No, I decided. That for sure wasn’t true. It was just that the actual truth was so much worse. I cared about her as a person, as a soul, and I wanted to fuck her, and that was the recipe for something much worse than carnal sin.

It was a recipe for falling in love.

I would go to her. But I would put her in contact with the leader of the women’s group, direct Poppy to seek guidance from her instead of me, and hopefully the occasional Mass would be the extent of our interactions.

Poppy stared at the altar as I approached.

“Aren’t there bones inside there?”

“We prefer the term relic.” My voice had that unintentionally deep timbre again. I cleared my throat.

“Seems a little macabre.”

I gestured towards the crucifix, which depicted Jesus at his most bloody, broken, and tortured. “Catholicism is a macabre religion.”

Poppy turned toward me, face thoughtful. “I think that’s what I like about it. It’s gritty. It’s real. It doesn’t gloss over pain or sorrow or guilt—it highlights them. Where I grew up, you never dealt with anything. You took pills, drank, repressed it all until you were an expensive shell. I like this way better. I like confronting things.”

“It’s an active religion,” I agreed. “It’s a religion of doing—rituals, prayers, motions.”

“And that’s what you like about it.”

“That it’s active? Yes. But I like the rituals themselves too.” I looked around the sanctuary. “I like the incense and the wine and the chants. It feels ancient and holy. And there’s something about the rituals that brings me back to God every time, no matter how foul my mood is, no matter how badly I’ve sinned. Once I start, it all sort of fades away, like it’s not important. Which it isn’t. Because while Catholicism can be macabre, it’s also a religion of joy and connection, of remembering that sorrow and sin can’t hold on to us any longer.”

She shifted, her flat bumping against my shoe. “Connection,” she said. “Right.”

In fact, I was feeling connection right now. I liked talking religion with her; I liked that she got it, got it in a way that a lot of lifetime churchgoers didn’t. I wanted to talk to her all day, listen to her all day, have her breathy words whisper me to sleep at night…

Noooooo, Tyler. Bad.

I cleared my throat. “What can I help you with, Poppy?”

She held up the church newsletter. “I saw that there was a pancake breakfast tomorrow and I wanted to help.”

“Of course.” The breakfast was one of the first things I’d started doing after coming to St. Margaret’s, and the response had been overwhelming. There was enough rural poverty and poverty in nearby Platte City and Leavenworth to guarantee a steady need for the service, but there were never enough volunteers and we were slammed the two times a month we hosted it. “That would be so much appreciated.”

“Good.” She smiled, the hint of a dimple appearing in her cheek. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”

I prayed extra last night. I woke up at dawn and went on an even longer run than the ones I’d been taking, crashing into my kitchen sweaty and exhausted, causing a casserole-unloading Millie to tsk at me.

“Are you training for a marathon?” she asked. “If so, it doesn’t look like you’re doing a very good job.”

I was too out of breath to even sputter a protest at that. I grabbed a bottle of water and drank the entire thing in several long gulps. Then I stretched out facedown on the cold tile floor in an attempt to lower my core temperature.

“You do realize it’s dangerous to run in the heat, even in the morning. You should get a treadmill.”

“Mmphm,” I said into the floor.

“Well, regardless, you need to shower before the breakfast. I ran into that delightful new girl last night in town, and she said she was going to help us today. And surely you want to look nice for the new girl, right?”

I lifted my head and looked up at her incredulously.

She dug the toe of her purple pump into my ribs before stepping easily over me. “I’m going to the church now to help them mix the batter. I’ll be sure to help Miss Danforth get settled if I see her before you get there.”

She left and I peeled myself off the floor, taking a minute to clean the sweaty torso-print with paper towels and a cleaning spray. And then I went back and showered.

It ended up being surprisingly easy to stay focused at the breakfast itself. It was so busy, and I tried to make a point to sit down at every table over the course of the morning and get to know the people who visited. Some had children who I could send home with backpacks stuffed with school supplies and peanut butter, some had elderly parents I could refer to local eldercare services and charities. Some just were lonely and wanted someone to talk to—and I could do that too.

But every so often, I’d see Poppy out of the corner of my eye, smiling at a guest or bringing a fresh stack of trays out, and it was hard not to notice how at home she looked in this environment. She was genuinely kind to the visitors, but she was also efficient, focused and able to ladle scrambled eggs at a rate that made Millie declare her an honorary granddaughter. She seemed so at peace, so unlike the troubled woman who had confessed her sins to me.

I ended the morning batter-splashed (it was my job to carry the giant bowls of batter over to the stove) and finger-burned (ditto with cooking the bacon) and happy. While I probably wouldn’t see any of these people at Mass anytime soon, I would see them again two weeks from now, and that was the important thing—it was about filling bellies, not winning souls.

I told Millie and the other two grandmothers to go home and rest while I cleaned up, not seeing Poppy and assuming she’d already left. I hummed as I folded up the tables and stacked the chairs, and as I wheeled the mop bucket out onto the floor.

“How can I help?”

Poppy was at the foot of the stairs, tucking a piece of paper back into her purse. Even in the dim basement light, she looked unreal, too rare and too lovely to gaze at for longer than a few seconds without pain.

“I thought you’d left?” I said, moving my gaze back to the very safe mop and bucket in front of me.

“I went up with a family earlier—I heard the mother mention some issues with late taxes and since I’m a CPA, I offered to help.”

“That was really generous of you,” I said, again feeling that frantic, squeezing feeling that I’d felt yesterday, that feeling like I was losing my footing with her and starting to flirt with something much worse than pure lust.

“Why are you surprised that I did something nice?” she asked, stepping toward me. The words teased and joked, but the subtext was clear. Don’t you think I’m a good person?

I immediately felt defensive. I always assumed the best of people, always. But I guess I was a little surprised at the depth of her earnestness to help—I had been when she’d told me about Haiti too.

“Is it because you think I’m some sort of fallen woman?”

I dropped the mop in the bucket and looked up. She was closer now, close enough that I could see where a small cloud of flour had settled on her shoulder.

“I don’t think you’re a fallen woman,” I said.

“But now you are going to say that we are all fallen sinners in a fallen world.”

“No,” I pronounced carefully. “I was going to say that people who are as smart and attractive as you don’t typically have to cultivate skills like kindness unless they want to. Yes, it surprises me a little.”

“You’re smart and attractive,” she pointed out.

I flashed her a grin.

“Stop it, Father, I’m being serious. Are you sure that it isn’t because I’m a smart, attractive, advantaged woman that you don’t feel that way?”