"Kenny began to visit us again. Twice a week he was over for dinner, often sharing space with people from the church at our table. He actually made himself very charming and became quite well-liked by everyone. If the subject of occupation arose at dinner, he would simply get evasive, and mumble something about being between jobs. It was already well into spring, and we lived very close to the forest, so he would take me out for short walks on the trails. We didn't talk very much, but he seemed to know a lot about the various trees and plants, and about forest ecology itself. It turned out that he was a university drop out, that he had majored in environmental sciences, but had to leave school because he couldn't keep up with tuition, being much on his own with only a few paltry government loans to help keep him alive. Later, it came out that he started doing sex work then to help pay for things, but then he fell on drugs and addictions, which only made everything worse.
"Well, it turns out that one of our dinner guests from the church was a deacon. Who already knew Kenny. I don't suppose you have to work too hard in order to guess why..."
"Let's see," Carl says, trying not too hard not to smile, "Could he have been one of Kenny's johns?"
"Brilliant deduction. Of course, Kenny did tell me all this when we went for our walk after in the forest. Seeing his regular there at table, he suddenly lost his appetite, and I wasn't always that fond of Dad's cooking, so we made a quick and easy exit.
"At the church, the shit really started to hit the fan. Apparently, the deacon ratted us out to the rector, who went to the regional dean, who went to the archbishop. That filthy little hypocrite of a dean, you know, paying Kenny in drag to suck his dick for him, then getting all sanctimonious and righteous and basically calling for burning at the stake for my father as a morally loose heretic and Kenny as a corruptor of clergy. And especially squealing foul about the corrupting and trauma of poor innocent little old me.
"But the archbishop saw through the deacon's little game, and decided to play on our side..."
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