Page 97 of Sinner (Priest 2)
office line. It’s only because it’s shift change and I’m not needed with Mom I pick it up.
“Sean Bell,” I say in greeting.
“Son,” Valdman rumbles. “I need you in the office today.”
“Did you get the message I left with Trent?” I ask idly, knowing that he has. I decide to make more bad coffee and walk over to the machine.
“I did, and I’m calling you to tell you that’s not going to work for me.”
“The Keegan deal is almost fixed,” I say, stabbing at the brew button on the machine. “The nuns are moving in two weeks, well before the Keegan demolition schedule. We have a press release in the works, and the Reverend Mother has agreed to talk to the local media about it.”
“This isn’t about the Keegan deal. This is about your commitment to this company.”
I stare at the amber liquid spattering into the disposable cup. “I don’t understand. I’ve been keeping up on everything else remotely.”
I hear Valdman’s chair shifting. “Well, I don’t know how to say this delicately, so I’ll say it bluntly. When you told me last winter that your mom had cancer, I was willing to let you do your thing because I figured she’d die soon after. But it’s been more than half a year of your attention being divided, and that’s not the kind of drive I’m looking for in my firm.” His voice goes conspiratorially low. “I know you can do better. I’m going to retire from day-to-day soon, and when I do, I want you in the chair, my boy. But I can’t put you there unless I know you’ll put the company first.”
The machine finishes up with an obnoxious hiss and then clicks off.
“Are you…” the words are so insane in my mouth that I have a hard time forming them. “Are you asking me to choose between my mother and my job?”
“It sounds so stark when you say it like that. Think of it as adjusted allocation. You’re going to adjust how you allocate your time back to a professional level. And once you show me you can do that, then I’m willing to show you the keys to the kingdom.” His voice is fatherly, warm almost, as if he feels like he’s being magnanimously paternal right now. Meanwhile, my actual father is leaning against a window and staring at a highway, his broad shoulders folded into themselves like wings.
“No,” I say, and it comes out so easily, too easily maybe, given that this is the one thing I used to want above all others.
Valdman’s office, Valdman’s chair. To be king of the garbage people, the biggest eel in the tank.
But I don’t want it anymore, and I’m shocked to realize that it’s not even because of my mom, not even because of Valdman’s cruel ultimatum. It’s because of Zenny and the man I’ve become from knowing her.
“No?” Valdman sounds amused, like he thinks I’m joking. “Sean, be reasonable now—”
“I am being reasonable. My mother is dying. I’m staying with her. Thank you for the phone call.”
And then I hang up. I want it to feel good, but it doesn’t feel like anything.
Dad has to leave around lunchtime to tend to a few things at the warehouse, and I find myself a pale, gelatinous pot pie in the hospital cafeteria and eat without tasting it. Thinking of the pot pie I made for Zenny a lifetime ago. Of making her eat it, watching her soft lips move enticingly over her fork. Of stripping her and tasting her and holding myself still with agonizing strain so she could explore every corner of my body.
And that memory spirals into every other night we shared, every other minute. The laughing, the teasing, the arguing. The discussions about God and poverty. The way I remembered more and more of my forgotten self with her.
How she made me think of the way light falls through stained glass.
That hole in my chest is huge now. Vacant, hungry, chewing through more and more of me, spreading from my heart to my eyes and my stomach and down to my wretched, selfish toes.
You fucked up royally.
The one time something good and pure and true landed in your life, you smothered it with greed, asshole.
Asshole is too good a word for me. I’m subhuman in my selfishness. I’m a rotting pile of shit with nothing to show for my life but an empty heart and a perfect head of hair. It’s dumb that I should have to confront this here, now; it’s weak and stupid that I can’t stave it off any longer, but who am I kidding? How long could I really have pretended to myself that I didn’t care? That I could feel nothing about the one thing in my miserable life that meant everything?
I love Zenny. And I lost her. All because I couldn’t stop being Sean Bell for one minute and look outside myself. All because I couldn’t put her first, not when it meant losing control. She’s gone and it’s my fault.
Okay, and maybe a little bit the Reverend Mother’s. She did say to tell Zenny, after all.
The good thing about hospital cafeterias is that no one looks at you twice when you start crying, which is what I do now, curling over my uneaten pot pie and letting the hole chew through the last remaining shreds of my soul.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Dr. Iverson is coming out of my mom’s room when I turn the corner, and I freeze. For a very idiotic, teenage second, I assume he’s here to kill me for sleeping with his daughter, and a very brainless, very adolescent panic thunders through me as the father of the woman I love walks my way.
