Friday Novel

His father's death was unexpected.

By and large, Alan had not taken his brief eighteen years of life very seriously. He barely passed his classes, although not for lack of intelligence. Often he didn't even show up, and he never did anything when he did. Occasionally something would pique his interest, but rarely. He was able to do well enough on the tests to pass without studying, which was the only thing that kept his high school career solvent.

He had a strange relationship with his father, who was a Roman Catholic priest. Very odd, to be the son of a Roman Catholic priest. His father didn't have a church, but worked for the Archbishop of Chicago in some capacity that Alan never quite understood. His mother, with whom he lived, called his father a "glorified gofer"--someone who basically just did whatever they asked him to do.

His father's past before becoming a Jesuit priest was even more ambiguous. His mother had met him in Italy while doing a semester abroad in Florence. He was at the University of Bologna. She had never met anyone like him before. He had been to so many places and knew so many things. In just the year she knew him he had traveled to India and China...