"Which is an important consideration." All of a sudden I felt Nathaniel crawling under the hollow of my desk, a warm weight on my feet. "What are you doing?"
"Batman needs a cave, Mom, duh."
"Ah. Right." I folded my legs underneath me to give Nathaniel more room, and scrutinized a police report. Nathaniel's hand stretched up to grab a stapler, an impromptu walkie-talkie.
The case was a rape, and the victim had been found comatose in the bathtub. Unfortunately, the perp had been smart enough to run the water, thereby obliterating nearly any forensic evidence we might have gotten. I turned the page in the file and stared at gruesome police photos of the crime scene, the sunken eggplant face of the woman who had been assaulted.
"Mom?"
Immediately I whipped the photo facedown. This was precisely why I did not mix my work life and my home life. "Hmm?"
"Do you always catch the bad guys?"
I thought of the victim's mother, who could not stop crying long enough to give a statement to the police. "Not always," I answered.
"Most of the time?"
"Well," I said. "At least half."
Nathaniel considered this for a moment. "I guess that's good enough to be a superhero," he said, and that was when I realized this had been an interview for the position of Robin. But I didn't have time to be a cartoon sidekick.
"Nathaniel," I sighed. "You know why I came in here." Specifically, to get ready for Monday's opening arguments. To go over my strategy and my witness list.
I looked at Nathaniel's waiting face. Then again, maybe justice was best served from a Batcave. An oxymoron chased through my mind: I am going to get nothing done today. I am doing everything I want to. "Holy Guacamole, Batman," I said, kicking off my shoes and crawling underneath my desk.
Had I ever known that the interior wall was made of cheap pine, and not mahogany? "Robin reporting for duty, but only if I get to drive the Batmobile."
"You can't be Robin for real."
"I thought that was the point."
Nathaniel stared at me with great pity, as if someone like me really ought to have learned the rules of the game this far along in life. Our shoulders bumped in the confines of my desk. "We can work together and everything, but your name has to be Mom."
"Why?"
He rolled his eyes. "Because," Nathaniel told me. "It's who you are."
"Nathaniel!" I call out, blushing a little. It's not a sin, is it, to have no control over one's child? "I'm sorry, Father," I say, holding the door wide to let him inside. "He's been . . . shy lately with visitors.
Yesterday, when the UPS man came, it took me an hour to find where he was hiding."
Father Szyszynski smiles at me. "I told myself I should have called first, instead of dropping in unannounced."
"Oh, no. No. It's wonderful that you came." This is a lie. I have no idea what to do with a priest in my house. Do I serve cookies? Beer? Do I apologize for all the Sundays I don't make it to Mass? Do I confess to lying in the first place?
"Well, it's part of the job," Father Szyszynski says, tapping his collar. "The only thing I have to do on Friday afternoons is eavesdrop on the ladies' auxiliary meeting."
"Is that considered a perk?"
"More like a cross to bear," the priest says, and smiles. He sits down on the couch in the living room.
Father Szyszynski is wearing high-tech running sneakers. He does local half-marathons; his times are posted on the News and Notes boards, next to the index cards that request prayers for the needy. There is even a photo of him there, lean and fit, without his collar, crossing a finish line-in it, he looks nothing like a priest; just a man. He's in his fifties, but he appears to be ten years younger. Once, I heard him say that he'd tried to make a pact with Satan for eternal youth, but he couldn't find the devil's extension in the diocese phone book.
I wonder which nosy gossip in the church rumor mill told the priest about us. "The Sunday school class misses Nathaniel," he tells me. He's being politically correct. If he wanted to be more accurate, he'd say that the Sunday school class misses Nathaniel more than half the Sundays of the year, since we don't make it regularly to Mass. Still, I know that Nathaniel likes coloring pictures in the basement during the service. And he especially likes afterward, when Father Szyszynski reads to the kids from a great, old illustrated children's Bible while the rest of the congregation is upstairs having coffee. He gets right down onto the floor in their circle, and according to Nathaniel, acts out floods and plagues and prophecies.
"I know what you're thinking," Father Szyszynski says.
"Do you."
