| The phone rang Easter morning. Ten o'clock. Jo Ellen was lying in bed beside Chris. The children, old enough not to believe in the Easter bunny and young enough to be oblivious to the spurious relationship between chocolate and pimples, had grabbed their baskets and run off across the front yard to a neighbor's where she imagined they were analyzing the smears on each other's faces. |
| She had reached toward Chris, stretched really, found him halfway. The bedroom door was locked, the door the children banged on to wake her and Chris every morning. Years, she thought, since they'd had time for morning love. "One more privilege," she heard Chris say, "the middle class is being deprived of." |
| Jo Ellen found the phone across Chris's bare chest. |
| "I think there's been a breakdown in communications," Peter said. Peter was the priest at St. Xavier's. At the beginning of Lent, forty days before, he had weighed 230 pounds. |
| "A breakdown in communications?" she said, staring at Chris's erection under the blankets. |
| "Yes," Peter said. "You were supposed to fix breakfast for usfor the choirthis morning." |
| Jo Ellen thought she could hear Peter's hunger, heavy and boundless, shifting inside his vestments. She knew what must have happened. He had been late, rushing to eight o'clock massthe nuns, their mass already celebrated, had called to him, "Father Peter, have some breakfast?" and he had replied, "No. Haven't got time," thinking all the while he'd get one of Jo Ellen's wonderful breakfasts, sausages she'd stuffed into the casings herself, the fluffy eggs scrambled with cheese, homemade muffins. |
| At the beginning of Lent, Ash Wednesday's cross barely washed off the congregation's forehead, Peter had bubbled from the pulpithis text, "Feed My Sheep"that St. Xavier's |
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