TWENTY-TWO
Tressa—seven months later
Lucy and I lived for three months in a one-bedroom apartment, her in the bedroom and me on the couch, before I got a call on a colder than normal Sunday morning that Mom had suffered cardiac arrest in the middle of her dinner one night, cigarette burned into a shell of ash in her hand. My heart broke when I went back, cleaned up the life she’d spent all of her days working so hard for. The small blessing was that she’d left everything to me, meaning Lucy and I could move in to Mom’s tiny little house, the burden of rent suddenly off our shoulders.
And Lucy grew.
At seven months, the doctor began to talk about taking the baby early. He also asked her if there was a chance she could be farther along than she thought.
She was adamant, though.
Her story unwavering.
Casey.
The boy with the backpacks.
That was still how I thought of him.
The sad, broken boy with the backpacks he’d stuffed chock-full of metal debris and pipe bombs and set off in St. Mike’s on another colder than normal Sunday morning.
I’d begun to resent the cold Sunday mornings, expecting only shitty tidings for the rest of the day.
Unfortunately, Philadelphia was afflicted with about 100 freezing-cold mornings a year, which made the odds almostneverin my favor.
I dug a little deeper each morning, one foot in front of the other as I took the bus downtown to one of the jobs I’d applied for that morning months ago, before everythingelsehad happened.
That’d been the one stellar silver lining in the catastrophe of my life.
I’d landed just about the greatest job I could have imagined, coordinating the corporate giving department of a major local bank with hundreds of branches situated around the area. I was expected to research charities and different locations around the globe that the bank could organize donations and giving events for. It was the best part of my day, every day.
I took my work home most days because I loved it. My life seemed to sharpen into focus in a way it never had before, my purpose to help those around me in any way I could. Corporate giving maybe wasn’t something I wanted to do for the rest of my life, but it was certainly something I loved in the moment.
Plus, it offered a great distraction from all things St. Mike’s.
I hadn’t let myself think about that time much. One of the detectives left Lucy with a card for a family counselor if we needed to “work through anything.”I’d had to hold back a wry chuckle then, and I still did now.
Who the hell had time to work through anything? We were barely feeding ourselves.
But thankfully, there’d been no fatalities in the tragedy at St. Michael’s that day.
Ms. Watson had suffered an abdominal wound and lost a lot of blood, but after a transfusion, she teased that she felt as young as the eighteen-year-old whose blood coursed through her old veins.
Even the older gentleman who’d been shaken off his feet whom Bastien had been tending to the last I saw him had recovered, according to Ms. Watson, and was now attending Mass twice a week alongside her.
The only long-lasting fallout in all of this was Bastien and me.
It didn’t matter how many hours I worked a day, how much overtime I burned through each week. Every night when I collapsed into the tiny twin bed I grew up in, he haunted me.
Father Bastien Castaneda.
The holy man who touched my heart and then disappeared from my life like he’d been an apparition.
I’d spent three days at Lucy’s side in the hospital after the explosions as they monitored her and the baby for any issues. While we were there, they also sent in a caseworker to assist in finding affordable housing for Lucy to go home to. They knew she was living with me next to the church right now, but they also knew that was a temporary solution.
By the time Lucy and I went back to the tiny house next to St. Michael’s to clear out our few things, Father Bastien was gone. A new priest had been installed in his place, one who came with a younger seminarian sidekick who looked down on both of us with disapproval in his eyes as we gathered our things before hustling back to the bus stop to head across town to meet the landlord to get the keys for our new one-bedroom.
Now we had a little more breathing room living in Mom’s house, the roof over our head paid for in full, only insurance and living expenses to pay every month. Lucy started working at a coffee shop a few blocks away, and it wasn’t long before we were actually managing to save up a little money and buy some things to spruce up the place.
