AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Dad solemnly took the spoon in his mouth, swallowed down the Eucharist, and crossed himself again, before stepping back.
My breath filled up my lungs and I let it go. It was done. The work I’d always set out to do. I’d offered my father Holy Communion.
I’d been a priest for several months, but I hadn’t felt any different. This time… now… I felt different. I felt like a priest. Like God’s servant. It was all real to me now. The fulfillment of my calling.
After the service, Vasili, Dad, and I went out for breakfast. At the Waffle House.
Joy at its most humble.
But its edges were blackened with a sense of foreboding.
What would I do without Dad?
My eggs felt like rubber. Come to think of it, it had been a long time since food had any taste. Everything carried the stench of death. This whole year should have been one that I should look back on with warm memory in my old age. My ordination. My marriage.
Dad was a man of deep and profound faith, but he had too much timidity to talk about it. I was the opposite; brash and boisterous about religion, while inwardly tiptoeing around my own spirituality.
Decca was a blend of the both of us. It was one of the reasons I loved her.
Loved her.
The words had come into my head so easily, as if they’dalways been there.
Hadn’t they, though?
As a priest… as a Christian… I’d loved her immediately. But I loved everyone. It was my duty. When had that love grown from the fulfillment of a commandment to a… feeling that she was the very blood running through my veins? That without her, I’d die?
Maybe that had been just as immediate.
I’d met her at Waylon’s house. I was home from a break during seminary. Soula had moved in, five or six months pregnant, and it was the night of their housewarming party. I’d heard Soula talking about her friend Decca for years, but in all that time, I’d never met her. Our ships had always passed in the night.
That night was the first time we were in the same harbor. And it was glorious.
I heard her laugh first. Smoky like whiskey, rough, and a little dirty. I turned on a dime, searching for the direction it had come from. When I heard it again, from the beautiful woman with crow-black hair, wide smile, and eyes that glinted with humor and intelligence, I was done for.
I did everything I could think of to talk to her, monopolize her every moment, afraid she’d slip away from me and I’d never get her back. It was dire, my urgency, my need for Decca.
No. I’d always loved her. It didn’t have to grow into anything. It was there from the start. God had made her for me, and if He didn’t makeme for her, then fuck, I’d become whatever she needed… whatever she wanted from a man.
I hadn’t said the words. I tried to tell her, in small ways: cleaning the house, restoring the garden, giving her the Liturgy book. Words meant nothing to me. Throwaway phrases. How could she possibly believe them?
Maybe Decca needed to hear them, anyway. Maybe that would help us both finally accept that we were real. That we’d found our skeleton, and it was complete.
Decca
“I’m sorry I wasn’tthere for Jim’s confirmation. A hunter in Davidson County found remains. I had to leave before dawn. I didn’t want to wake you.”
“Chrismation. Not confirmation. You got called out this close to Christmas?”
“Crime doesn’t stop for holidays. Anyway, I thoughtthe Orthodox Church doesn’t really do Christmas.”
He grinned and kissed me on the head before twisting a strip of cheese straw dough into a spiral and placing it on a cookie sheet. He looked so happy today. I loved when Gus was this happy. It must be the party tonight.
“We don’t, really. Just the pageant for the kids. Easter’s our thing. Don’t you dare take calls on Holy Week.”
“I’ll put in for vacation now. At least the atmosphere was festive at the crime scene, though. We got a Santa cap on Sheriff Hardy. And Chris was there. Did I tell you? He’s visiting his parents in Nashville, so he’s in town.”
“Great.” He snorted.
