8
Logan
“It’s just as gloomy as I remember,” Shawn mutters to himself once the droning priest is out of earshot.
“No one asked you to come with us.”
“Mom did,” Aiden corrects me, which explains why he also tagged along. “She said something about moral support.”
I nod, my teeth settling into their well-worn grit, and my tongue traces the seam the dentist left behind on my repaired molar. I didn’t want an audience for this meeting with Celine’s mother, but nobody asked me.
Despite marrying into the Hayes family, my mother still insisted on attending church where her family did where she grew up.
I never felt as much connection with the congregation as she did at Saint Mary Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows.
Aside from Celine, there weren’t many members I’d had any interest in talking to in all the years I’d attended regularly.
Our mother, sitting several rows ahead of us, casts all her children a sweeping, reproachful look for not joining her closer to the front, but we’re already a few minutes into the service, so we shrug and stay put.
It’s not the first time we waited until after our mother found her friends, catching up with them in the first few rows, holding out until the organ music started before the three of us settled into the very last pew. It’s the kind of shit we wouldn’t get away with when Dad came with us.
The priest is pontificating about life’s lack of meaning without the Almighty, and right on cue, Aiden nudges Shawn and repeats, “I hear you have a God-sized hole in you to fill.”
Shawn snorts and tries to smother a smile behind a hand. My brothers’ immature snickering echoes off the vaulted ceiling for a moment before austere organ music fills the church again.
I elbow Aiden’s side, hushing the pair of them.
It’s oddly reminiscent of when we were younger, our father rapping our knuckles for every hint of a smile during the sermon, except now I’m on the other side of it, alone. I don’t know how I got here.
Some rows ahead, I catch sight of Celine, sitting in a pew with her mom and brother. I hoped we would get a chance to discuss how we would break the news to her family, but the moment never came.
I recognize her brother Kyle, as he tilts his head to her and murmurs, “You would pick the humorless one.”
I blow out a long, slow sigh. That would be me, then.
It didn’t sting quite as much as it might have.
I’d already resigned myself to the knowledge that Celine’s family would hate me for the rest of eternity after we tell them that we’re breaking things off.
I’ve found a little more peace with it, now, and I’m starting to see how the break was a long time coming.
Maybe I’d been the only one who couldn’t see it.
Aiden is folding one of the donation envelopes into a paper airplane when the cue summons the rattle of everyone shuffling from their seat as the kneelers swing down on their hinges. The three of us fall into position, knees pressed against the padded bar.
“Was there a particular reason you gave me the slip, the other night?” Shawn asks under his breath, giving me a sidelong look, and of course Aiden’s attention immediately snaps to the both of us with eager curiosity.
Biting the inside of my cheek, I give my head a brief shake, and any opportunity for further questions is thankfully lost under the prayer the congregation speaks in something almost resembling unison.
The past week or so, these interludes with Ava have become my routine.
We skip past the hellos and, often, I find I’m inside Ava while I’m still trying to think how to ask her about her day.
Each banal detail she gives me about her job or the coworkers that annoy her is hard won.
Each time before I leave, I think about asking Ava if I can make her breakfast tomorrow morning, how perfect it would be to wake up holding her.
I won’t care that my family will ask where I’ve been if I get to see her first.
And then the trek back home is too brief and still terribly long. The clock moves maybe twenty minutes driving home after seeing her, and every time, I spend the first fifteen thinking about just turning around.
I take the moment while everyone’s heads are down and hands are clasped to slip out of the pew, the carpet muffling my footsteps as I slip into a different part of the building.
Alone, wandering the empty halls, I sigh, scrub a hand over my face, and rake my fingers through my hair, searching for some amount of relief from the impending nothingness before me.
The prospect of ending the engagement formally with Celine’s family present isn’t nearly as stressful as staring down the aisle was, but it’s also no picnic. We’re two weeks out from the full moon, and yet I still feel the agitated creature that lives within me pacing its cage.
It is what I want, I remind myself. Still, I can’t help but hesitate. I’d had everything planned out before me.
