Page 77 of Saint
“Aww, how come I don’t get a smile?”
“We’ve been over this. You’re not best uncle. But,” he adds with a dramatic exhale, “I guess I could ask you how your trip is going anyway.”
I look around the clearing at the ancient grotto and the big trees and the naked man sprawled on a blanket with his head pillowed on his arms and one knee drawn up.
“It’s going great,” I say honestly.
“And you’re really thinking of moving to Europe?” Sean asks doubtfully. “To become a Europe monk or something?”
“I’m thinking of switching orders, and I’m looking at some monasteries of that order here in Europe, yes.”
He stares at me a moment, and I stare back. Bell brothers come in two varieties—blond-haired and blue-eyed, or dark-haired and green-eyed. Sean’s the former, and I’m the latter. But we all came out of the same Bell factory and so sometimes looking at Sean is like looking at an older, blonder mirror of myself, especially when we’re both making anare you serious right now?face at each other.
“You know as a medieval landowner hoping to preserve Josie’s inheritance that I support you being a monk. But do you have to be a monk so far away? I barely see you when you’re a monk inKansas. And now you’re thinking about joining an abbey in Liechtenstein or something?”
“Ha. The one in Ireland is the one I’m interested in, if you’re wondering.”
“Ireland,” Sean says, bouncing Josie a little. “Our family’s from Ireland. I don’t know if you knew that.”
“Somehow that hasn’t escaped me after two decades of watching you and Dad get drunk at the local Irish festival while listening to very loud, very bagpipe-y cover bands.”
“Oh, like you’re better than IrishFest. Like you’re better than the Red Hot Chilli Pipers. Who areScottishby the way, so I don’t even know what point you’re trying to prove.”
“Also you can come and visit me, you know,” I say. “Stop impregnating your wife for half a minute and then come out to my Irish sea cliffs.”
“Elijah sent me pictures of that place,” Sean says, looking down at something on his desk. I realize it’s a pair of video baby monitors. Satisfied by what he sees, which is presumably two sleeping children, he looks back up at me. “It lookedverydepressing.”
“It’s not depressing!” I protest. “It’s starkly poetic.”
“Poetic is a synonym for depressing, and you know it. Even poets know it. What about where you’re at now? Is that an olive grove behind you? Aren’t you really close to the sea that people pay lots of money to vacation near? What’s so wrong with this place that you’d rather go to the depressing abbey instead?”
I look around the clearing again, my mouth folding into a fond smile as I watch Elijah sleep in the sunshine. With him on his stomach and his leg hiked up like that, there’s a deep wedge of shadow between his legs that invites exploration, but also there’s something so sweet about his face like this. There’s no restraint, no doubt, no puzzling things out. Just the face of a man who hates being tickled awake and who secretly loves superhero movies even though he pretends he only likes sad indie documentaries and who will always, always chase after a stray dog and take it to a rescue shelter.
He fits in here, under the bright sun and with the wind that smells like crushed herbs, and then I think of the abbey in the valley below. Of the lavender and the chatting monks in the cloister and the sweet beer and how it feels to pray with Elijah’s kisses still stinging my lips.
“Nothing,” I say quietly. “There’s nothing wrong with this place at all.”
Sean looks at me like he wants to ask something more but decides not to. “You look good,” he says, with obvious reluctance. “You seem happier than when I saw you last.”
He’d visited me at Mount Sergius right after Josie’s birth. “That was in February. No one looks happy in February,” I say.
“No.” He shakes his head. “It’s something different. You’re more like the old you, maybe.”
That sends a ping of alarm through me. I don’t want to be like the old me. But also I think he’s right—I’m more the old Aiden Bell than ever. I’m fucking around, cursing up a storm, spending time I should be using to discern my future to screw my ex-boyfriend, and maybe that means...
No.
I’m just taking up God on his invitation, that’s all. I’m using this trip to figure out what I really want, which of course will be to stay with God at one of his abbeys, to pledge my future to him. Of course.
“Anyway,” Sean says, “Tyler will be happy to know you’re doing well. He was asking about you.”
“Is he doing okay?”
“He’s fine,” Sean says, sounding bored. “Blah, blah, he and Poppy are so very in love, blah, blah, he wants to make sure you’re happy in your chosen vocation and frets about you all the time whenever we talk. The usual. Show me more of this pretty French place you’re at. I want to take Zenny somewhere special, but we’ll bring the babies too, of course. She wouldn’t stand for leaving them for any real length of time.”
He cuddles Josie tighter as he says it though, and I suspect it’s not only Zenny who would be miserable leaving the children behind.
“Okay,” I say, relieved not to have to respond to the part about Tyler worrying about me. Even though he’d be the most natural choice to talk to about what’s going on with me and Elijah, I have the sneaking suspicion he’ll ask me hard questions and expect hard answers, and I don’t want that. No one wants to be pastored by their own brother.
