“Yes. You did.”
Sister Cortona took a deep breath. “I’m going to tell you a story.”
“Really? Now?”
“You told me to talk to you like one of the preschoolers, and I guess we’re having story time.”
Patrick motioned for her to proceed.
“You know I wasn’t always a nun.” Honestly, Patrick had thought she’d come out of the womb with a habit, but he wasn’t about to risk his neck by saying that. “Before that, I was a girl in love.”
He couldn’t picture her in love. “What does that have to do with me? You’re now a nun, and—”
“I wish I wasn’t.”
Patrick’s knees dropped. Hearing people’s confessions for a decade about everything from bad thoughts to petty theft to marital infidelity had made him mostly impervious to shock about what would come out of people’s mouths. But Sister Cortona had truly shocked him. “Okay . . .”
“If I had gone after her when she asked me to, I wouldn’t be here trying to convince you not to make the same mistake that I made when I was just a wee lesbian.” Patrick laughed. Their binge watch of Derry Girls had more significance now.
“But that was before you’d taken vows, right?”
“Yes, but it’s the same. I was in love, but I was afraid. I was too afraid of disappointing my parents—the fucking homophobes they were, God rest their souls—to do what would have made me happy.”
“You could leave and be happy now.”
“She’s married to a lovely woman and has three kids.” Cortona shook her head. “You, however, have a chance to make a real life.”
“I have a real life.”
“Neither of us do.”
“Then why do you stay?”
“I don’t know. I’m still afraid. It’s probably why I’m so mean. But, right now, I’m a nun so that I can make sure you don’t waste your stupid, pretty face on getting fondled by septuagenarian widows until you’re old and decrepit like me.”
Patrick looked down. “I don’t have anything to offer her.”
“You have yourself. If you decide not to be a coward.”
“That has never been enough.”
“Then you don’t see what I do.” That was the nicest thing that Sister Cortona had ever said to him. It was bordering on mushy. That’s probably why she felt the need to add, “But I’m starting to see why she dumped you.”
“Are you going to tell the diocese about me and Sasha?” He might be considering asking to be laicized, but he was still afraid of causing a scandal. It might jeopardize the pre-K program.
“No. You are, when you tell the bishop that you’re in love and intend to leave.” Sister Cortona looked around the bar. “Nice place.”
Patrick grokked that the subject was closed. He looked around, happy that he was in a familiar place. This was as much his home as the house he’d grown up in or the rectory.
“Are you going to stay?” Learning what he had that night, he was filled with concern for Sister Cortona. If she wasn’t happy, she should leave. It was so simple when it was someone else.
But she blew out air. “I have to stay and break in the new dummy that they send to ruin the place.”
“Do you ever think that it’s beyond saving?”
“St. Bart’s?” Patrick nodded, and she continued, “Every time you give me a hard time about the budget.”
“What about the whole thing?” Maybe if priests and nuns couldn’t have real lives, it wasn’t worth it. A thing that held fetid, grotesque secrets and protected abusers for millennia had been the foundation of his life. He’d never questioned it. And the privilege in that made him feel dirty and ruined. It was only when he could no longer conform to the expectations he’d gladly taken on that he’d begun to question it.
She paused. “It exists and is going to continue to exist. I have no real power in the institution, but I do have power in people’s lives. We feed the sick and minister to the poor, and I don’t always agree with how we do it. Like all institutions, it is corrupt. If we lived in a utopia, there would be no reason for the Church to exist. It is ancient and broken. Like all ancient things. The institution itself is a false idol. But I also take comfort in the fact that it is ancient. There will be women after me who take vows and teach children and take care of the sick that no one else will touch.”
Patrick understood what she was saying. Human beings were wired for ritual, and he’d found purpose in being the conduit for the ancient. In the liminal spaces—especially the ones between life and death—he felt purpose. He may have lost God, but he’d never lost the sense that being there to assure a family that their small one was never going to be alone, or a man dying too soon and away from his family that he would be welcomed into whatever came after, was important.
Could he give that up?
“You could give it up for her.”
Patrick had almost forgotten that Sister Cortona was there, staring at him while he tried to process everything that he’d told her. “Are you a mind reader or something?”
She took another sip of beer. “Comes along with the habit.”
“You’re not wearing one.”
“You ask too many questions.”
And everything that she’d said to him was making him ask more. Before she’d walked into the bar, he’d felt hopeless—as bad as things had been after his mother’s death. Watching Sasha step away from him was like watching his heart walk out of a room. He didn’t know that he could survive it. He looked down at his third scotch of the night.
“Finish your drink and close up.” Sister Cortona made a motion to his tumbler. “It won’t do to have you dying before you make your escape.”
* * *
—
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, PATRICK found himself staring at his mother’s headstone in the Catholic cemetery near his father’s house. The ground was wet from a midsummer storm, but he sat down anyway. The lilies he always picked up on his way to his mother’s resting place were in his lap. For some reason, he didn’t feel like giving them to her yet.
When his mother had gotten sick, he’d still been young enough that he hadn’t gotten to know her as a person. As she wasted away, he’d been able to see her humanity slipping from her, but his personal pain had come from the fact that his mother was dying. His father may have been stingy with emotional support—thank you to toxic masculinity—but his mother had lavished both him and Chris with it.