you think all the bingo money went for all those years?"
Krys giggled, reveling in irreverence. The favorite priest was always the least priestly.
"Matt, this is wild, and I don't know if you can afford it, but I know something that would be a knockout on your mother, with this blouse and just plain anytime. I'd ... forgotten somehow that she has those gorgeous pale-blue eyes." Krys pulled his free hand, as if he were a reluctant parent, to lead him into a fine jewelry chain store that occupied an entire corner space. "Can we go in here, huh?"
He nodded. It was fun to edge someone else, and himself, into the light. To be edged into the light, even if it was only the commercial spotlight of Christmas. He began to understand Temple's self-appointed mission.
His mother had been like this before he had loomed on her horizon like a nightmare, he realized. Every woman had. Temple had, and still kept a bit of it as a shield against the disappointments of time. Carmen Molina had been here, or had hoped to be, once when she was very young, but now she was busy interring that memory behind the perimeters of her profession. How would she deal with a growing daughter if she denied her inner sprite? Maybe he should write a self-help book: Finding Your Inner Sprite. Or was that just a secular pseudonym for the Holy Ghost? he wondered.
But inside the promising store, goods lay in dishearteningly similar ranks within their well-lit cases. Same designs, different strokes. Red stones in one, green in another, royal blue in yet another.
Krys skipped the precious rubies, emeralds and sapphires whether genuine or "man-made," leading him to a case displaying jewelry set with purple, amber and blue stones.
"I can help you? Sir. Miss?"
The clerk here was male and from the Indian continent, but his smile was as genuine as the man-made diamonds' glitter was false.
Krys nodded, pointing to the blue side of the display case. "Can we see some earrings, clip style?" Her hazel eyes rapidly consulted Matt, then she continued. "Something elegant."
The salesman didn't hesitate, but pulled out velvet case after velvet case, until six were lined up on the glass countertop.
"The finest blue topaz, in vermeil." His hand presented them as one would introduce a visiting dignitary to a head of state. The clerk ebbed away to a decent distance, so they could discuss prices in private.
"Ver-meal?" Matt asked.
"Gold wash over silver," Krys replied with expert intensity. "Great look, cheaper price. See! Only seventy-eight dollars."
Matt loved the way she threw the word "only" around at a shopping mall. He was feeling like a weird cross between a harried father and a sugar daddy. But he had the credit card, and the clerks were only too happy to press it between the carbon-backed pages of a sales slip as if it were a memento from the high school prom.
Krys tried on each earring, describing merits and flaws. "Pinches." "Too overbearing." "I'd adore these, but your mother--?" "Very classy." "Too matronly." Whether for herself or his mother she never said.
The earrings they selected were large blue topaz teardrops surrounded by silver with gold accents.
As they-- he was paying for it, or rather, the card was, Matt noticed a Plexiglas stand by the register displaying cards of sterling silver earrings and pins. He glanced at Krys's ears with their discreet, for nowadays, earrings in triplicate.
He turned the display piece until an amethyst-set ornate cross came to the fore. "You want a souvenir?"
Her eyes widened, then emptied in wonder. "Souvenir?"
Matt took down the cross and put it on th
e counter. "Add this in," he told the clerk. It was only twenty-eight dollars. His sense of proportion had magnified.
Krys was all eyes. "For me, really?"
"I appreciate your help today. Besides, you can tell your friends you got the cross from an ex-priest who rides a Vampire motorcycle."
"Oh, cool. Oh, way, way, way too cool. Can I wear it now?"
Since no one disagreed, she left the shop with the amethyst cross swinging in her right ear.
"Does it bother you," she asked breathlessly, "crosses being such popular jewelry now? Are we being too shallow?"
"Those 'Y-shaped' necklaces in the Sunday-paper department-store ads are nothing but rosaries. Maybe it's a religious renaissance, huh?"
"I don't know. They're just. . . cool." She fingered the small box in the tiny bag she carried, with the blue topaz earrings. "She can wear these with gold or silver," Krys explained as they melded with the still-milling shoppers. "Did you see how the Indian guy at the shop thought these were for me when I tried them on? He took us for a couple, can you believe it?"
"No. I'm too old for you."
"Hey. You can't be over . . . twenty-seven, right?"
"Wrong."
"What are we, anyway? We never did decide. First cousins or what?"
"In any case, it doesn't matter."
She stopped to pout.
"Stop flirting with m
"I am not'"
"Catholic girls always want to flirt with a priest, or an ex-priest. It's a stage."
"A stage! You act like I'm a teenager, or something. Hey, it's almost three o'clock. Can we eat? I'm beat and I'm starving!"
"Me too. Sure."
She ordered a chili burger, jumbo fries and fried jalapeno cheese sticks. Matt almost got indigestion from watching her shovel every bit of it down.
The fast-food restaurant rang with the noise of raised voices, the cash register, transitory dishes and silverware, and the passing bustle in the mall traffic lanes alongside it.
Matt nursed a beer after nibbling on a club sandwich and watched her eat.
"This has been fun, after all!" Krys said, chewing happily. "You're way cooler than I thought you'd be. And I know your mother will love her stuff."
2Golden garland Page 27
