“I have seen that guy over there that keeps staring at you, though,” he adds quietly.
Now it’s my turn to roll my eyes internally. When I was a young girl and first told my mother that I wanted to join the convent, she told me that I was too pretty to waste my life on my knees praising anyone except a man that would return the favor. She wasn’t being cruel, she just wanted me to make sure I knew that I was equal to anyone that walked the face of the Earth and she wanted me to know my worth. She wanted grandchildren and since my brother had cancer when he was a teenager, the radiation treatments left him sterile. It was up to me to fulfill her dream and I wonder if she would be proud of me now—even if the way I went about becoming a mother was completely unconventional.
“Take a look,” he says, nodding almost imperceptibly in the direction of my admirer.
I sigh and lean back. I reach up and pull my ponytail tighter, glancing over to where Luke motioned toward and almost fall back out of my chair.
“We have to go,” I say to him once I regain my bearings.
Luke nods as he folds his arms across the tabletop. “Yeah, I thought he looked familiar.”
I get to my feet quickly, almost knocking the chair down, and reach down for my son’s wrist.
“We need to leave. Now.”
“I’m not done with my sandwich yet,” he says, pulling out of my grip. “And I may want to take a look at the waitress now that you’ve mentioned how pretty she is.”
I want to walk away and leave him, but I don’t know if he would be able to find his way home. I don’t want to abandon him here because I see an old ghost, but I don’t want to face my past right now either.
“We’ll come back tomorrow night. Let’s go,” I say, putting my hands on my hips.
Luke looks up at me and a strange smile plays across his lips. “You look so adorable when you’re angry. I try not to laugh, but sometimes I wonder if you’d be capable of making me do what you want me to do.”
“Please,” I hiss at him. “We’ll take the fucking sandwich with us, but I want to pay this bill and go before …”
“Before?” he asks, glancing over in the direction of my ghost again. “Oh, here he comes.”
I’m horrified—wishing the Earth would open up and swallow me whole, but I know that’s not how things work. A wish is nothing more than a hopeful sentiment that rarely ever travels where it should.
“Hello, Taylee,” my ghost says in a frosty tone.
I jump, not realizing how close he had gotten already, before I turn to face him, a huge smile forced onto my face.
“Father Moore! It’s been years since I’ve seen you,” I exclaim. I clear my throat to remove the sudden falsetto tone it’s taken on and sit back down in my chair. “Would you like to join us?”
He glances down his nose at Luke who’s now sitting back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, eyeing him dangerously.
Father Moore holds Luke’s glare with an even stare of his own before he slowly shakes his head.
“No thank you. I just thought I would come over and say hello since it’s been so long,” he explains with a tight smile.
I begin to wring my hands nervously as Father Moore looks me up and down with an un-approval I haven’t seen since I first told him about Luke’s father.
The loud scrape of a chair brings me back to the moment and when my son drops an arm around my shoulder and pulls me protectively close to him, I let out a small breath of relief.
“Mom, is this the priest? The one from your old church?” he asks in a mischievous tone.
“It is. Luke, this is Father Moore. Father Moore, this is my son, Luke.”
Father Moore extends a hand toward my son who shakes his head and waves him off.
“There’s no need to pretend we like each other, mister,” Luke says evenly. “Actually, I’d be much obliged if you got the hell away from my mother and maybe shove that nose up your God’s ass where it belongs.”
“Luke,” I hiss at him, giving his leg a swat. He smirks at me, tightens his grip, and turns his attention back to the shell-shocked priest. I’m sure he’s heard quite a few things in his day, but I don’t think anyone has ever been quite as harsh during their first talk with him.
“I should have known that anything that fell out of your womb would be as rotten as the man that put it in there,” Father
Moore says, before he turns on his heel and stalks away from us.