Raised in a saint-haunted country, her father says the saints' stories are only fairy tales for grandmothers and children. He believes only his own legends of how he came to America and met his American wife. On mornings that Emma faints from fasting in the church, he takes her outside to sit on the steps, telling of how he fell in love with her mother. Fresh from Palermo, he spoke no English, so the company put him in Emma's mother's second grade class with the eight-year-olds. Whenever his young classmates became unruly, her mother would say, “Massimo, please stand,” and her dark father would stand silently, in awe of her mother's blond hair and blue eyes, her proper manners and command of English, his height ending the unruliness of school children.
        “She was a lady,” he said. “She was so beautiful I could only look at her.”
        Her father tells Emma she favors her mother, but she knows better. Wide-shouldered and thick waisted, she is built like a farm hand. Her face is round, even when she stands before the mirror beside the coal stove, sucks in her breath, searching for her mother's high cheekbones in her own face. She pulls her lank, brown hair into a braid that hangs to her waist. She has inherited only her mother's schoolteacher vocabulary and the habit of saying “going to” instead of “gonna,” which proved such a constant source of ridicule and amusement for her schoolmates that she stopped talking proper and dropped out to help her mother with the housework.
        Down in the hollow, the last yellow squash of the season flashes among red and indigo birdhouses in the immigrant women's gardens. Emma climbs the stone steps bordered with rock lilies to the white church. The tepid holy water warms her cold fingers as she blesses herself at the doorway. In the side aisle, the priest sits on the top rung of a stepladder, touching up the faded mural of Christ emerging from clouds, appearing to his apostles. The empty church smells of candles, linseed oil, and the fainter scent of red wine and tobacco that always trails the priest. Dressed in a pair of work boots and khakis, the blond priest calls Emma by her full name, Mary Margaret, and praises her proper speech. As Emma approaches, he smiles, wipes his hands with a turpentine-soaked rag and descends, motioning for her to follow him into the sacristy behind the altar.
        In the sacristy, the chalice from mass remains on the counter, a wine-spotted napkin slung over its mouth. Crumbs from the communion bread cling to the silver dish beside it. Emma wipes them from the silver dish with her sleeve. Glancing up at the framed picture of Mary sitting beneath the cross, holding her dead son in her arms, she remembers where she is, blushes, setting down the sacred plate. The priest only laughs, nodding toward the picture.
        “That was made by Michelangelo.” He pronounces the name “Meek-el-angelo” because he once lived in Rome and can speak to the Italian miners in their own language. “Notice Mary's face. She still looks seventeen, too young to be holding a full-grown son in her arms. Now look at her hands. Those are the hands of a much older woman.”
        Emma thinks of her mother's young, sorrowful face bent over the steaming tub of laundry, her old hands emerging from dark wash water.
        “Is it a sin to grieve?”
        The priest pauses.

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