Every week I went through the motions of accompanying my mother to confession on Thursday and Sunday mass, the whole nine yards.
But every muttered Hail Mary was empty. I was always thinking about work emails and delivery schedules.
Every time I sat in confession, I lied to the priest, making up some story about cutting another driver off in traffic. Grave sins indeed.
It turns out it’s no better when I do have something I ought to confess. Am I supposed to tell a priest that I’ve spent almost every night these last two weeks feeling her unravel on my cock, fingers, or tongue? I doubt I could even dig up an ounce of guilt. It would just be bragging.
It never really bothered me that I didn’t have the passion to believe in something, anything, really.
I enjoyed the ritual, the time, the quiet, the routine.
I liked the structure, the predictability.
I could scaffold a calendar for the rest of my life just using this rubric.
Not that long ago, I was certain that I could see whatever children Celine and I would have christened here, learn when to sit, stand, say the prayers.
For a moment, it almost makes me smile to imagine them making the same tasteless jokes my brothers made, before I see myself in the place of my father, disciplining small knuckles, reminding them it was important to feel bad for just existing.
It made me falter, stopping in my tracks. The scaffold of structure wilts into a debt of endless Sundays for a Heaven I don’t know that I’ve ever believed in.
The muted sound of the congregation seeps through the walls while I remain stuck in this thought. I don’t know how I won’t live the same life my dad did, be shaped the same way by it.
Suddenly, I’m craving a bit of fresh air. It’s too warm inside the building. I push on the fire exit door, propping it open with a loose brick from the courtyard path, so I don’t get locked out.
The courtyard leads into a slightly overgrown but otherwise well-kept graveyard. I recognize a lot of the family names on the gravestones, other congregants, surnames of my mother’s friends. Without a thought, I drift the well-known path to my family plot and find my Aunt Danielle’s headstone.
It had been such a scandal to have her buried here, on church grounds, that I was still hearing about it decades later. I lean over the headstone, chipping some lichen off with my nail.
She died because she didn’t have a pack to keep her from going feral, the narrative I’ve heard a hundred times over.
She didn’t have nearly as many family members as I had.
But I can’t shake the feeling that I know what she went through, that I’ve brushed that same terror of not being able to change back, overruled by the full-moon frenzy coursing through my veins.
There’s this awful, lethargic feeling that threatens to creep back up when I think about the ways I built my life to avoid Danielle’s fate: being alone, without family.
And now, I am bound to them no matter how I pull, straining at the end of a leash. Trapped by home and house and honor and tradition, and worst of all, loyalty. I could never leave Mystic Falls, the historic Hayes House, or Aconite Ales.
I’d like to believe that Ava is my mate.
I want it to be real. She’s irreverent and energetic and so utterly different from what I thought I liked in a person.
I wonder if maybe that’s what I like best about her; she’s a distraction, unburdened by the gloom of my family lore.
Is it just that she makes me forget I have real responsibilities to attend to?
“. . . then these are for a funeral tomorrow morning, and these are for the baptism after the mass . . . ”
I look beyond the courtyard for the voice, where the church’s parking lot curls around the property, and freeze when I spot a familiar truck with faded lettering.
Jesus fucking Christ, it’s her. Ava. Here.
I’m pretty sure we’re an hour out of Mystic Falls—how far do I have to go before I can rest assured we won’t bump into each other? I’m not sure my heart can keep up with the number of times she’s just popped out of the woodwork: my own personal jump scare.
Ava’s in the process of unloading flowers from the back of her truck onto a handcart—a veritable bushel of lilies, another of daisies—checking them off her clipboard list, when she turns and spots me.
I see the exact moment she realizes it’s me. A smile takes over her, and she looks happier to see me than anyone ever has. “Hey!”
“You don’t go here,” falls out of my mouth before I can come up with anything a little less stunned to see her.
“But you do,” Ava counters quickly, pausing a moment to let her eyes rove over me, assessing me with a glance. She’s got on a muddy pair of overalls, her hair swept up in a messy bun that some wisps are falling out of.