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It's Reuben who finds the pamphlet, tucked inside the pages of a transitional missal from 1963, bought shiny and new and inscribed to Fr. Reilly, merry Christmas! inside its shiny embossed leather cover and then outdated within six months and shoved into the storage closet at the back of the rectory where it somehow or other ends up holding up the broken leg of a camel in the church's nativity scene for nearly fifty years.
(Em maintains that she should get credit for finding it, because she was the one who fixed the camel's leg, and Reuben would have never opened the dusty old thing if she hadn't taken it out and offended his sensibilities by setting it on the floor. But then Reuben inevitably points out that he was the one who volunteered to haul out the nativity scene that Saturday in the first place, and that Em shouldn't get credit when she only tagged along because they were in the middle of an argument she wanted to finish, and, well, the conversation only ever goes downhill from there.)
So it's Reuben who picks it up, grumbling at Em about leaving sacramentals on the floor (Em: "you don't know it's blessed!"; Reuben: "You don't know it's not"); it's Reuben who looks at the date on the imprimatur and sighs and flips through it to salvage the prayer cards tucked between its pages before consigning it to the FREE box.
It's Jay, though, who shows up sweaty from his after-school job, dumps his backpack in a pew and leafs idly through the pile of prayer cards before stopping and murmuring "huh" at the pamphlet.
It's the kind of pamphlet you find at the ends of pews among the offering envelopes, or on the table when you come into the vestibule between the plastic rosaries and the Project Rachel flyers. Pray this nine times on nine consecutive days, leave nine copies in the church each day, your prayer will be granted, read these implausible testimonials. Photocopied almost to illegibility. Generically saccharine Madonna on the front. World's devoutest form of chain letter.
"Does this," Jay asks, squinting at the fuzzy text, "actually have instructions on how to summon an angel?"
They all cluster round and agree that, yes, that definitely does have instructions on how to summon an angel, and apparently the late Fr. Reilly was rather more heterodox than previously assumed. ("Or someone just gave him that and he was too polite to refuse it," Reuben puts in, scrupulously charitable, but no one buys it.)
Em starts it; Reuben finds it; Jay reads it; but it's Faith who actually draws the circle, playground chalk in the parking lot, Em translating the Latin aloud and Jay watching for cars and Reuben making huffy faces and standing by with holy water "just in case."
"Holy cow," says Faith, when the angel appears, "I'm converting."
"No you're not," says Reuben, and then to the angel, "Would you like something to eat? I just made cookies."