Ryan was hitched up on the counter, for once without his phone. He had a bag of Cheetos in his hand instead. “No, dude, it really did. Unless you were trying to look like Rick Grimes.”
“Why wouldn’t I? He’s my hero.”
Mom clucked. “Princeton students don’t look like Paul Bunyan, Tyler. Hold still—no, Ryan, he can’t have Cheetos while I’m doing this.”
Ryan had shoved the bag in my outstretched hand after hopping down to find his phone (“This is so sick. I have to Periscope it.”)
I sighed and set the Cheetos down.
“I’m going to miss you,” Mom said, out of nowhere.
“It’s just school. I’ll be back to visit all the time.”
She finished with the scissors and set them down. “I know. It’s just, all you boys have stayed so close to home. I’ve been spoiled by having you all here.”
And then she burst into tears, because we weren’t all here, hadn’t been all here since Lizzy.
“Mom…” I stood up and hugged her tightly. “I love you. And this isn’t permanent. It’s just for a few years.”
She nodded into my chest, and then sniffed and pulled away. “I’m sad because I’ll miss you, but I’m not crying because I want you to stay.” She met my eyes with her matching green ones. “You boys need to live your lives without being chained down by obligation or grief. I’m glad you’re doing something scary, something new. Go and make new memories, and don’t worry about your silly mother here in Kansas City. I’m going to be just fine, plus, I still have Sean and Aiden and Ryan.”
As much as I wanted to scoff, I couldn’t. Sean and Aiden were attentive in their own ways, never missing a family dinner, carving out time to call and text during the rest of the week, and Dad was here. Still, though. I worried. “Okay.”
“Sit down, so I can finish up on this monstrosity of a beard.”
I sat, thinking about leaving home behind. I’d seen enough grief as a priest to know that people never really moved on, at least not in the linear, segmented way our culture expected people to. Instead, Mom was going to have good days and bad days, days where she circled back to her pain and days were she was able to smile and fuss over things like beards and the cost of Ryan’s car insurance.
Mostly, I knew that I wouldn’t be able to carry her pain for her, even if I stayed here. We’d each have to find our own ways of living with Lizzy’s ghost, and we’d have to find them in our own time. I felt like I’d already started, and maybe Mom had too.
“Now, go shave,” she ordered me now, brushing at my face with a dry towel and dropping a light kiss on my forehead. “Unless you’ve forgotten how.”
Moving wasn’t so hard. I found an inexpensive apartment not too far away from campus and used my dwindling savings to put in a deposit. I’d be a teaching assistant as well as a student, and the stipend was enough to cover room and board, even if I would have to take out a few loans for tuition. I didn’t have much to move, really, all of my furniture having belonged to the rectory and my weights being left in Kansas City. Clothes and books, and then a futon and a table I scrounged from Craigslist.
After settling in, I spent a long day or two trying to hunt down a new address for Poppy on the internet, even just a place of work, but there was nothing. She was either very careful or very quiet or both—the last mentions of her that I could find were around the time of her graduation from Dartmouth, and a handful of campus dance performances from her time at the University of Kansas a few years ago.
I could find no trace of her, and I even went as far as calling her parents, using numbers I found online for her father’s company and for her mother’s non-profit. But they were well-guarded by rings of assistants and receptionists, none of whom seemed inclined to give up any information about Poppy or forward me on to her parents. Not that I could blame them; I probably wouldn’t give out information to a strange man either, but it was still frustrating as hell.
Why did she have to leave Weston? Why did she have to leave the rosary? Maybe if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be consumed with the idea of giving it back…
There was one person who I knew would almost certainly be willing to talk to me about Poppy, and the thought of seeing him again filled me with immense distaste, but I was running out of options. The semester would start soon and I wouldn’t have time to gallivant about the eastern seaboard looking for my ex…girlfriend? Ex-lover? And I couldn’t imagine having this kind of idealistic, ultimately hopeless quest on my plate until Christmas.
After two hours on buses and trains in various states of over-crowdedness, I was in Manhattan’s Financial District, staring up at the large steel and glass structure that belonged to the Haverford family. I wandered inside, surrounded immediately by marble and busy-looking people and an overall air of industry, and this persisted even when an elevator took me to the central office sixty floors up. No wonder Poppy chose Sterling. I’d never be able to offer her anything like this. I didn’t have fleets of black cars and portfolios of investments, I didn’t have a marble-floored empire. All I’d had was a collar and a home that didn’t legally belong to me—and now I no longer even had those.
God, I’d been such a fool to think I could have kept Poppy Danforth for my own. This was the world she’d come from—of course this was where she would return.
The receptionist inside was a pretty blonde girl, and asshole that I was, I wondered if Sterling had slept with her too, if his life was just a parade of money and infidelity, a parade without any consequences, a parade without a single concern other than how to get what he wanted.
“Um, hi,” I said as I approached her desk. “I was wondering if I could see Mr. Haverford?”
She didn’t even look up from her computer screen. “Do you have an appointment?”
“I’m afraid not,” I said.
“No one without an appointment can get in…” her voice trailed off as she looked up at me and then her eyes widened. “Oh my God! You’re the guy from the Hot Priest meme!”
Sigh.“Yeah, that’s me.”
She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I follow a bunch of the Tylerette tumblrs. Is it true you went to go live in Africa? Were you hiding? Entertainment Tonight said you were hiding.”
“I was on a mission trip,” I said. “Digging wells.” Although the lack of internet in Pokot had definitely been its own perk.
She made a high-pitched aww noise, peering up at me with her big brown eyes, suddenly looking very young. “You went to go help people? That’s so sweet!”
She bit her lip and glanced around the empty waiting room. “You know, Mr. Haverford never keeps track of his own appointments. He wouldn’t know if you were on the books or not.” A few keystrokes. “And now you’re officially on the books.”
