Page 78 of Priest (Priest 1)
Not really.
Now that we had established I wasn’t just some random guy harassing dancers, I tried again. “Do you know where Poppy went?”
The bartender turned pitying. “No. She gave her notice so fast, and she didn’t tell anybody why she was quitting or where she was going, although we all knew about the pictures, so we guessed it had something to do with those. She didn’t tell you?”
“No,” I said, and I picked up my martini again. Some truths went better with gin.
She hung her towel off a nearby rack and then spun toward me again. “You know, now that I think about it, I think she left something here when she came to pack up her things. Let me go grab it.”
I tapped my fingers against the stainless steel bar, not letting myself believe that it was something as important as a letter left specifically for me, but still craving it all the same. How could she just have left? Without a word?
Had it all meant that little to her?
Not for the first time, my chest went concave, crumpling inward with the pain of it. The pain of one-sided love, of knowing that I had loved her more than she had loved me.
Is this how God feels all the time?
What a sobering thought.
The bartender came back with a thick white envelope. It had my name on it, Sharpied in hasty, thick strokes. When I took it, I knew immediately what it was, but I opened it anyway, more pain slashing through my gut as I pulled out Lizzy’s rosary and felt its weight in my hand.
I held it up for just a minute, watching the cross spin wildly in the low light of the dance floor, and then I thanked the bartender, slung back the rest of my martini, and left, leaving Sean to have his strip-adventures on his own.
It was over. Really, it had been over the moment I’d seen Sterling and Poppy kiss, but somehow I knew that this was her definitive signal that there was nothing left between us. Even though I’d given the rosary freely, as a gift, had never thought once about wanting it back, she had seen it as some sort of bond, some sort of debt, and she was rejecting that bond, just as she’d rejected me.
Yes. It was time I accepted it.
It was over.
I’d love to say that I walked out the club and used this newfound closure to get my life together. I’d love to tell you that a white dove came fluttering down and the heavens opened and God told me exactly where to go and what to do.
Most of all, I’d love to tell you that the rosary—and the implicit message it sent—healed my broken heart, and I spent no more nights thinking of Poppy, no more days scouring the internet for mentions of her name.
But it took longer than that. I spent the next two weeks much like I’d spent the two weeks before I got the rosary back: listening to the Garden State soundtrack and apathetically filling out applications for different degree programs, imagining in vivid detail what Poppy was doing right then (and whom she was doing it with.) I went to Jordan’s church and mumbled my way through Masses, I exercised constantly, and I immediately undid all that exercise once I finished by eating shitty food and drinking even more than my Irish bachelor brothers.
Christmas came. At our big family meal, we had this Bell family tradition of saying what our perfect present would be—a promotion, a new car, a vacation, that sort of thing. And when we went around the table, I realized what I wanted the most.
“I want to be doing something,” I said, remembering laying on Jordan’s pew and fantasizing about distant shores and dusty hills.
“So do it,” Aiden said. “You can do anything you want. You’ve got, like, a million college degrees.”
Two. I had two.
“I am going to do it,” I decided.
“And what is it?” Mom asked.
“I have no idea. But it’s not here.”
And two weeks later, I was on a plane to Kenya on an open-ended mission trip to dig wells in Pokot, for the first time running to something, rather than away.
Seven Months Later
“So you’re a lumbersexual now?”
“Fuck you.” I shoved my bag into Sean’s chest so I could dig out some money for the airport vending machine. Dr. Pepper, the Fountain of Youth. I almost wept after taking the first sip, the first cold, sweet, carbonated thing I’d had since the Nairobi airport.
“So no pop in Africa, eh?” Aiden asked as I took my bag back and we started walking out of the airport.
