1 - Gabriel
Iwear my collar everywhere.
Not out of devotion — though that's what I tell my parishioners, and they believe me, because people believe what a priest tells them. I wear it because it's the most effective repellent known to man. Better than a wedding ring. Better than a cold shoulder. A white collar on a reasonably attractive man broadcasts one unmistakable message: don't bother.
After eight years of practice, my gaze slides off beautiful women like water off glass. The redhead at the post office. The nurse who brings her mother to Sunday mass in a sundress that tests the structural limits of cotton. The college girls who drive down from Miami on weekends to pick strawberries at the farms and wander into town smelling like sunscreen and youth. I see them the way I see the weather — present, irrelevant, nothing to do with me.
It's harder when they approach. When Mrs.Herrera's niece visits from Havana and leans across the pew to tell me she loves my homilies, her blouse doing things that have nothing to do with God's word. When the new teacher at the elementary school finds reasons to stop by the rectory with questions about the parish history that somehow always require standing very close. The collar handles it. I smile. I redirect. I become so thoroughly Father Gabriel that whatever they think they see in me dies on the vine.
It works. It has worked for three years in this small, quiet town where nothing happens and nothing is required of me except performance.
The rest of the machinery helps. Five-mile run at dawn, fast enough that my lungs burn and my legs stop sending any signals except pain. Cold shower after, standing under the spray until my skin forgets it can feel anything at all. On good mornings, that's enough. On bad mornings — the ones where I wake up hard and aching from dreams I won't let myself remember — I run seven. Sometimes eight. I eat plain eggs at the kitchen counter, standing, because sitting down for a meal feels like a pleasure I haven't earned. Black coffee. Dry toast. The body gets fuel. The body does not get comfort.
Alma's Diner is where the town eats. I come here twice a week for coffee because pastoral visibility is part of the job, and because Alma herself — sixty-three, five feet of Cuban authority — would show up at the rectory and drag me out by the ear if I didn't.
"Father Gabriel!" She sets a café con leche in front of me before I've sat down. "You look terrible. Eat something."
"I ate at the rectory."
"All alone." She crosses herself. "Your mother would cry."
She says this every time. My mother has been dead for nine years, but Alma knew her, back in Miami, back where the Delgado name opens doors I've spent years trying to close. I drink the coffee because refusing Alma is not an option available to mortal men.
The diner is half full. Farmers. A couple of truck drivers. Mrs.Alvarez, who waves and mouths God bless you across the room. I wave back. The collar does its work: I am visible and untouchable, a man set apart. I open the parish budget on my phone and try to focus.
The bell above the door jingles.
I don't look up. People come and go at Alma's all day. There's no reason to look up.
But something shifts. A change in the ambient noise — conversation dipping for a beat, then resuming slightly differently. The way a room recalibrates when someone worth noticing walks in. I've been reading rooms since I was twelve years old, sitting in on my father's meetings, learning to track the subtle currents of power and attention. The skill never left. It just went dormant.
I look up.
She's at the counter, sliding onto a stool with the easy grace of a woman who's comfortable in her own body. Dark hair — loose curls past her shoulders, the kind of hair that looks like she just ran her fingers through it and called it done. Olive skin. A face that's striking rather than pretty: strong jaw, full mouth, eyes that tilt up slightly at the corners. She's wearing jeans and a white t-shirt and she looks like she just walked off a highway, and every man in the diner is pretending not to stare at her.
Including me.
My gaze should slide off. This is the moment where my years of discipline kicks in and I become Father Gabriel and she becomes weather. It doesn't happen. My eyes stay on her like they've been nailed there, and something in my chest — something I haven't felt since long before the collar — does a slow, rolling turn.
She orders in Spanish. Fluid, easy, with an accent I can't place — not Cuban, not quite Mexican. "Café con leche, porfavor. And whatever pie that is." She points at the case. She has good hands. I should not be noticing her hands.
Alma serves her, studying her with the frank appraisal of a woman who considers the diner her territory. "You're not from around here."
"Passing through." She takes a bite of the pie and makes a sound — quiet, involuntary, a small hum of pleasure that she probably doesn't know she made — and my hands tighten around my coffee cup.
"Passing through to where?"
"Haven't decided yet." She smiles at Alma, and the smile transforms her face from striking to devastating. "Anywhere that isn't where I was."
Alma glances at me. The glance says: interesting. I pretend to be absorbed in parish budgets.
"Running from something or running to something?" Alma asks, because Alma has never met a boundary she respected.
The woman laughs. It's a real laugh — throaty, surprised, like she wasn't expecting to find anything funny today. "Ask me again when I figure it out."
I should leave. I should finish my coffee and walk out and let her be a stranger who passed through Homestead and kept going. Instead, I'm sitting here cataloguing the curve of her throat and the way her fingers wrap around the coffee cup and the small scar on the inside of her forearm that she touches absently.
Alma, because she is either divinely inspired or diabolically inclined, says: "Father Gabriel, come meet our visitor. He knows everything about the area."
