Sexting The Priest

Chapter Four: The Guest Room

The town hasn't changed in the way towns like this never really do. Same water tower with my graduating class's year still faintly visible under two coats of paint that didn't quite cover it. Same diner. Same church spire poking up over Main Street like it's been standing guard since before anyone currently living here was born.

I don't look at it too long. It's just a building. Every town has one.

Peggy answers the door before I've finished getting my second suitcase out of the trunk, which tells me everything about how much rest she's actually been getting, doctor's orders or not.

"You didn't have to come," she says, by way of hello, arms crossed over a cardigan I'm fairly sure I bought her three Christmases ago.

"I know."

"I'm perfectly capable."

"I know that too." I kiss her cheek, which she allows for exactly one second before pulling back like affection is a medication she's been told to ration. "I'm not here because you can't manage. I'm here because I wanted to see you and I happened to have a free month. Two unrelated facts."

"Mm." She looks entirely unconvinced, which is fair, since it's a lie constructed almost entirely out of concern I know better than to say out loud to a woman who considers being worried about a personal insult. "Well. Your room's how you left it. I never saw the point in redoing it for no one to sleep in."

The guest room is, in fact, exactly how I left it at eighteen — same quilt, same water-stained ceiling corner, same shelf of trophies from a swim team I quit sophomore year and never told anyone I regretted quitting. It's a strange kind of time travel, unpacking a suitcase full of thirty-one-year-old problems into a room that still smells like being seventeen and certain I was going to leave this town and never look back.

I did leave. I'm just apparently the kind of person the town gets to reclaim anyway, one grandmother's fall at a time.

"You'll want to know the schedule," Peggy says, appearing in the doorway with a mug of tea I didn't ask for and clearly needed anyway. "Physical therapy Tuesdays and Thursdays. I do the crossword at eight, don't talk to me during it. And Father Elias usually stops by Sundays after the noon Mass, so don't schedule anything over that."

"Who?"

"The priest. New-ish. Well — three years, but everyone still calls him new because Father Doyle was here forty-one." She says this like it explains something. "Brought over a casserole himself the day I fell, if you can believe that. Didn't send it with the youth group like Doyle would have. Drove it over, sat with me an hour so I wouldn't be alone till your mother could get someone here."

"That's nice," I say, and mean it, and think nothing else of it, because there is exactly no reason a stranger's kindness to my grandmother should register as anything other than a stranger's kindness to my grandmother.

"He's a good one," Peggy says, in the tone she usually reserves for produce she approves of. "Bit quiet. Carries something, that boy, though he'd never say what. You'll meet him eventually. Can't avoid the priest in a town this size, not that you go looking to."

I file it away exactly where it belongs — nowhere — and spend the rest of the afternoon doing the things a granddaughter is supposed to do: reorganizing the pantry into something a woman with a bad hip can actually reach, arguing with Peggy about the stepstool she insists she doesn't use and definitely uses, making a dinner she critiques the seasoning of and eats two full helpings of anyway.

By ten, she's asleep in her recliner with the television still on, and I'm back in my childhood bed staring at a water stain shaped vaguely like Florida, phone in hand, doing the thing I've apparently decided is now a nightly ritual.

*Survived day one,* I type. *Grandmother alive, stubborn, and already running my schedule. I've been here six hours and I already have a crossword-adjacent curfew.*

*Sounds like she's got a system,* he writes. *Systems usually mean someone's scared and doesn't want to say it out loud.*

*You're doing the thing again. The uncomfortably accurate thing.*

*Occupational hazard.*

*What is your occupation, exactly? You've dodged that question four separate times now. I'm starting a list.*

*I help people who don't want help admit they need it,* he writes, after a pause. *Badly paid. Excellent hours, if you don't mind being awake at 2 a.m. for other people's emergencies.*

*So — a saint, or a bartender.*

*Somewhere in that general neighborhood.*

I laugh at that harder than it probably warrants, loud enough that I have to press a hand over my own mouth so I don't wake Peggy down the hall.

*Can I ask you something,* I type, before I can talk myself out of it, *and you're allowed to say no?*

*Go ahead.*

*What do you look like? Not — not a photo, I know the rules. Just. Anything. I've built you into a whole person in my head and I have no idea if I'm even close.*

The dots take longer this time. Long enough that I start composing the *forget I asked* text before he answers.

*I think you already know more of the true parts than a photo would tell you,* he writes finally. *And I'd rather you keep whatever version you've built for a little while longer. Selfishly. I like being someone you had to imagine instead of someone you looked up.*

*That's either the most romantic or the most evasive thing anyone's ever said to me.*

*Can't it be both?*

*You already used that line. Day one.*

*Caught. I only have so many good ones. I'm rationing.*

I fall asleep with the phone still lit against my chest, Florida-shaped water stain overhead, my grandmother's careful little warning about a priest I have no plans to think about again folded somewhere at the bottom of a day that otherwise belonged entirely to a man I've never seen and can't stop imagining anyway.

Two hundred miles or two blocks away. I still don't know which. I've stopped letting myself wonder.