First Time: Ian's Story (First Time (Ian) Book 1) (29 page)

“
Yeah, it’s fine.” I hadn’t
thought she might be nervous about her appearance or how to dress.
“I like your hair.”

“
Thanks.” She reached up to
touch it. “I thought since your sister would be there I should
forgo the bedhead look. I didn’t want her to think it was, you
know…”

“
Actual bedhead?” I
supplied.

Penny nodded with a weak smile. “Yeah.
That.”

“
You’ll be fine. If it
helps, she’s not going to like you the first few times she meets
you, anyway.”

“
That doesn’t help.” Penny
sighed. “I just want this to go well. I know this is important to
you.”

“
It is. But what’s most
important to me is that you were willing to come along, even if
it’s just this once.” I helped her with her coat then put on my
jacket and my long gray trench coat. We ventured out into the
chilly November wind. A few snowflakes drifted down from the gloomy
sky.

“
Oh, no,” Penny said in
dismay. “This is crazy. It can’t snow yet.”

“
You’ll be in a church
today. Pray that it doesn’t.” When she didn’t laugh, I said, “I’m
sorry. It wasn’t a comment on your beliefs, or trying to change
them. I was just trying to be funny.”

“
Oh, I know,” she said with
a smile. “You were just failing to be funny.”

The narrow lot of St. Basil’s was nearly
full, but I snagged one of the last spaces and led Penny inside.
Her heels clicked on the checkered tile in the vestibule.

She looked around with wide eyes. There were
a few men in sport coats, others in button-downs and khakis.
Teenagers in jeans and faded T-shirts accompanied their mothers and
fathers. That particular demographic eschewed a business-casual
approach: polo shirts for the men, silk scarves and chunky jewelry
for the women.

“
I feel really overdressed,”
Penny murmured.

“
Don’t feel that way,” I
reassured her. “You look beautiful, and besides, my parents always
insisted that you should dress well for mass, since you’re in the
presence of God. It’s just respectful.”

Even when we’d been so poor that our roof
was falling in, Mum had scrubbed us up and slicked down our hair,
and though we’d eaten beans and toast for quite a few dinners, we’d
all had Sunday clothes.

Penny smoothed her skirt. “Okay, is there
anything I have to do?”

I shook my head. “No, God knows you’re not
Catholic. You just have to come into the church, sit in the pew
beside me, stand when we stand, sit when we sit, kneel if you’d
like, and smile warmly at my sister. Oh, and don’t take communion.
You can just stay in the pew when we go up.”

“
Go up?” She blinked at
me.

She might have needed a full lesson. It blew
my mind that she’d never been to a Catholic mass, not even for a
wedding. “I promise, I’ll give you direction. Please, don’t be
nervous.”

She should have been more nervous to meet
Annie, but I would rather have cut out my tongue than tell her
that. She didn’t need her anxiety compounded. I’d told Annie we
were coming, and that would have given her ample time to prepare an
assault. I’d be in her crosshairs, as well; I expected I would get
a scolding about whether or not it was appropriate to bring the
girl I was sinning with to church with me.

On the way into the sanctuary, I dipped my
fingers in the holy water and made the sign of the cross, noting
Penny’s close observance. She looked as though she would be taking
notes, if she’d had a pen. Inside, I led her to the votive racks,
where I dropped a ten into the donations box and lit candles for my
mother and father, and Robby and Cathy.

“
What’s this for?” Penny
whispered.

I lit one more for my sister’s child, whom
I’d never met. “You light them to remember your loved ones who’ve
passed on.”

“
Oh,” she said quietly, and
I knew I didn’t need to explain who the votives were
for.

I crossed myself as we stepped away.

We went to find a spot in our usual pew, but
I didn’t see Annie anywhere. I’d hoped I would make an introduction
before I went to confession, but my sister hadn’t arrived, yet.
Well, it wasn’t as though she would recognize Penny, anyway. I
genuflected at the end of the row, then stood back and gestured
Penny in. She sat and slid down a bit to make room.

