For some reason, this seems to annoy him. He shakes his head, like he’s trying to figure something out, but the pieces just aren’t fitting together. “Teenagers get up to things, though, don’t they? You never snuck out? Shoplifted? Had a boyfriend you weren’t supposed to have?”
I shrug again, finding it harder now to smile. “I guess I was just a rule follower. My mom…she had a hard time conceiving my brother. A really hard time.” My mother’s story is so much a part ofmystory, or at least what I was told my story was supposed to be, that it’s easy and familiar to recite it now. “She asked God to give her Dean, and when He did, she decided that I should give my life to God to make up for it. And I never thought to question it.”
“Until after you were a nun for five years?” Wow, Thad really did do his homework. “What happened—did something change?” His hands tighten a little on the steering wheel. “You got hot and heavy with a priest or something?”
Thinking of the seventy-six-year-old priest I worked with back at St. Elizabeth’s, I laugh out loud. “Um, no. Nothing like that. It wasn’t really anything crazy, I just…I woke up one day and realized I was living a life that I hadn’t chosen for myself. And I didn’t want to do it anymore.” His face is no longer guarded, but genuinely curious, and I feel compelled to add, “It was like, my whole life I was propelled by this story about what I was supposed to be, and then one day I asked myself—is this even what you want? And I realized no one else had ever asked me that before.”
For a moment, our gazes hold. An understanding passes between us.
Then Thad blinks, looking back at the road, and it’s like the wall has come back up again. I feel it between us, something Thad is hiding behind. But why?
“I guess I just find it hard to believe that you’ve always been this perfect angel.”
I flinch, frowning at the description. “No one ever said I was perfect?—”
Thad scoffs. “Come on. Look at you. You’re fucking perfect.” He raises an eyebrow at me, almost challenging. “Can I swear in front of a former nun, or am I gonna go to hell?”
I’m the one to look away now, out at the road. He’s not the first person I’ve encountered who’s gotten hostile about my so-called saintliness. Some people seem to take my choice to become a sister as a personal indictment of them, somehow, like I must be judging them for not taking the same life path as me. If only they knew how little judgment there was. I alwaysenviedpeople who didn’t make the same choices as me, who got to explore, make mistakes, live their own lives on their own terms. I never thought I was perfect, but the lifestyle I was living, that in some ways I’m still living, wasn’t some carefree, happy existence. It was, and is, a lonely life, full of regret. “You can say whatever you want.”
“Butyouwon’t say it.”
I hear the challenge in his tone and find myself rising to it. I’m usually pretty easygoing, and I’ve been able to shrug off these kinds of confrontations before, but something about him and his presumptions gets under my skin. “I can say it. If I want to say it. But I don’t. I think there are better ways to express yourself.”
“Hmm,” Thad says.
I clear my throat. “And anyway, I’m notfreakingperfect.” At the mean little laugh he does under his breath, I feel my temper rise. “I’m just a person. I might not have made some of the mistakes other people do, but I’m plenty messed up in my own way.”
“Oh, yeah? Like what?” Now he sounds genuinely curious—but I don’t know if this is just a ruse to goad me into saying something else he might make fun of.
I raise an eyebrow at him, warring between protectingmyself, or proving him that he’s wrong about me. “Well. I don’t always recycle. Sometimes I’m too lazy to wash out a gross container and I just throw it away.”
Thad doesn’t just look unimpressed—he looks almost sorry for me. “That’s the worst thing you’ve ever done in your whole life, Sister Helen?”
I glare at the unexpected nickname. “I broke my mom’s angel figurine once and blamed it on Dean.”
“Whoa. Easy, rebel.” This said pityingly, like one might placate a small child who’s tried their best but just can’t quite play with the big kids.
“I’m still a virgin.” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them, but I need to prove Thad wrong about me. I’ve always had a bit of a competitive streak—hard to avoid, really, when you’ve been pitted against your brother your entire life. “I’ve been a layperson for four years and I still haven’t done more than kiss a man.”
That shuts him up. If Thad is doing the mental calculations, he’s probably figuring out that when he kissed me that first night we met, that’s the farthest I’ve ever gone with a man, sexually. What he hopefully isn’t piecing together is that he’s theonlyman I’ve ever kissed. That brief, embarrassing encounter with Thad was the total sum of my sexual experience.
He clears his throat. “That doesn’t make youbad, though. If anything, that puts you even more in perfect, saint-like territory.”
“I never said I was bad, I said I was messed up,” I remind him. “And I am plenty messed up. I have spent my whole life trying to get my mother’s approval, dedicating five years of my life to fulfill a bargainshemade with God. And now I’m out, but it’s like I’m stuck. I write about romance and sex but I don’t have any idea what I’m talking about. It’s all fantasy, only I’ve fantasized about it so long that now I’m terrified the reality can never live up to my expectations. Like, imagine you’ve never tried chocolate, and your whole life everyone is telling you how incredible chocolate is, and you want to have some but at the same time you know you’ve built it up to be this thing in your mind that it can never be. Right? Nothing will ever be as good as what you’ve dreamed chocolate could be.”
A long pause. “I dunno,” Thad says at last. “Chocolate is pretty damn amazing.”
He says it so deadpan that I can’t help but laugh—a sharp, gasping laugh that takes me by surprise and sets me off on the giggles. Thad laughs along with me, maybe more so because he’s relieved that we’ve moved on than that he actually finds it funny. Either way, soon we’re both laughing so hard that we’re in tears.
“Noted,” I say, wiping at my eyes. “I’ll have to give chocolate a try. Someday.”
I keep my eyes on the road in front of us, though I feel Thad studying me. “You should.” He sighs. “Or maybe you shouldn’t. Sometimes I feel like it can’t be worth all the hassle. You know about Vera, but she was hardly the first.”
He must register my surprised look, because he hastens to add, “The first woman to betray me—not ‘hardly the first’ woman to sleep with me.”
I’d rather not dwell on who he has or hasn’t slept with, frankly. “Who else betrayed you?” I ask quietly, looking over at him.
Still gripping the steering wheel with one hand, he extends his fingers on the other, folding each one in again as he lists a new person. “High school girlfriend dumped me right before she started college, even though she’d asked me to sign a lease on an apartment near the school to be closer to her. Another girlfriend, when I was in my early twenties, borrowed three thousand bucks from me to ‘fix her car’ but instead spent it on a trip to Malaysia with her friends, then ghosted me. Vera, of course. And honestly, even my own mom. She was in a pretty bad way when I was a kid, with drugs and whatnot. She basically gave my dad custody for an allowance so she could blow it all away. She’s clean now and we’ve patched things up, but that was…a rough couple of years.”
