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Out of the blue, a wave of fear for my sister absolutely crushed me. Of worry. Of missing my sister. I pressed a hand to my chest and a sob hiccupped out of me. I bent my head, trying to get myself together.
“Lass, lass, what’s gotten into you?” The priest abandoned the pea plants, the string falling into the dirt. Awkwardly, he patted my uninjured shoulder once and then sort of hovered.
“I’m sorry.” I gave him a watery smile. “I just really miss my sister.”
“You’re close, then.”
“Yes.”
It was all I said because there was no explaining the bond I had with Zilla. There was nothing this pseudostranger could say and so he didn’t try, returning to the pea plants. It was comforting to just work in silence.
“Do you have any siblings?” I finally asked.
“I am the youngest of four brothers,” he said. “Each of us fewer than two years apart.”
“Your poor mom.”
“Indeed.”
“So, Father, if you don’t mind me asking, what made you decide to join the church?”
“It’s not a very interesting story,” he said. “I’d rather hear how you met your husband.”
He looked up at me under his lashes, letting me know he didn’t believe our story.
“You first,” I said with a smile.
“Ma always wanted one of her sons to be a priest.”
“Your other brothers weren’t interested?”
“They were occupied.”
“Having families?”
“Getting arrested.”
I laughed before I caught myself and the priest smiled, pleased. “Two of them managed to straighten out and get married. Gave me four nephews and two nieces.”
“The other one?”
“Died. In jail.” He made a sign of the cross. “We grew up in a shite neighborhood. Council housing. Gangs. Bad schools. It was the kind of place that didn’t want you to succeed, I reckon. And when I got the job as a teacher up here, I thought I would have something in common with those boys, but I’d been so green they just made meat out of me.”
“Ronan grew up in the same kind of neighborhood. He told me when he was little, he wanted to be a priest because they seemed to have so much power.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” he said. “Where did you grow up? Not in the same neighborhoods as me and Ronan, I imagine.”
“What makes you say that?”
“You got this . . . shine about you. This hope.” He looked up at me, squinting against the sunlight. “Makes me think you grew up thinking you could do anything. Be anything.”
“I did,” I said, startled to realize, in a way, that was true. I was equally startled to realize I still had any innocence left. Perceived or not. I felt hard to the touch. Brittle all the way through. “Until I was eighteen. And then . . . my sister got sick, and everything sort of fell apart.” I felt the ghostly grip of the senator’s hands around my fingers.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Me too, but . . .” I smiled again. “I did have a nice childhood, though. My sister and I both. We grew up by a pond and we had a lot of freedom and we had each other.”
“I’m glad.” He nodded and handed me the next end of string so I could tie it to the top row of the fence.
The black cat I’d seen the other day was prowling through the tall grass near the shed. It pounced on something and another cat jumped out of the grass to wrestle.
“There are a lot of cats around here,” I said.
“There used to be a feral cat colony here years ago. Sinead saved three of them. One of them adjusted to living in her house but the other two keep coming back up here to sleep with my cow in the shed.”
“What happened to the rest of them?”
“Father McConal had them killed some years ago. Said they were pests, and he was trying to prove a point.”
“To who?”
“One of the boys who lived here.”
“That’s a mean way to prove a point.”
“Yes. It was.” He nodded and the conversation drifted into silence.
Within a few minutes, I’d tied the last of the string and he was brushing the loamy black dirt off his hands. Below us, there was still no sign of the car. I wasn’t ready to go in yet. The sunshine was warm, the breeze was briny, and I felt better than I had . . . in ages.
“It’s so pretty here, isn’t it? Looks like a postcard.”
“The church has offered to move me over the years. To someplace bigger with more people.”
“You’re not interested?”
“At first, I was worried that if I left, they wouldn’t find someone to live here, and St. Brigid’s deserves better than to be all alone. But now, it’s my home and I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else.”
“It must be nice to know where you belong,” I said, unable to hide the longing in my voice.
