Chapter 3 #2
Last May, Caleb and Molly had found themselves alone after hours at school, decorating the hallway for the tradition of the senior entrance.
Tangled in blue and white crepe paper streamers, an ocean of silver balloons at their feet, they’d talked long after the last poster was hung, laughed until they were both drunk with it.
It was the only explanation for the way their bodies had gravitated towards each other, for the temporary insanity of turning his face into her hair, the cinnamon and bergamot scent of her so revelatory he still imagined he could smell it late at night when his thoughts drifted to things he could never admit.
Their goodbye hug had lingered a little too long, hands skating over backs and waists with a little too much reluctance to withdraw, and she’d looked at him with those big eyes like she could see every part of him.
That night, he’d almost broken his vows mere steps from his own chapel.
“I think about that night a lot,” she continued. “I liked seeing that side of you.”
He forced himself to swallow, bringing moisture back to his mouth, and folded his hands on the table. “What side?”
“You were…different. Relaxed. Sometimes it feels like you’re performing or something, like you’re always aware of people watching you.”
“Because they are.”
She nodded. “But not that night. You were just…Caleb.” His throat constricted around the words he wouldn’t allow himself to say as a sad sort of smile tilted up her lips. “I liked it.”
“I liked it too.”
“I even liked your dance moves.” He barked out a laugh, her sudden teasing releasing the tension building in his chest, and her smile widened. “Very Hugh Grant in Love Actually.”
“Ouch.” He clapped a hand over his heart. “I think I should be offended.”
“You have some impressive hip action.”
“It’s all that ballroom dancing in Mrs. White’s class at the senior center.” He chuckled to himself. “She’s determined to make me the perfect rumba partner. Right now, Gavin puts me to shame.”
“You can’t be outdone by your little brother.”
“Never.” The laughter fell away, replaced by something softer, more truthful. “I liked dancing with you.”
“More than with Mrs. White?” she teased.
“Much more.”
Her lips pressed together, and her eyebrows furrowed, despite her valiant effort to maintain her smile. “Why did you become a priest, Caleb?”
He hesitated, the practiced story of his calling springing to his lips as it had so many times over the last twenty-five years. A story he’d told so often he almost believed it himself.
But that wasn’t the story he wanted to tell her. He wanted her to know the other story—the one he’d only ever told his confessor.
“After my dad died, when I was little, Mom started taking us to church a lot more. She said Dad was with God and we could tell Him what we wanted Dad to know—the baseball games we won or the first time I jumped off the diving board without holding my nose. And I never understood. Why did I have to talk to an intermediary? Why couldn’t I just talk to my dad? ”
She leaned forward, her fingers inching closer to him across the linoleum tabletop but stopping short of actually making contact with his skin.
“For a while, I stopped going, and I know it broke Mom’s heart.
She was so comforted by the Church, and I was just…
angry. I was so angry for so long I think I stopped even registering it as an emotion.
It was just my state of being. But even through all the anger, I kept praying, hoping someone would talk back someday—God, or my Dad, it didn’t even matter because by that point they were so intertwined in my head. ”
“I told my mom God talked to me one day when I was around seven or eight,” Molly said, her fingers mere millimeters from where his hands rested on the table.
“What did He say?”
“To get off his lawn.”
Caleb laughed, loud and deep, and her lips turned up at the corners in response, though her eyes remained soft, focused on him, as though she knew he needed a reprieve from telling his story.
“Of course, I didn’t tell her until later that I was talking to the old man who lived next door. He had a long white beard, and his name was Mr. Lord.”
“You thought God was your neighbor?”
“Seemed more reasonable than an invisible, omniscient deity. My mother was unamused. She’d told all her friends I was blessed but the whole time I was just getting into shouting matches with my crotchety old neighbor over the ball I lost in his yard.”
He hung his head, smiling, taking a moment to imagine seven-year-old Molly’s feud with her neighbor. “I wanted to yell at God,” he continued, focusing his eyes on the space between their hands. Hardly any distance at all, but one he couldn’t cross. “Instead, I got in trouble. A lot of trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Stupid kid stuff. I broke into the high school the night before graduation and TP’d the principal’s office. Set all the frogs in the biology lab free my freshman year of college. Things like that.”
“Why?”
“Because maybe I wasn’t being loud enough.” He met her eyes, desperate for her to understand. “I believed the stories. I believed them so much it hurt, because Moses got a burning bush and Joseph got dreams, and Paul got a voice on the road to Damascus, and I got nothing.”
