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The Evidence of Angels To those who have seen The Child, however dimly, however incredulously, The Time Being is, in a sense, the most trying time of all. - W. H. Auden My mother believes she gave birth to an angel. She told me so when I stopped by one day for lunch, and though we have never discussed it, I imagine she told Michael, Mary, and Kelly just as matter-of- factly. "I think there was a reason he was only here for a short time," she said. "I think he was an angel sent to save someone." My father was sitting across from me at the kitchen table. From merely looking at his face, I can usually tell exactly what he is thinking, especially if anything has been said that either of us might consider questionable. He has communicated silently with me since I was a child, staring at me from across a room or in the rearview mirror of the car until I look up to see what he wants to tell me. It is an unspoken language of astonishment, criticism, and condemnation. It has always kept us close. The first time my father communicated with me this way I was five. He had picked me up from kindergarten. Usually my mother picked me up, but it was a beautiful fall day, and even though he was still in the construction business, and good weather was a commodity, my father was splendidly carefree sometimes, coming home early and taking us on long drives to undisclosed destinations, special places he wanted to show us. But before we could go to wherever we were going that day, we had to drop off a boy in my class. His mother drove us to school and mine drove us home. When he saw that my father had come instead, the boy ran for the front seat, where I usually sat, so I climbed in back and sat behind my father. As he started the car, my father looked at me in the rearview mirror as if to say he recognized what the boy had done, usurping the seat that should have been mine. When we got to his house, the boy told my father to pull all the way up to the top of the driveway, as close to the front door as he could. "Closer. A little closer," the boy said. It was something my mother did every day without direction, the boy having instructed her the first time we took him home. He hated to walk any farther than he had to. Now the boy sat up high in the front seat to see out past the hood of the car, saying, "Just a few more feet." My father looked at me in the rearview mirror again. "Here is a real baby," his eyes said. I felt privileged then, and I didn't fight for the front seat later that day, as I usually did when we picked up Michael and Mary from North American Martyrs, the school I would go to the following year when I started first grade. Instead, I stayed in the back to watch in the rearview mirror for anything else my father might want to tell me. It was almost twenty years later, and many words had passed unspoken between us by the time my mother revealed her belief that my younger brother, Sean, was an angel. It was a few weeks Excerpted from The Tender Land: A Family Love Story by Kathleen Finneran All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.