Night at the Fiestas: Stories (23 page)

More likely, Father Paul stayed up late reading. In the afternoons Crystal cleaned the rectory, and Father Paul’s study, with its crowded, dusty shelves and uneven stacks of books, was the most difficult of her jobs. Or it would have been, if she’d ever done it properly. Usually she swiped her paper towel along the edge of the shelves and vacuumed around the papers and wool cardigans and scattered shoes and books. Church histories, Pacific naval battles, CIA conspiracies. If she mentioned his books—how many he had or how busy they must keep him—Father Paul generally cracked some mild self-deprecating joke and changed the subject to television, as if out of consideration for Crystal. He loved crime shows, the same ones Crystal occasionally watched at night, in which naked young women showed up dead in hotel bathrooms. “My guilty pleasure,” Father Paul said, shrugging good-naturedly.

Crystal didn’t like thinking about a priest’s guilty pleasures. But, actually, she couldn’t see Father Paul being truly guilty of anything. Even the crime shows were part of an act, she suspected, to prove that he was a little naughty. Human. During Lent he’d made a big show of sneaking handfuls of M&M’s from the glass bowl on Collette’s desk, the woman’s one concession to office niceties.

“Oh, you know me,” Father Paul would say, jiggling the candy in his palm before tossing back a mouthful, and Crystal would smile gamely.

“Guess he has to have something,” Collette said once after Father Paul left. “These alcoholics never get any better, just switch one thing for another. He better watch it.”

Crystal had rolled her eyes. Twenty-eight years clean, Father Paul had announced last month, on his anniversary, and his air of celebration had seemed just as overblown as Collette’s cynicism.

Father Paul would, as always, feel terrible about being late for the couple’s appointment. He’d take off his glasses and press his thumbs into his eyes, and his lapse would probably show up in his homily, as his lapses always did. His sins were so vanilla that you almost had to wonder whether he committed them just to have something to talk about on Sundays. Even his alcoholism and his journey to recovery had been wrung of any possible drama by how thoroughly and publicly he had examined them. In the next several days he’d repeatedly bring up this morning’s tardiness, and Crystal would have to tell him each time that it was an honest mistake, that everyone makes mistakes.

The young man bounced his leg, and the heavy heel of his work boot thumped. Finally, he stood. He planted his fists on the cluttered edge of Collette’s desk and leaned in. “I’m not waiting around all day.”

His fiancée widened her eyes. But, if he meant to intimidate, he’d picked the wrong person. Collette had worked in the parish office for years. Her tasks were menial and few, but she sat at her desk all day like a toad, grumbling in Spanish as she opened offertory envelopes and pasted labels. Though her desk was closest to the door, she did not greet people when they came in. If spoken to, she sighed, set down whatever she was working on, and looked so put-upon that, more often than not, people made hasty apologies and turned to Crystal for what they needed.

Collette jerked her porous, wrinkled chin at the young man. “You got things to do? So get away with you, then.”

When he looked at her in surprise, Collette held his gaze. “I mean it. Get out. We don’t want you here.”

The man stepped back, glanced uncertainly at the door, then at Crystal.

“Please,” the girl said, eyes filling, voice tragic. “We
have
to meet Father Paul. We’re not even done with the premarital questionnaire. The wedding’s on Saturday!”

Collette turned to Crystal. “Go find him.”

Crystal fixed her eyes on the screen and clattered away at the keyboard. “Actually, I’m in the middle of something.”

“And if he’s not there, bring that Father Leon.” Collette snorted, as she always did when mentioning the new priest.

The girl’s face registered dismay, because Father Paul was beloved and Father Leon was not, but what could you do? A priest was a priest, even if he was just a pastoral vicar newly arrived from Africa, and you had to act grateful.

Now Collette said, “It’ll do that man good to socialize him. You hear me, Crystal? Go on.”

Crystal pushed herself up from her desk, tugging her shirt over her belly. “
Fine
.”