His chest heaved, the pain of those years still jagged beneath his ribs. And she waited, her gaze steady and patient, as her pinky dragged along the edge of his hand. Just once. A single swipe of her skin on his, a balm and torture all at once.
“Then one day, just before Christmas break my freshman year of college, I went to the chapel on campus. To this day, I’m not sure what I intended to do, but I was angrier than I’d ever been and I wanted to know He saw.
That He knew. I wanted Him to take some responsibility for the tangled-up mess He’d made of me. ”
“What happened?”
“I met Father Raymond. And it felt like, for the first time, God was listening.” He pulled his hands away, dropping them in his lap, though each fraction of an inch he put between them felt wrong.
“He helped me find a way through the mess and the anger, and when I didn’t know what to do with my time if I wasn’t being mad at God anymore, Father Raymond told me I should try loving Him instead. ”
“How?”
“By loving His people. By helping other angry, mixed-up kids know they are loved. Father Raymond showed me I could have a purpose, a way to turn my years of frustration into something good. Something to help people. I contacted the Diocese the next day.”
Her brow furrowed in something he would have called confusion if she didn’t look so pained by it. “God isn’t the one who makes angry, mixed-up kids doubt they are loved, Caleb,” she said, her voice shaking slightly. “The Church does that.”
He bristled at the accusation. “No institution is perfect.”
“Institutions protect themselves, not the people in them,” she practically spat, the frustration in her words bubbling over.
He blinked, struggling to place the source of the sudden shift in her mood, the unexpected hurt of it dragging his own frustrations to the surface. “Are you…mad at me for joining the priesthood?”
Her cheeks flushed scarlet, and she avoided making eye contact. “I’m not mad at you, Father.”
He winced at her use of the honorific, the word slashing across his skin as the new, fragile closeness between them begin to crumble. Caleb swallowed down the bitterness at the loss. Distance was safer anyway.
“Here we are!” The waitress reappeared, her arms loaded down with their lunch, but all Caleb could see was Molly, her whiskey eyes and the freckles across the bridge of her nose that he’d memorized months ago and the disappointed downturn of her lips.
Molly, who saw him in ways he hadn’t been seen in so long he’d almost forgotten what it was like to have someone see him before they saw his profession.
Molly, who challenged him as he hadn’t been challenged in decades, who tangled him up inside in new, exciting ways that made him never want to unravel it.
He’d said something wrong. Somehow, he’d let her down. A clawing, scraping need dragged itself up his throat, desperate to snatch back whichever words had put that look on her face, to make her understand, to go back to easy smiles and banter about pizza.
Tell her the truth.
But what truth would make her look at him with that sparkle in her eyes again?
The truth that he’d devoted the last twenty-five years of his life to an institution he was no longer sure he believed in?
That everything he knew about faith, about God, was telling him one thing while the Church he’d vowed to serve told him something else entirely?
That he wanted her to understand how he’d gotten here, even if he was more convinced by the day it was a mistake?
That he was terrified to leave because he didn’t know who he was anymore if he wasn’t a priest?
Except you do. You’re the man you are when you’re with her.
She blinked, her eyes clearing and her smile stuttering, before it morphed into the plastic version she wore at faculty meetings.
He hated it, wanted to reach across the table and drag his thumb across her bottom lip to wipe the lie from her face.
He’d thought they were getting closer, but she’d never felt farther away.
She reached for her fork and knife. “This looks delicious. Do you want some?”
“Molly.” His voice was hoarse.
“Thank you. For telling me. I really am grateful.”
“You seem angry.”
“It’s okay to be angry sometimes, Caleb. Even at God, and maybe especially at the Church.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out, her words buzzing beneath his skin like a hornet’s nest burst open in his veins.
She gestured to her pancakes again with her knife. “You sure you don’t want any?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“I mean, no. I don’t want any. Thank you.”
He watched with rapt attention as she carved off a triangle of pancake and popped it into her mouth, her eyes fluttering closed as she ate. An answering jolt of electricity raced down his spine immediately followed by a nauseating wave of guilt as those hornets continued to buzz.
Something had shifted between them. Somehow he’d put more distance between them when all he wanted was to bring her closer.
His muscles burned with the restraint required to keep from reaching for her hand, to stop himself from bringing them back to the moment when her finger glided against his skin and he thought he might die from the pleasure of it.
Worse still, he knew now, without a shadow of a doubt, he would do whatever it took to get her to look at him again the way she did that night last May.