“Wow, thank you,” I said, feeling grateful—that is, until she handed me a business card with a number scrawled on the back.
“That’s my phone number,” she said a bit coyly. “In case you ever feel like breaking your vows again.”
Sigh.“Thank you,” I said as politely as I could manage. There didn’t seem to be much point in explaining my current non-clerical position to her, or that there was only one reason I’d ever broken my vows, and that reason was why I was here in my enemy’s stronghold in the first place.
“Can we take a selfie?” And before I could answer, she was up and on the other side of her desk, standing next to me with her phone extended in front of us.
“Smile,” she said, pressing herself against me, her blonde head against my shoulder, and I dutifully smiled, at the same time realizing how deep Poppy remained in my system. I had a slender blonde smashed against me, warm and willing, and all I wanted was to peel myself away. I’d rather be in the next room fighting with Sterling than enduring this girl’s flirtatious advances. Sean would be ashamed of me.
“You can go in now if you’d like—he’s between appointments,” the receptionist said, still conspiratorially, thumbs working fast and nimble over her screen as she posted her selfie everywhere on the internet.
Sterling’s office was as impressive as the rest of the building—dizzying views, a massive desk, a low bar filled with expensive Scotch. And then Sterling himself, sitting like a king on his throne, signing reams of paper covered with dense type.
He glanced up, clearly expecting one of his employees, and then seeing me instead, his mouth fell open. I expected him to be angry or triumphant—ask me to leave, maybe—but I didn’t expect him to stand up, walk over to me and then extend his hand for a shake, like we were old business partners.
I ignored the proffered hand. I may have been a priest, but even I have my limits.
However, my rudeness didn’t seem to bother him in the least. “Tyler Bell—sorry, Father Bell,” he exclaimed, pulling back to look me in the face. “How the fuck are you?”
I rubbed the back of my neck, uncomfortable. I’d prepared for every possible shade of Sterling’s assholery on the train ride here, but not once had I considered the possibility that he could be, well, friendly. “It’s actually not Father anymore. I left the clergy.”
Sterling grinned. “I hope it wasn’t because of those pictures. I did feel a bit bad after I released them, I’ll be honest. Do you want something to drink? I’ve got this amazing Lagavulin 21.”
Um… “Sure.”
Sterling went over to the bar, and I hated to admit it to myself, but right now, now that he no longer considered me his enemy, I could see what Poppy once saw in him. There was a specific kind of charisma in his manner, coupled with the kind of sophistication that made you feel like you were sophisticated too, just by being around it.
“So I imagine you came to gloat, which I deserve, I admit. I’ll be a man about it.” He unstoppered the Lagavulin and poured us both a healthy glass. He walked over and handed it to me. “I’m surprised you didn’t come sooner.”
I literally had no idea what the hell he was talking about. I took a sip of the Scotch to hide my confusion.
Sterling leaned against the edge of his desk, swirling the Scotch with a practiced hand. “How is she?”
Was he talking about Poppy? He couldn’t be, he was with Poppy, but yet she was the only she that we both shared. “I came here to ask you the same question, actually.”
Sterling raised his eyebrows. “So you two…” he used his glass to gesture at me. “…You guys aren’t together?”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I thought you were together with her.”
A shot of pain—real pain, not disappointment or anger—flashed through his face. “No. We aren’t…we weren’t. We weren’t what I thought.”
I found myself—ridiculously—feeling sorry for him. And then his words began to really sink in, and a small flower of hope bloomed in my chest…
“But I saw you two kiss.”
His brow crinkled. “You did? Oh, that must have been in her house.”
“The day you released those pictures.”
“I am sorry about that, you know.”
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn’t water under the bridge exactly, but I was much more interested in how they’d gone from kissing in her bedroom to not being together. I should tamp down this hope now, before it truly blossomed, but I couldn’t bring myself to—although if she wasn’t with Sterling, then why hadn’t she tried to contact me?
One question at a time, I coached myself.
Sterling must have read the meaning behind my expression, because he took a sip and then set his glass down and explained. “That day, I had finally gotten tired of waiting, so I drove up to that craphole town—no offense—and told her I’d release those pictures if she didn’t promise to be with me. She was standing by the window, and then all of a sudden she shuffled me into her bedroom and tore my jacket off. I kissed her, thinking that’s what she wanted. But no. After one kiss, she shoved me away and kicked me out.” The way he rubbed his jaw just then made me wonder if kicked me out had involved a punch to his jaw. I really hoped it had. “I went ahead and released the pictures because I was pissed—understandably, I think, given the circumstances.”
I sat down in the nearest chair, staring at the whisky in my hand, trying to sort out what this all meant. “You only kissed that once? She didn’t leave Missouri to be with you?”
“Obviously not,” he said. “I assumed she’d gone running back to you.”
“No. No, she didn’t.”
“Oh, rough luck, old sport,” he said sympathetically.
I digested this. Poppy had kissed Sterling once and then demanded that he leave. Sterling was either a terrible kisser or she didn’t want to be with him at all—but if she didn’t want to be with him, then why hadn’t she stayed with me? And after those pictures, after I’d left the clergy, she hadn’t once reached out. I’d assumed it was because she was with Sterling, but now that I knew differently, that stung a bit more. She could have at least said goodbye or sorry or something, anything.
My heart twisted some more, a tired washcloth still being wrung out. Rosary, I reminded myself. This is about returning the rosary and giving her your forgiveness. And you can’t forgive her if you’re bitter about what happened.
Besides, at least she wasn’t with Sterling. And that was some small comfort.
“Do you know where she is now?” I asked. “I want to talk to her.”
Of course he did. He went back around his desk, found his phone, and within a few seconds, I was holding a scrap of paper with his neat block handwriting. An address.