Saint of Sinners

Chapter Six: A Reasonable Amount of Times

Celeste

He came back the following Tuesday.

And the Tuesday after that.

By the third Tuesday Sister Margherita had started putting out an extra coffee cup before he arrived, which I found both unnecessary and telling, and which I addressed by saying nothing about it whatsoever.

I want to be clear that I understood what was happening. I was not confused about it. I had taken my vows with a clear mind and a willing heart and I did not regret them and I was not going to regret them. What I felt when Dante Ricci came through the convent gate every Tuesday morning was simply the natural warmth of one person toward another person they had shared something significant with. It was gratitude. Familiarity. The specific comfort of someone who had seen you at an unguarded moment and not used it against you.

That was all it was.

I told myself this on Monday nights with great conviction.

By Tuesday mornings the conviction had a slightly different quality.

* * *

What I learned about him came in pieces, the way he gave everything: carefully, one thing at a time, nothing offered that hadn't been considered first.

He had grown up in Palermo, the second of three sons. His father had built the family business from nothing, which sounded respectable until you understood what the business was. By the time Dante was old enough to understand it, it was the only world he knew, and leaving it was not a thing that happened to people like him. He said this without self-pity and without drama, just as fact, the way you stated the weather.

His mother had died when he was twelve. He had not cried at the funeral because his father had told him not to, and he had been trying to make his father proud since he was old enough to understand that his father was not a man who was proud easily. He said this carefully, like a man examining an old wound to see if it still hurt.

It still hurt.

He read. This surprised me unreasonably. History mostly, and occasionally philosophy, and once he mentioned a novel with the offhand embarrassment of someone revealing something they considered private, and I made my expression completely neutral because I understood that laughing would have been the wrong thing even though part of me found it genuinely endearing.

"What?" he said anyway, reading my face despite my best efforts.

"Nothing," I said. "I just wouldn't have guessed."

"What would you have guessed?"

I considered this honestly. "Security briefings. Financial reports. Things with graphs."

He looked at me for a moment. Then he laughed. A real one, short and genuine, and it changed his whole face in a way that I filed away carefully in a drawer I was trying not to open.

"I do read those," he said. "But after."

"After the novel."

"After the novel."

I smiled at my coffee. He watched me do it.

"What do you read?" he asked.

"Everything," I said. "Theology. Poetry. The occasional mystery novel that Sister Agnes thinks I don't know she hides behind the Lives of the Saints."

"Does she know you know?"

"Absolutely not. It would ruin the whole arrangement."

He smiled again. Smaller this time, quieter, but it reached his eyes, and I thought that was probably what a Tuesday morning was for.

* * *

Mother Bernadette said nothing directly. She was too wise for that.

But one evening after Vespers she handed me a book of poetry she had been reading, opened to a particular page, with a particular verse lightly underlined in pencil.

I read it once. Then again.

It was about the specific difficulty of loving something you had promised yourself you wouldn't.

I closed the book and handed it back.

"I'm fine, Mother," I said.

"I know you are," she said. She took the book without comment and walked away, and left me standing in the corridor with the particular feeling of someone who has just been told the truth in the gentlest possible way.