Redemption Alley by Bob Perry (Purzycki)

Author:Bob Perry (Purzycki)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Potter/Ten Speed/Harmony/Rodale
Published: 2015-05-10T04:00:00+00:00

Strangely enough, one of the few other people who was talking to me now was my old friend Tony. And Tony just happened to be the last guy I had robbed. I could call him collect, and he’d pick up. Tony agreed to pick me up when my time at St. Christopher’s was over, and to take me to wherever it was I was going next. Eventually it turned out that a spot opened up for me at a hospital rehab called St. Clare’s Riverside, in Boonton, New Jersey. I’d be leaving in a few days.

Not too long before Tony came to pick me up, I was walking down the road to the friar’s cemetery, to pay my respects to Father Benjy and thank him for everything he had done for me. And while I was walking up the hill, a car pulled over. The door opened. It was the priest who ain’t there.

“Get in,” he says.

“No,” I say. This is just getting too weird for me. “I don’t know who you are.”

“Robert, get in the car.”

“No.”

“Robert, get in this car, please.”

“No.”

“Where are you going?” the priest says.

“I’m going to the friar’s cemetery.”

“Where is that?”

Then I just stop and stare at him, an old guy in a baggy brown robe, almost like a pajama robe, with his little tufts of gray hair and his piercing eyes, staring at me out of the car.

“Who are you?” I ask him.

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you do what I have told you all along—that you focus all that talent you have, all that intelligence, all that drive, on getting sober. It’s very important that you get sober.”

Then he closed the door and drove away.

Look: Am I telling you I saw a ghost driving a car? Well, I’m just telling you what happened. I don’t know any more than that.

After the priest drove away, I walked up to Father Benjy’s grave and stayed there quietly for a while, thanking him. When I turned around to walk away, my foot scuffed something in the dirt, and I leaned over to pick it up. It was a Miraculous Medal, one of these little gold coins made to celebrate the time when a lady named Bernadette had seen the Blessed Mother, at a place in France called Lourdes. They say that if you put this medal in the hands of somebody who’s dying, they go directly to heaven. All I know for sure is that when you get a spiritual gift like that medal, you’ve got to give it away. That’s how you get it back. I’ve heard that called “the divine paradox,” and maybe that’s what it is.

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