Closer tome.
What listening to Bastien had helped me learn was that those bad decisions I’d made weren’t bad so much as mini learning detours. That I should be grateful for their existence to keep me on the right path. Bumper cars in the game of life.
All of it sounded like a bad Pinterest vision board, but just the same, I found if I took that perspective to heart and tried to live by that reframing every day, life felt…better.
Now, I had the energy to think about event organizing and ways St. Michael’s could help improve the neighborhood. Now, I could give back.
In fact, I might have been freezing cold and looked a mess the first night Bastien saw me, but really, in a wild, roundabout way, I had Dr. Grady to thank for my meeting Bastien at all.
That night could have turned out so very differently.
I’d called the number on that card that night.
After losing my scholarship, the checks from the grants no longer depositing into my account meant I couldn’t even feed myself. The funding for my student housing terminated.
My life. In ruins.
I’d called the number that night because I didn’t have anywhere else to turn.
I told myself I didn’t know what I was getting into, but I think, really, I did.
I knew by the flirtatious grin and cocky tilt of his eyebrow that he was trouble.
I should have hung up when he forced me tobeg himfor the meeting.
He complained that he was too busy for college dropouts.
I was a dime a dozen now.
I assured him I wasn’t.
Begged him to give me a chance, desperation cracking my voice.
A chance at what? I wasn’t sure, but the naïve part of me hoped for a secretarial job or maybe personal assisting. But within minutes of climbing into his black Suburban, I recognized the error in my judgment. His hand was crawling up my thigh, fingertips tickling the nape of my neck, and he was telling me he required a taste of all the goods before he hired anyone to work for him.
Flames of fury lit in my stomach, and I’d done the very first thing I could think to do.
Balled up my fist and nailed him in the balls with all the rage I could muster.
He probably could have pressed charges against me.
He barked at the driver to pull over and kicked me square on my ass on the curb.
It was all fortunate, really, because Father Bastien had been clearing the steps of St. Michael’s when I’d, almost literally, landed at his feet.
My in the flesh, real-deal, cassock-wearing saint.
He was my guardian angel that night, gathering me up in his arms, my body rattled and life broken, and walking me into his church. Hustling me into his private home, he settled me on his small, threadbare couch and wrapped me in wool blankets, tending the scrape and forming bruise on my thigh.
We sat shoulder to shoulder that night, slurping soup and watching reruns ofJersey Shore.
My selection, not his.
But it’d been the entertainment of a lifetime introducing him to those kids for the first time.
The last time I had been under the roof of St. Michael’s, I was eight and innocently blabbing the reality of my existence to Father Martin. The idea that the pious man I sat next to on the couch I would someday fall for…that still felt like utter nonsense.
And that’s because it was.
Whatever else Bastien and I were, at the heart, we would always be nonsense.
