THIRTY-FOUR
Bastien
Within days of her arrival to my tiny homeland she’d established two things—a weekly dinner for those in the community who struggled with putting food on the table, and that Father Martin had been hiding out in Cuba, shacking up with a tiny family, living his life none the wiser for having pretty much upended many lives back in Philadelphia after his departure.
I learned very early on, growing up in a poverty-stricken nation, that life wasn’t fair. I’d come to terms with it, but Tressa still struggled with injustice.
She’d spent all of the next day texting back and forth with Lucy, at one point even video-chatting after Luce managed to dig up a box of old photos from Tressa’s mom’s attic and the letter Casey had written to Lucy that she’d long since tucked away.
It’d only taken a few photos of the two and even the three of them together. Father Martin—or Padre Juan, as he was now called—was always dressed in his vestments, reserved hand on a shoulder or both palms clasped and crossed at his front, always the pious shepherd of God. With thirty years and thirty pounds, he was undeniably Carmelita’s Padre.
And while I didn’t tell her this, with both of their faces wearing the mask of youth, Tressa and Juan didn’t look unlike one another. Same round eyes, full Cupid’s bow lips, and high cheekbones. Tressa’s mother’s shy smile caught my eye in some of the photos, her love and devotion burning like a flame behind her irises.
Tressa’d thrown my Bible across the room at one point, wishing with a few choice curses that her mom were still here to answer so many of her questions.
“The fact that my mom had this sordid affair with a priest…” She was struggling with the fact that their indiscretion didn’t look unlike our own brush with scandal. Tressa shoved a spade deep into the dirt, making room for another row of tomatoes. “Well, it creeps me out, to say the least.”
I pierced the dirt beside her, our efforts at a community garden well underway. It was Tressa’s hope that our meals be cooked primarily from the garden one day, and that it would grow so large it could help to sustain the tiny farming community around us. Her dreams were big, always. So many people allowed fear to hold them back from their greatest potential, but never Tressa. She’d been thinking grander than even I, and that was why God had taken over in her life—and brought her to me.
“It feels like I was fed a bunch of bullshit for my entire life. I understand that love happens, and maybe he’s good at getting women to take care of him. Carmelita seems perfectly enamored.”
This was true; I’d never seen someone as devoted.
“But I don’t understand why Mom felt she couldn’t tell me the truth. I spent so many nights asking. So many questions about the man who fathered me. I understand now why her answers were always so vague.” She shook her head, stabbing at the ground again.
“What was life like for you and her when you were a teenager?” I inquired.
“Horrible,” she spat.
“And when you went to college?”
“Even more horrible. I avoided her at all costs.”
I nodded. “And then?”
Tressa frowned, casting a weary glance at me. “And then I was stupid and let the head of the department put his hand down my pants. I had some stuff I was dealing with, whatever. She still should have told me about my father.”
“Perhaps she thought she had time.”
Tressa let my words land silently on the bougainvillea-scented breeze. The tiny footpath that led up to the old stone church of Iglesia de Santa Maria’s was bordered on one side by a wall of the deep-pink vines that bloomed year-round.
Walking up the path each evening always made me think of Tressa. Funny now that she was here, sharing my bed, my life.
“I don’t like that she kept me in a bubble.”
“What would life have looked like out of the bubble?”
“Do you have a rhetorical question hidden under that white collar for everything?”
I adjusted said white collar at my neck just to irritate her.
She narrowed her eyes and shook her head, glossy dark hair bouncing in a riot. “If you weren’t a holy man…”
I didn’t think, only crossed the space between us, gathering her in my arms, hidden behind the pink blooms. I kissed her slowly but with force, expressing in every nonverbal way how very much I loved having her.
“Being without you felt like an exorcism of the soul. Your absence in my life left me a shell of a man.” Our foreheads touched. “And this place isn’t for the fainthearted.”
“It is rather devoid of anyone between the ages of fifteen and fifty.” Her hands dipped below my waist, pinching at the cheeks of my backside through the dark fabric of my clerical blacks.