T
HE JOB WAS SUPPOSED
to have been temporary, a pause before college, but here she still was, needing the money more than ever. When Crystal first started showing, she worried that she might have to leave, but to her relief her pregnancy had elicited surprisingly positive reactions, Collette notwithstanding. The ladies in the Altar Society had given her an array of miniature garments in pink and blue. Her mother, usually so needy and resentful, was pleased that Crystal had given up her apartment and moved back home. She talked incessantly about the babies, prepared plates of protein- and calcium-rich foods, loudly beseeched God to keep them healthy. Crystal was grateful—she was—but still hated that her mother had to be involved. “Where were you, staying out all hours?” her mother asked when Crystal got home Sunday morning. “You know better. And me home alone waiting.”

But no one was as sympathetic as Father Paul. Perhaps because she was young and pregnant or because she cleaned the rectory, he was always reaching out, thanking Crystal for her hard work, taking an interest. “Anytime you need an ear or a hand,” he’d say as she Windexed the patio doors. He seemed eager for her good opinion, seemed to want her to confide in him.

Once she had admitted that the babies’ father was out of the picture, though she hadn’t revealed how little she’d known him—another hookup, another party. She hadn’t revealed that whenever she was out, at the mall or the grocery store, she found herself looking more closely at a certain type of man—short, built, sandy-haired—despite the fact that he hadn’t even been from Santa Fe, had been visiting from California. She hadn’t revealed how often she wondered what traits in her children would bring the blurry, drunken memory of him more sharply into focus.

“I’m so sorry,” Father Paul had said, his eyes soft and his voice rich with empathy. Then, after a moment, “You know, the sacrament of Reconciliation is such a gift.”

When Father Leon’s arrival was announced, Crystal had expected someone energetic and progressive and possibly tiresome, setting up basketball games and youth activities and regular soup kitchens in the hall. She’d thought that the new priest might joke with her, might offer real comfort that came from his contemporary understanding of how the world actually worked.

Instead of invigorating the parish, though, Father Leon’s arrival had strained its atmosphere. “Would you believe he told me to type up his homily?” Collette had hissed, thrusting a legal pad into Father Paul’s chest. “Who does he think he is?”

“I’ll talk to him,” Father Paul had promised, but the same day he’d drawn Crystal aside and asked her to type it. “Please. As a favor to me.” So, ever since, it had fallen to her to decipher Father Leon’s slanted, feminine cursive. Each time Crystal handed Father Leon the printed pages, dense with abstractions and biblical quotations, he murmured a wooden thank-you without looking at her, already scanning his words.

Rather than sticking to love and brotherhood and the primacy of conscience, Father Leon went right for the hot-button issues, criticizing the permissiveness of American society. “Tolerance of sin is not a Christian virtue, and homosexuality is a sin, full stop,” Father Leon had told the congregation during an early weekday Mass. “Even in this house of God, I can smell the stink of Satan. He has found purchase in the hearts of some gathered here today.” Crystal pictured him scowling down from the pulpit in his cassock, looking like an unpleasant child forced to play dress-up.

There had been very few people present, but one of them was the president of the Altar Society, whose fourteen-year-old grandson was gay. She’d stormed into the office in a rage. “The stink of Satan? Shame on him,” she told Father Paul. “God forgive me, but that man doesn’t belong here.”

“He’s young, he’s full of ideas. He’s getting his sea legs,” Father Paul had said, looking fretful. “We’re lucky to have him, with so few young men entering the priesthood.”

Father Paul had begun to show signs of tension: the oversleeping, for one. He also seemed to have amped up his benevolence, as if to compensate for Father Leon’s coldness. While Father Leon stayed shut away in his study, Father Paul always seemed to be lying in wait for Crystal when she came to clean, ready with a smile or a kind word. He was lonely, maybe, Crystal thought, or maybe, with Father Leon chipping in, he just had less to do. Over and over he offered her help, over and over he brought up Reconciliation, as if he had an urgent personal stake in her salvation.

So, after months of putting it off, she’d gone to confession. But there, in the dark confessional, something had happened: Crystal had actually felt bad about not having been a virgin since she was sixteen, had almost believed that sex wasn’t completely ordinary. The sudden sense of her own remorse had made her words waver, and she was overcome by the vastness of her insult to God. She had believed truly, as she never had before, that Father Paul—this man whose dishes she washed and laundry she folded, who left drops of urine on the toilet seat—could deliver her apology to God. She’d caught her breath and felt tears burn her eyes, until, from the other side of the screen, Father Paul had dropped into his most soothing voice. “We can hate the sin but love the sinner.”

