“You should have met my grandmother Fergusson.” Clare opened the front door. “Do you want to take my car or yours?”

Mrs. Marshall paused on the steps to consider the Shelby Cobra, badly in need of a trip to the car wash, parked next to her Lincoln Town Car. “Mine, I think.”

They didn’t talk much on the ride into town. Clare watched the landscape, covered with sodden, tired snow, and tried to shake off the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. She could handle disagreement, disapproval, even, she supposed, disdain, with equanimity. But she hated disappointing anyone. She dreaded it with the same nauseating plunge she had felt as a child, standing in front of her mother or grandmother and admitting, yes, she had lost her new shoes, yes, she had let the twins out of her sight, yes, she had brought home a report card full of low grades and slack effort.

Mrs. Marshall could evidently read minds. “It’s hard to deliver bad news, isn’t it?”

“It’s not that, exactly,” Clare said. “You can’t be in the army and then the ministry without learning how to say things people don’t want to hear. It’s this feeling that I’m the cause of the bad news. That’s hard to live with.”

Mrs. Marshall slowed the car to turn onto Route 51. “You might be taking a little too much responsibility for this, don’t you think? You’re a wonderful priest; a little rough around the edges, of course, but experience will help with that-” Clare sat up straighter in the crushed velvet seat and surreptitiously checked her black blouse for any traces of breakfast.

“But you aren’t St. Alban’s, dear, and you mustn’t go around confusing yourself with the institution.” The scenery was more crowded now as they neared the center of town. They passed an auto repair shop, a tire store, a barren plant nursery hunkered down for the long, cold spell between Valentine’s and Mother’s Day. “If anyone should feel responsible, I should. It’s my decision, ultimately. But even so, I came to it as part of the group, not as an individual. Neither you nor I can carry the day all by ourselves. We’re part of a democracy.”