Joey and Manny dropped to their knees at the sight of an old lady, lying in an uncovered coffin at the front of St. Elias'. The boys had correctly assumed that the the diocese had abandoned St. Elias,' just as the city had abondoned their crumbling public school. The old lady, whose name Joey and Manny would never find out was Margaret, lay dead, in a coffin of her own choosing, at the front of her church. Margaret had wanted Monsignor Frank to say her last rites, even though that wasn't quite proper, but the Church had transferred their young priest, a boy of a man named Father Gifford, to a prison, so Margaret asked Mgr. Frank to perform the rites.
Mgr. Frank never wanted to perform the rites on Margaret. Mgr. Frank worked forty years as a longshoreman, the last thirty-five on the take. Mgr. Frank spent his Saturday nights sheparding kids like Joey and Manny at the CYO dances in the St. Elias basement, hoping that they wouldn't wind up dirty, like him. He never married, Mgr. Frank, but if the idea of a wife had ever crossed his mind, he would have wanted someone full of firewater and soda like Margaret. Frank never asked that question, but he did ask Margaret over for dinner one night. Frank's food tasted so terrible that she asked how Frank had lived to 67 without killing himself. Frank laughed, and smiled, and patted her hand, and neglected to call the doctor about the squeezing ache in his chest. Perhaps that's love, Frank thought. By the time Frank passed, the congregation had shrunk to just the two of them, including Frank. The others had already died, or moved to the suburbs, or to Florida. Margaret read the Last Rites for Mgr. Frank, using grade school Latin she hadn't spoken since Sister Grace walked the desks with a yardstick when Margaret was a girl in the Catholic School for Girls like Margaret. Margaret barely remembered the meaning of the words, but she pronounced the syllables well, to her amazement, and felt Frank's comfort, to her comfort.
When Margaret felt her time, she bought her own coffin with her coffee can savings and had it delivered. The church had nothing left; even the Bibles had been moved to another parish and all the accounts were closed. Margaret dressed herself slowly in her iron blue dress with the flowers, the one she'd worn to dinner with Msr. Frank all those years ago. Margaret locked her apartment, then unlocked it again to save her landlord the bother. She took a taxi to St. Elias'. Such luxury. Margaret did lock the church door behind her, as no one else would ever come, and then laid down in the soft, satin-lined coffin. Margaret thought a thought too late.
Joey and Manny knew none of this. All they saw was an elderly woman with thin, white hair, in a blue dress, laying dead in an uncovered coffin, her eyes barely opened like someone waking from a dream, and a gentle, broken smile that hung from her old lips like the unused door of St. Elias'. In that welcoming mouth, Joey and Manny imagined their own mothers and grandmothers smacking them good for eating candy in Sunday School, and singing from the hymnal, and folding laundry, and telling them things they should never have forgotten. Between the bare walls of the abandoned and empty church, Joey and Manny, ages 17 and 19, fell to their knees and hid their faces from each other, both secretly thankful that St. Elias held nothing worth stealing.