Crystal must have been seeking punishment, humiliation, shame. She must have been trying to hold tight to her guilt or to shock him out of his infuriating tenderness, because what else could explain what came out of her mouth next? “But Father, it wasn’t just regular sex. He went in behind, too.”

There was a long, terrible silence. Beyond the confessional, the empty church breathed and creaked. Outside, a motorcycle roared past. Crystal gripped one hand with the other. Finally, she heard the unsticking of lips and Father Paul said, “Consider this a new chance, and ask God to help you be the mother your babies deserve.”

Confession was confidential, of course, and Father Paul gave no sign that he knew who had been on the other side of the screen—and who knows, maybe he didn’t, though he’d have to be a fool not to—but Crystal couldn’t stand to be around him for weeks afterward. She felt ambushed and stupid. In the office, she kept her head behind the computer monitor when he passed through. Most afternoons Father Paul had appointments, so she cleaned the rectory when he was out.

Really it was a miracle that she’d managed to avoid him for as long as she had. But on Friday, as Crystal was putting the rags and detergents under the sink, Father Paul had come into the freshly mopped kitchen. He’d leaned against the counter and watched her. “You must miss the father,” he’d said, and Crystal had had to sink back on her heels and nod politely.

Father Paul furrowed his brow, and the creases went all the way up his bald red head. “Even if it wasn’t the right partnership, it must pain you to be embarking on this alone. But we’re here for you.” His voice was insistent. “The parish will stand by you and your children.”

Father Paul paused. He seemed to be thinking something over, and, with a sense of vertigo, Crystal imagined him imagining her in the throes of all sorts of mortifying, sweaty exertions.

Then he crossed the damp linoleum—leaving dull footprints—and dug in his pocket. He presented her with a laminated prayer card of the Santo Niño de Atocha. “I’ve been wanting to give you this.”

Crystal turned the card in her hand, flushing. The Santo Niño: Christ Child with long dress and pilgrim’s staff, dark curls tucked under wide-brimmed hat, walking under the stars across mesas and winding among piñon. He walked so far and so long, searching for miracles to perform, that he wore the soles of his shoes to nothing. In the chapel in Chimayo devoted to him, along with prayers and petitions and milagros, people left him children’s shoes—knit booties and beaded moccasins and sneakers and patent-leather Mary Janes scuffed at the toe.

“Thanks,” she mumbled.

Father Paul smiled with relief. He waved her away, pleased with himself. “You should pray with your babies. They can hear you, you know.” He stood smiling at her for another torturously long moment, then left.

Crystal gripped the card, enraged. Who was Father Paul to tell her that her life might be saved by a child? What could he possibly know about being trapped forever by your own stupid biology? Or about the defeat of moving home, where every night your mother was on the living room couch, suit skirt unzipped, watching a game show and eating microwaved hash browns slathered in red chile, her smelly panty-hosed feet on the coffee table?

Heartsick, Crystal thought of her old apartment, quiet and hers alone. Maybe she’d never wanted escape, college, a future, she thought bitterly. Maybe some part of her had been seeking a comforting narrowing of possibilities, an excuse to give up on her life. If this was all life was—working in the office of a small Santa Fe parish, living at home with her mother and twin babies—then it was at least manageable.

She had thrown the prayer card out, right there in the kitchen trash. She had slammed the back door, leaving the little Santo Niño with his girlish misty eyes gazing up, daring Father Paul to find him.

N
OW, AS
C
RYSTAL CROSSED
the parking lot toward the rectory, she hoped that he hadn’t. She’d been bratty, throwing out his gift. Because what would she have preferred? To be scolded? To be made to sit facing the congregation each Sunday during Mass, the way pregnant girls were punished in the old days?

The wind was blowing, and leaves and dust skittered across the blacktop. It was late fall now, chilly, but Crystal was sweating through her shirt. Pregnancy had made her clammy and zitty and fat.

She flapped her arms, willing the dark spots to dry, and pushed open the back door of the rectory. She was greeted by the familiar hush and the smell of old cooking. On the stove were the gray remains of a pan-fried steak; on the counter, a sticky ice cream carton. The sink was full of dishes—couldn’t they just put them in the dishwasher?