He turned, smiled, said to me, “I hope this is at least palatable.”
He dished up an aromatic stew and even put a small bowl of it down for Birdie. I was so hungry that my awkwardness with James fell away. The stew, the bread, the wine, it was all delicious, and after dinner, we played with Birdie, who couldn’t stop looking at James.
“She remembers you,” I said.
“But of course. I took her out of a garbage can. Didn’t I, Birdie? Fetch,” he said, throwing a ball of paper, and she brought it right back.
James said, “Brigid, the dishes can wait. Let’s go outside. Put on your jacket.”
We sat together on the rectory steps watching the light traffic. A couple walking by waved to James.
I was conscious of all that, but my mind was on James. I had told him that I had feelings for him. He was a priest and had taken vows of celibacy. Clearly, he cared about me, but not in the same way I was feeling. He cared about me as a shepherd cared about a lamb in his flock.
I leaned away from him and said, “James, if I leave now, I can be in Cambridge by midnight.”
He said, “No way, Brigid. What’s the point of driving two hours at night when I have a perfectly good second bedroom with a semidecent bed? Will you stay? I’m not ready to say good-bye to you again. Okay?”
“Sure,” I said.
He said, “Brigid, I’m not a priest as defined by Rome. Not anymore. I’m just James.”
“What does that mean?”
He reached his arm around me, pulled me close, and then he kissed me. As I marveled at the feeling of that kiss, he kissed me again, and I kissed him back and I stopped thinking.
James said, “You’re always in my thoughts, you know.”
I blinked up at him. He was so familiar to me, and at the same time, I had never spent time like this with him before.
“Do you think you could love me?” he asked.
I blinked some more. Could I love him?
“Could I love you? Do you not see me staring at you with big moony eyes?”
He grinned. “How do my eyes look to you?”
“Moony,” we said together. We laughed and then James released me.
He closed his eyes and folded his hands. And after a moment, he stood up, reached his hand down to me, and helped me to my feet. I didn’t want to ever stop holding his hand.
When we walked through the door to his bedroom, I heard the words in my head.
Be with James.
With the help of God, that was what I would do.
Part Four
Chapter 87
SIX MONTHS had passed since the morning I drove into a church parking lot expecting to return home that night.
Since then, I had rented out my brick house in Cambridge, resigned from my job at Prism, and taken a new job at the Spring Street Women’s Clinic, and I was living my new life to the fullest extent in JMJ’s rectory with James.
His church was flourishing. There were overflow crowds that included people from other faiths, and clergy from other churches, who came to JMJ because they wanted to replicate what James had done in their own parishes.
On that high-summer morning, James wore plaid and denim. He held Sunday Mass on the wide deck he and other men and women in town who also knew how to use hammers and saws had built behind the church.
Rows of folding chairs were set up on the lawn. Daisies encroached from the field, and James and the choir had to compete with birdsong.
James spoke to the congregation about changes he saw happening in pockets of church communities across the country. Priests were getting married, women were becoming priests, and more liberal views on same-sex marriage and abortion were shifting people’s view of what it meant to be Catholic.
“These changes will feel radical and worse to some, but those who believe that God is love will have an easier time understanding that anything that gets between a person and his love of God is wrong.”
James was a soft-spoken but powerful orator. People nodded as he spoke to his ever-expanding flock. But he didn’t tell them what I knew.
Cardinal Cooney had called James several times, making serious threats: excommunication for one, and a civil trial on the grounds that James was defiling the brand of the Roman Catholic Church by advancing “seditious ideas” and, in so doing, “undermining the Word of God.”
How could Cardinal Cooney hope to succeed with these charges? James was doing God’s work, not just in JMJ but in the community that surrounded Millbrook. He was helping the poor, finding jobs for the unemployed, visiting the jail in Springfield, and generally bringing out the best in people. Three other JMJ churches had sprung up in Massachusetts, and I thought that was what had inflamed the archdiocese.
JMJ was spreading.
The choir of young girls was singing when my phone buzzed from my skirt pocket.
It was Kyle Richardson.
“Brigid,” he said, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but G.S.F. is in Mass General. He’s been diagnosed with lung cancer. Stage four. He’s asking for you.”
“What?” I said stupidly.
Kyle said, “He wants to see you before he dies.”
Chapter 88