“
I have to go bother Danny
for absolution. Will you be all right on your own for a second?” I
asked her.

“
Um. Maybe.” She looked
around, wide-eyed. “I’m a little freaked out by the
chanting.”

At the front of the church, Dan Holmes
called out, “The fifth glorious mystery: The coronation of the
Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth,” and the rest of
the congregation began mumbling the Our Father in response.

“
Ah. Yeah, I could see why
that would be unsettling.” I scratched my neck and looked away.
“It’s just praying the rosary. Nothing scary. Sit tight a
minute?”

“
Oh, the rosary!” She
smacked her forehead with the palm of her hand, startling the woman
seated in front of her. Quieter, she said, “Sorry. I should have
known. I’m just a little nervous.”

“
Don’t worry, you’re doing
fine.” I held my breath and headed to the sacristy. Hopefully Danny
would make my absolution quick.

I slipped out of the sanctuary and down the
short hall in the vestibule, to the door marked, “Private.” I
knocked and called, “It’s Ian.”

Danny opened the door, adjusting the
microphone clipped to the collar of his vestment. “Cutting it close
this week. I should be out there getting ready for the
processional. You better not have many sins.”

“
I always have many sins,” I
reminded him, shutting the door behind me. “I don’t have time for
the full rigmarole today. Penny’s waiting out there.”

“
Penny!” Danny looked past
me, as though he could see through the closed door, the vestibule,
and into the sanctuary proper. “You brought her?”

“
Things have been going
really well. I thought it might be a good time.” I shrugged and
couldn’t disguise my smile. “Did I mention things are going
well?”

“
You’re lucky Mom’s not
here.” He paused. “No, you’re not lucky. You’re going to hear about
it when she finds out she missed the chance to meet the woman who’s
been stealing her baby brother away.”

“
She’s not going to be
here?” I asked, for total clarification. “I told her I was bringing
Penny. Where’d Annie run off to?”

“
She and Dad are on the
ladies’ altar society marriage retreat to D.C. She must have
forgotten to mention it. They’re going to mass at the National
Basilica today.”

“
Good for them. They deserve
to get away,” I said. But bullshit Annie forgot to mention
something like a trip to Washington D.C. She just didn’t want to
meet Penny.

“
Uncle Ian, if you’re
serious about wanting Mom to meet this girl, you’re going to have
to bring her to the house. Do you have any idea how much I hear
about this?”

“
I can only imagine.” It was
why I’d been keeping my phone calls with Annie brief. “I wanted to
keep my relationship with Penny private while we got to know each
other. This is a first step, and a pretty big one. She’s not
religious at all, but she’s here because she knows what this means
to me. She’s
the one
, Danny.”

“
I’m happy for you. But if
she’s the one, you’ve got to somehow trick Mom into meeting her.
She’s ready to put your tackle in a mason jar over this girl.” He
stepped up to give me a hug. I slapped him on the back, and I felt
the wire for his microphone under his chasuble.

“
Oh no.” I took a step back,
shaking my head. “Tell me that wasn’t on.”

Someone knocked on the door. “Father? Your
microphone is on.”

Danny pushed the robe aside and checked the
little black box at his hip, looked up from the glowing green light
at the top, and gasped, “Oh, fuck me.”

“
For Christ’s sake, turn it
off!” I waved my hands at him until he flipped the switch. “This is
worse than the time you left it on when you were having a
piss!”

“
Oh, every priest has done
that!” he hissed at me.

Cold sweat stood out on my brow. “Penny…
She’s sitting out there, right now… Fuck, I hope she’s sitting out
there right now, and she hasn’t run away!”

I flung the door open and launched myself
out, then composed myself as I walked back to the sanctuary. When I
entered, the stares of some of the other parishioners bored holes
into my back, but I kept my head held high and pretended I had no
idea why they were looking. The only person in the church who
mattered to me at the moment, was the slender blond sitting ramrod
straight in the pew as I approached. I genuflected and slid into my
seat, not daring to look at her.

“
Sorry about that,” I said,
my tie suddenly feeling quite like a garrote.

