Page 9 of Holly Jolly Heresy
“Of course, I didn’t tell her until later that I was talking to the old man who lived next door. He had a long white beard, and his name was Mr. Lord.”
“You thought God was your neighbor?”
“Seemed more reasonable than an invisible, omniscient deity. My mother was unamused. She’d told all her friends I was blessed but the whole time I was just getting into shouting matches with my crotchety old neighbor over the ball I lost in his yard.”
He hung his head, smiling, taking a moment to imagine seven-year-old Molly’s feud with her neighbor. “I wanted to yell at God,” he continued, focusing his eyes on the space between theirhands. Hardly any distance at all, but one he couldn’t cross. “Instead, I got in trouble. A lot of trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Stupid kid stuff. I broke into the high school the night before graduation and TP’d the principal’s office. Set all the frogs in the biology lab free my freshman year of college. Things like that.”
“Why?”
“Because maybe I wasn’t being loud enough.” He met her eyes, desperate for her to understand. “I believed the stories. I believed them so much it hurt, because Moses got a burning bush and Joseph got dreams, and Paul got a voice on the road to Damascus, and I gotnothing.”
His chest heaved, the pain of those years still jagged beneath his ribs. And she waited, her gaze steady and patient, as her pinky dragged along the edge of his hand. Just once. A single swipe of her skin on his, a balm and torture all at once.
“Then one day, just before Christmas break my freshman year of college, I went to the chapel on campus. To this day, I’m not sure what I intended to do, but I was angrier than I’d ever been and I wanted to know He saw. That He knew. I wanted Him to take some responsibility for the tangled-up mess He’d made of me.”
“What happened?”
“I met Father Raymond. And it felt like, for the first time, God was listening.” He pulled his hands away, dropping them in his lap, though each fraction of an inch he put between them felt wrong. “He helped me find a way through the mess and the anger, and when I didn’t know what to do with my time if I wasn’t being mad at God anymore, Father Raymond told me I should try loving Him instead.”
“How?”
“By loving His people. By helping other angry, mixed-up kids know they are loved. Father Raymond showed me I could havea purpose, a way to turn my years of frustration into something good. Something to help people. I contacted the Diocese the next day.”
Her brow furrowed in something he would have called confusion if she didn’t look so pained by it. “God isn’t the one who makes angry, mixed-up kids doubt they are loved, Caleb,” she said, her voice shaking slightly. “The Church does that.”
He bristled at the accusation. “No institution is perfect.”
“Institutions protect themselves, not the people in them,” she practically spat, the frustration in her words bubbling over.
He blinked, struggling to place the source of the sudden shift in her mood, the unexpected hurt of it dragging his own frustrations to the surface. “Are you…mad at me for joining the priesthood?”
Her cheeks flushed scarlet, and she avoided making eye contact. “I’m not mad at you, Father.”
He winced at her use of the honorific, the word slashing across his skin as the new, fragile closeness between them begin to crumble. Caleb swallowed down the bitterness at the loss. Distance was safer anyway.
“Here we are!” The waitress reappeared, her arms loaded down with their lunch, but all Caleb could see was Molly, her whiskey eyes and the freckles across the bridge of her nose that he’d memorized months ago and the disappointed downturn of her lips.
Molly, who saw him in ways he hadn’t been seen in so long he’d almost forgotten what it was like to have someone seehimbefore they saw his profession.
Molly, who challenged him as he hadn’t been challenged in decades, who tangled him up inside in new, exciting ways that made him never want to unravel it.
He’d said something wrong. Somehow, he’d let her down. A clawing, scraping need dragged itself up his throat, desperate tosnatch back whichever words had put that look on her face, to make her understand, to go back to easy smiles and banter about pizza.
Tell her the truth.
But what truth would make her look at him with that sparkle in her eyes again? The truth that he’d devoted the last twenty-five years of his life to an institution he was no longer sure he believed in? That everything he knew about faith, about God, was telling him one thing while the Church he’d vowed to serve told him something else entirely? That he wanted her to understand how he’d gotten here, even if he was more convinced by the day it was a mistake? That he was terrified to leave because he didn’t know who he was anymore if he wasn’t a priest?
Except you do. You’re the man you are when you’re with her.
She blinked, her eyes clearing and her smile stuttering, before it morphed into the plastic version she wore at faculty meetings. He hated it, wanted to reach across the table and drag his thumb across her bottom lip to wipe the lie from her face. He’d thought they were getting closer, but she’d never felt farther away.
She reached for her fork and knife. “This looks delicious. Do you want some?”
“Molly.” His voice was hoarse.
