Page 34 of Saint
Indifference?
And then I realize what he’s looking at.
The key around my neck. The key he must recognize as belonging to my cage. I clear my throat and try to tuck it under the collar of my scapular. Maybe he doesn’t recognize it. Maybe he’s forgotten that we used to play with chastity at all.
“That is truly spectacular,” Brother Crispin says wryly. “I can’t see why you don’t show that off more often.”
“They could make it into a stained-glass window,” Brother Denis suggests. “The iconography is actually quite striking.”
Because I’m a masochist, I look over to Jamie, already braced for his superior amusement. But I don’t find any—either superiority or amusement. Instead he is looking at me with something like understanding...and pity. Probably all the things he’s heard about me in bits and pieces are starting to make sense. Here is Aiden Bell the fuck-up, who was so famously a fuck-up that only a monastery could fix him.
I feel stupid all over again, standing there with the warm summer air kissing my shoulder, my regr-tat exposed to everyone, the idiocy of the Flamin’ Hot Aiden story still making everyone erupt in giggles. My fellow brothers are looking at me like they’ve never met me before—which isn’tuntrue given how hard I’ve worked to change who I am since I came here—and Elijah is looking at me with that inscrutable gaze, and Jamie is looking very sorry for me, his eyes soft behind his glasses and his free hand fiddling with his Apple Watch, which has probably already logged ten thousand steps today.
I shrug my habit back on and zip it up, smoothing my scapular back over the front of my robe before plonking myself back on the bench and shoving my head in my hands. I can’t believe I just told the Flamin’ Hot story to two-bicycle rack, senior outreachJamie, of all people.
I close my eyes against my palms and pray someone brings me another beer. Preferably the Archangel.
“So,” Jamie says as everyone settles back in their seats, “I do have a question actually. How does one become a monk?”
I recognize immediately that he’s trying to be polite and helpful and shift the conversation to something less embarrassing to me. Little does he know.
“Well, if you’re Brother Patrick,” Brother Amos says, grinning behind his beard, “you come in through the gift shop.”
The brothers all laugh; this is a perennial fave. It’s the “Free Bird” of Mount Sergius stories. I usually never mind it being a favorite because itisfunny, but now with Jamie and Elijah here—Elijah who still knows so little about why and how I came to the abbey—it feels like agony waiting to happen.
Elijah straightens up. “Sorry, you said through the gift shop?”
“Oh yes,” Brother Crispin says. “One morning, right after the gift shop opens, Brother Patrick comes staggering in.”
“In his pajamas,” Brother Amos adds.
“Walks right up to the counter where we keep our cash register and says to me—”
“‘I’d like to become a monk, please,’” Brother Amos finishes for him.
Brothers Thomas and Titus are already cracking up.
“Maybe I should go get everyone more beer,” I say, standing up. I don’t need to watch Jamie and Elijah’s faces while they listen to yet another tale ofAiden Bell, Ridiculous Man.
“Aw, come on, Brother Patrick,” Brother Crispin says. “Stay and tell it yourself!”
I wave a hand. “You all tell it better than me anyway,” I say with smile. “I’ll be right back.”
I hear him start up with the story again as I walk into the taproom and start pouring everyone a round of the Raphael—our farmhouse saison—and load the tulip glasses onto a tray. And then when I’m done, I brace my hands against the bar for a moment and close my eyes. I knew even that day that I was being so very Aiden; I knew that showing up in my pajamas and asking a gift shop employee where I could sign up for Monk School was no less impulsive or outrageous than anything else I’d done in my silly life.
But it had been different in one important way. Because after years and years of running from the slithers and whispers in my mind, I wasn’t chasing sex or alcohol or money in order to drown the whispers out. I was searching for a safe place to confront them once and for all—even if I didn’t entirely understand that’s what I had been doing at the time.
And if I needed any more proof that God exists, it was right there in what happened that damp, desperate morning. Because as a confused Brother Crispin went to go get Father Harry, Brother Connor happened to walk in. And instead of seeming surprised that a grown-ass man in pajamas was trying to become a monk at the gift shop checkout counter, he nodded to himself, like he’d been expecting me.
“Would you like some coffee?” he’d asked gently, and then after leaving a note for Brother Crispin, took me to the south cloister and fed me breakfast. We talked—him asking compassionate, delicate questions, me as shaky as someone who’d just escaped a burning building—and afterward, he took me straight to the abbot. At the time, I had no idea how unusual this was, how many steps I was skipping. I had no idea ofanything. The last time I’d gone to a Mass that wasn’t a wedding or a baptism was for my sister’s funeral, and that had been so bleak and awkward and awful that I’d never had the energy to come back for something that wasn’t explicitly a happy event.
So when the abbot greeted me warmly and took me for a walk around the grounds, I assumed that was the way it was done. I assumed he would hand me some robes and a rosary and then swat me on the butt the way basketball coaches do to players before they take the court. I assumed I was in, and all I had left to do was give him the keys to my truck and figure out if I needed to learn Latin or something.
But when we got to the graveyard, and the old oak tree I would come to know as Brother Connor’s tree, the abbot stopped, and instead of giving me ayou’re hiredhandshake, he turned and looked up at the hill, which crested above the abbey in a sweep of rock and tall, dry grass.
“I love this hill,” he said. “I love watching the shadows of the clouds move over its face. I love how it breaks the wind in winter, as if it’s trying to throw its arms around me. I love waking to it, each morning, like an old friend.”
It was the hill that had brought me there, actually, which he’d already known from what I told him on our walk. But seeing it like this, tall and friendly and strong—a fort of nothing but wind and grass—I couldfeelthe words that had brought me here. I could feel them moving over my body like the shadows of the clouds the abbot had just described.