I heard a sputter, and turned to see her
covering her mouth in an attempt to hold back her laugh.

“
I’m glad you found that
funny,” I tried to scold her. But it really was funny, now that I
knew she wasn’t furious with me. “Danny is going to get a lot of
complaints today.”

Penny giggled and whispered, “Well, tell
your sister that if she puts your tackle in a mason jar, she’s
going to get a complaint.”

* * * *

I spent all of mass
keenly aware I was being stared at. The other parishioners seemed
to be divided between amusement and annoyance, so it wasn’t safe to
make eye contact with anyone. But there was one person’s scrutiny I
felt far more strongly than the others. Penny watched me like an
anthropologist studying my culture. That was probably what was
happening in her quick little head. She would remember every hymn
and response, and would be able to pass for Catholic, now, once she
sorted all the information in her brain. I envied her intelligence
and memory. She would have made a fantastic con artist.

After mass, I avoided everyone. Even Danny,
since being seen speaking to each other would just cement the
incident in the minds of everyone who had forgotten it. If there
was anyone who’d forgotten. But perhaps facing acquaintances and
strangers would have been preferable to actually discussing with
Penny what had happened.

We got into the car and pulled into line to
leave the lot. We were on the street before I tried to start a
conversation. “So…”

“
If your plan with the
microphone mix-up was to make my first visit to your church even
more awkward, congratulations,” she interrupted me, doodling a
heart in the fog on the passenger side window.

I couldn’t tell if she was mad or joking.
“That bad?”

She looked over at me, but I had to keep my
eyes on traffic as we approached a four-way stop, so I couldn’t see
her expression.

“
I’m just teasing,” she
said, and my chest muscles eased from their state of panicked
cramp. “It wasn’t terrible at all. And I got some really, really
good news out of your nephew’s mistake.”

“
Well, now that you know I’m
spending my spare time doodling hearts around your name in my
notebook, I’m not sure I can look you in the eye.”

“
It’s not necessarily a bad
thing to have the woman who loves you know how much you love her,”
she said. “If you caught me talking about you without my knowledge,
you would probably want to change your address.”

No, but I did want to change hers. My home
felt a lot lonelier these days, when Penny wasn’t in it. “It would
be that bad, would it?”

“
Yeah. I have a lot of
fantasies about our future.”

Our future.
Saying it made what had been only possible
absolutely certain. “So, you’ve picked out the names of our
children, then? Planned our wedding?”

“
Have I named our children?
Are you kidding? I’ve seriously researched the benefits and risks
of epidurals on pregnancy websites.”

I should have admitted I’d already
considered and lamented the fact that, owing to my divorce, we
couldn’t be married in the church. It was a relief to know I wasn’t
the only one whose daydreams turned to practical concerns.
“Yikes.”

“
Kinda makes ‘she’s the one’
seem less embarrassing, now, doesn’t it?” She paused. “You like to
read, right?”

“
Aye, I do.”

“
Right. So. Okay, are you
ever reading along, and something happens, something so
earth-shattering for the characters that you can’t believe they’ll
ever recover from it, so you skip ahead to make sure that
everything turns out okay?”

“
Chapter sixty-nine
of
A Dance With
Dragons,
” I answered automatically. It was
the first hardcover book I’d ever actually thrown on the floor in
anger.

“
And when you saw that
whatever was happening actually turned out okay, you still wanted
to read the book, right? Knowing the ending at that point didn’t
ruin the rest of the chapters for you.”

I bit my cheek. There was no
sense in giving her spoilers. “Yeah, after I saw that everything
in
A Dance With Dragons
turned out all right for Jon Snow in the end, I
felt much better.”

“
Well, that’s how I feel
about us,” she said, and I bit my cheek again to stop myself from
begging her to never compare our love to
A
Song Of Ice And Fire
, ever again. She went
on, “No matter what happens between us between now and then, I know
that at the end, we’re together forever, and it takes the pressure
off. That’s what your nephew’s bad judgment with the AV equipment
helped me realize today. So, don’t worry about it.”