I turn this over in my mind.
“Your mother is like St. Anselm,” Zenny goes on after a short, cute yawn. “She’s willing to engage in a spiritual practice while coexisting with a host of complicated ethical and metaphysical questions. A comfort with doubt concurrent with a commitment to living a spiritual life—that’s amazing.”
It occurs to me that it’s Zenny’s goal to live like that. That somehow in the midst of tragedy and impending death, my mom has found a relationship with faith that could make even a nun envious.
It’s a curious thought.
“Tyler’s middle name is Anselm,” I say, apropos of basically nothing, but I don’t have any response to her insights. She’s too smart and I’m still too close to the howling boy kicking his car open in a fit of drunken pain.
“See then?” Zenny murmurs, and I know she’s very close to sleep now. “I bet she already knows all this.”
I snug my little nun in close and stare at the lights outside as she sleeps in a temptingly sweet burrow against me. I think about God on trial and my mother’s rosary until my thoughts blend into unhappy dreams, dreams I can’t remember when I wake the next morning.
It’s a Saturday, and Zenny has a clinical rotation today—her first—and she has to stop by the shelter afterwards to help with dinner. I practically gnash my teeth in frustration, because after being so twisted up over God and Mom last night and after my (very noble and very stupid) insistence on sleep instead of play last night, my cock is approximately the hardness of a carbon dwarf star, and the gravity of its need is insane. My thoughts, my hand, everything feels like it’s pulling toward my aching organ, and I just want to fuck it all away, I want to ride Zenny until my chest stops hurting and my thoughts are clear again.
But I won’t, not even when I get her back tonight, because of the plan. The stupid fucking plan that I can’t let go of. Although as much as I’d like to fuck her, I am pretty excited about tonight.
We’re going on a date.
I have to call in a favor from Aiden (sigh), but even that can’t dampen my excitement as I get everything ready.
“Sixty dollars,” Aiden’s saying as I finish up a few odds and ends in my home office before I get Zenny from the shelter.
“Sixty? Are you insane?”
“Oh, like you’re not good for it,” Aiden says dismissively. “And are you going to tell me who this girl is or what?”
I think for a minute. Aiden’s not exactly what I would label “trustworthy.” Once, right after college, he promised to help me move a couch into my apartment, and then moved to Belize the next day. (He came back a month later with a sunburn, a fresh hatred of tequila, and a vague story about a girl named Jessica.) Last year, I spent God knows how many hours touring lofts and condos with him, examining minute differences between exposed brick and stained concrete, and then he up and bought a creaky farmhouse in the middle of nowhere without a word.
The nice word for Aiden is spontaneous and the less nice word is flaky, and either way I slice it, I’m not sure that I can trust him with a secret like this. For all I know, he’ll meet another Jessica and somehow end up at the Vatican telling the Pope about Zenny and me.
But also I have this adolescent need to talk about her. I want someone else to know how fucking smart she is, how fucking pretty, how fucking sweet and tart all at once. I want to talk about her contradictions and her layers, I want to talk about the things she dredges up inside me—these old sensory glimpses of churches and rituals—about the version of Sean I remember when I’m around her.
I want to talk about how much I want her, how much I need her, and how much that doesn’t scare me.
“It’s Zenny Iverson,” I say quickly before I can change my mind. “Zenobia. Elijah’s sister.”
A silence yawns on the other end.
“Aiden? You still there?”
He doesn’t answer right away, but when he does, his voice is strangled. “Elijah’s sister?”
“Yes.”
“The nun?”
How does he know about that when even I, Elijah’s best friend, didn’t? “It’s a long story,” I say.
“You’re taking a nun on a date,” Aiden says, as if he’s a teacher laying out a remedial logic problem for a student to solve. “You’re dating a nun.”
“Not…exactly,” I hedge. “It’s complicated.”
“Oh my God,” Aiden says. “Elijah’s going to kill you.”
“Elijah is not going to know,” I say firmly. “Because Zenny and I won’t tell him.”
“But—” Aiden makes a fretting noise.
“There’s no buts, man. It’s not like you’re going to see him to tell him, and no one else is going to tell him, and it’s going to be fine.”
Aiden is still making agitated sputters.
“And anyway, we should be talking about you. I notice you haven’t been raiding my fridge the past few days; I wondered if you’d died or something.”
“I’m just busy,” he says, and there’s a note of evasion in his voice. But with Aiden, evasion is sometimes par for the course. He’s Belize Boy, after all.
“Okay, fine. I won’t pry. Just tell me if you’re dating a nun too.”
That earns me a laugh. “I’m not as bonkers as you.”
“Yet,” I warn, and I do mean it as a joke, but it does come out with a prophetic sort of ring and hangs in the air as we finish making plans for tonight and wrap up the call.
Chapter 18
“Where are we going?” Zenny asks. “And why is there sixty dollars tucked into your console?”
“You’ll see. And there’s sixty dollars because it’s a fancy date, Zenny-bug.” I’m kidding, obviously, because I could easily spend tens of thousands of dollars on a single night with her—and I considered it, I really did. I thought about whisking her away to St. Bart’s or Paris or the Seychelles, but somehow I knew that wouldn’t impress her.
And I do want to impress her. Or more accurately, I want her to have fun, I want her to be happy, I want her to feel what it’s like not to have the world on her shoulders. I want to see her smile and laugh. I want tonight to belong to her, not to her nursing degree, not to her shelter, not to her family’s subverted expectations. Nothing gets to claim her tonight but laughter and bad pizza.
Zenny misses the humor in my tone though, because she rubs her hands uncomfortably on her jeans. “Should I change?”
I glance pointedly down at my own clothes—jeans and an artfully rumpled button-down. “You’re dressed perfectly.”
“Okay,” she says, and then makes a noise that is somewhere between nervousness and self-deprecation at said nervousness. “Between the new nursing scrubs and the jumper, sometimes I feel like I forget how to dress for the real world. Not that I know where we’re going in the real world,” she adds pointedly.
I don’t take the bait. It’s going to be a fucking surprise. I shift gears as we merge onto the interstate south, and then I ask, “So you’ll wear the habit all the time after your vows, but you don’t have to wear the postulant’s uniform all the time now?”