Page 28 of Midnight Mass (Priest 1.50)
Please, Lord. Please please please.
But the moment I saw the 816 area code, I knew it wasn’t Poppy. My heart—which had been pounding like mad, full of hope and energy and nervousness—flopped down to somewhere in my stomach.
Even though it was an unfamiliar number, I still made myself answer.
“Hello?”
A pause. “Is this Tyler Bell?”
I scru
bbed my face with the towel while I answered. “Yes. How can I help?”
“I’m Sarah Russell, Mildred Gustaferson’s daughter.”
I let the towel fall away from my face. “Millie? Is everything okay?”
Sarah didn’t answer right away, but when she did, she was obviously fighting back tears. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this. My mother died this morning.”
I flew to Kansas City alone.
I’d broken my self-enforced phone fast and called Poppy. She hadn’t answered. I’d left a voicemail and sent a text, and then I’d driven to our house before I went to the airport, hoping to catch her there, knowing that she would want to know about Millie.
She hadn’t been home.
And so I was alone on the plane, my eyes pressed tightly shut, as if I could keep the tears from falling that way. But they still managed to leak out, slowly and ceaselessly, hot tracks of grief and isolation against my cheeks. I felt so hollow and yet so full, so blank and yet so scrawled upon by events outside my control. My good friend dying, my wife’s absence, this ridiculous distance between me and all the people I cared about. Nothing felt real, nothing felt intimate or close or true—it all seemed like a terrible movie of my life that I was being forced to watch from hundreds of feet away.
When I stared out the airplane window, my reflection superimposed against the velvet night outside, I barely recognized the unshaven man there. Who was he? Where was he going? And why was he going there alone?
The questions were too painful. I shut the shade for the window and leaned back, closing my eyes again, hoping to keep back a fresh wave of tears.
The priest in me wanted to meditate right now. He wanted to pray. He wanted to think of the right things to say to Millie’s children when he went to the funeral, and he wanted to have the right verses ready in his mind in case they were needed.
But the other me—the guy who was Just Tyler—wanted to do nothing at all, except maybe flag the stewardess for a drink. He wanted to think about nothing, feel nothing, say nothing, and do you know what?
That’s exactly what he did.
“Your tie is crooked.”
I turned back to my brother’s bedroom mirror. “It is not!”
Sean huffed impatiently. “The knot is crooked. Hang on.”
I let him fiddle with my tie some more, my thoughts elsewhere. Well, on one thing in particular. Poppy still hadn’t called me back. She wasn’t here and she hadn’t called or texted and I had no idea still if she even knew about Millie. And since it was the day of the funeral, I’d given up on the faint but unflagging hope that she’d fly out here to be with me.
“There,” Sean said, stepping back and gazing at the Windsor knot he’d just made with a critical eye. “Better.”
Sean himself looked every inch the impeccable mourner, his tailored black suit and his Charvet tie screaming money and power. Since I’d left the clergy four years ago, he’d risen to the top of his investment firm, which had in turn become one of the biggest Midwestern firms in America, handling massive agricultural and livestock accounts, along with the private accounts of several Midwestern professional athletes. We were probably as different as two brothers could be—me, the priest-turned-scholar, and him, the millionaire playboy who only went to Mass when someone died—but we looked like a matching set in our black suits. His hair was a dark blond to my brown and his eyes were a blue to my green, but we shared the same high cheekbones and square jaw, the same mouth that maybe smiled a little too widely, the same dimples that dug into our cheeks when that wide smile did appear.
And for all that he was a shallow, self-obsessed asshole, he had genuinely cared about Millie. She’d sent him cookies every month since I’d moved to her parish, and he’d adopted her as a sort-of grandma slash financial advisor, bringing his iPad full of business proposals for her to run through whenever he’d visited her. Aiden, our younger brother, had cared about her too, but he was on a business trip in Brussels and couldn’t make it back for her funeral.
“So,” Sean said as we walked into the elevator down to where his Audi waited. “Where’s your fucking wife, TinkerBell?”
It was like simultaneous shots of rubbing alcohol and laughing gas. For a moment, irritation and raw hurt blinded me…and then I couldn’t help but laugh. Mom and Dad, and even my teenaged brother Ryan, sensed it was a delicate subject for me and so had danced around Poppy’s absence like one would dance around a live grenade. But Sean—Sean gave no fucks about anybody else’s feelings, and hadn’t since our sister had hung herself in our parents’ garage all those years ago. It was the best and worst thing about him, and right now, it was exactly what I needed.
“I think she is really angry with me,” I said. The elevator got to the parking garage level and we walked towards Sean’s car. “I think…I think we might not be together any more.”
Sean looked at me. It wasn’t a look of pity or concern, necessarily, but a look of understanding. A look of even if we don’t talk, even if we don’t share our adult lives together, I’m still here for you. I guess that was the thing about brothers. We shared something that couldn’t be artificially minted or molted away, a bond that would stick for as long as we were both alive.
