“Thank you, sister.  I’m sure that will give him comfort.”

If you knew that monster as I do, Carrie thought, you’d withhold your prayers.  Or perhaps you wouldn’t  She stared a moment at Mother Superior’s kindly face.  Perhaps you’d pray for even the most ungodly sinner.

Not me, Carrie thought, turning and heading for the street.  Not for that man.  Not even an “Amen.”

Supposedly she was visiting him at the nursing home.  Usually the sisters traveled in pairs or more if shopping or making house calls to the sick or shut-ins, but since this was a parental nursing home visit, Carrie was allowed to travel alone.

She’d never been to the nursing home.  Not once.  The very thought of being in the same room with that man sickened her.

Brad took care of the visits.  Her brother saw to all that man’s needs.  The cost of keeping him in the Concordia, which its director described as “the Mercedes Benz of nursing homes,” was no burden for Brad.  Her investment banker brother’s Christmas bonus alone last year had come to over a million dollars.

Brad traveled a lot to earn that kind of money.  Many of his clients were headquartered on the West Coast and he spent almost as much time in California as he did here in Manhattan.  So whenever he headed west he’d call and leave word that he’d be out of town.  That meant his condo was hers to use whenever she wanted a change from the convent.  Carrie availed herself of that offer by saying that her brother’s absence made it necessary for her to attend to her father more often at the nursing home.

And when she visited the condo, she did not visit it alone.

Poverty, chastity, and obedience, she thought as a cab pulled up outside the convent.  This afternoon  I’m breaking all my vows at once.

A tsunami of self-loathing rose from her belly into her chest, reaching for her throat, momentarily suffocating her.  But it receded as quickly as it had come.  She had hated herself for so long that she barely noticed those waves anymore.  They felt like ripples now.

She descended the convent steps and slipped into the cab.

‡

As the taxi rounded Columbus Circle and headed up Central Park West, Carrie gazed through the side window at the newborn leaves erupting from the trees in the park, pale, pale green in the fading light.  Spring.  The city’s charms became most apparent in spring.  Nice to live up here, far from the squalor of downtown.

She spotted a homeless man, trudging uptown on the park side, wheeling all his worldly possessions ahead of him in a shopping cart.

Well, not too far.  You couldn’t escape the homeless in New York.  They were everywhere.

You can run but you can’t hide.

Brad had run to the Upper West Side, to Yuppy-ville.  Or Dinc-ville, as some folks were calling it these days.  But Brad wasn’t a dinc.  Wasn’t married, lived alone.  Carrie guessed that made him a sinc: single income, no children.  He could have lived anywhere—Westchester, the Gold Coast, Greenwich—but he seemed to like the ambiance of the gentrified neighborhoods, and often spoke of the friends he’d made in the building.

The cabby hung a mid-block U-turn on Central Park West and let her off in front of the building.  Carrie counted up five floors and saw a light in one of Brad’s windows.  Had to be one of Brad’s windows—his condo took up the entire fifth floor.  She smiled as desire began to spark within her.  She was the latecomer this time.  Usually it was the other way around.

Good.  She wouldn’t have to wait.

The doorman tipped his cap as he ushered her through to the lobby.  “Beautiful evening, isn’t it, Sister.”

“Yes, it is, Ricardo.  A wonderful evening.”

Carrie had to use her key to make the elevator stop on the fifth floor.  The sparks from groundlevel had ignited a flame of desire by the time she stepped out into a small atrium and unlocked the condo door.  Slowly she swung it open and slipped through as silently as possible.  Light leaked down the hall from the dining room.  She removed her shoes and padded toward it in her stockinged feet.

On an angle to her right she spotted him, hunched at Brad’s long dining room table, his back to her, his sandy-haired head bowed over half a sheaf of typewritten sheets, so engrossed in them she had no trouble entering the room unnoticed.

Desire grew to a molten heat as she crept up behind him.

Closer now, she noticed the waves in his hair as it edged over his collar and ears, the broad set of the shoulders under his shirt.  She loved this man, loved the scent of him, the feel of him, the sound of his voice, the touch of his fingers and palms on her.  She wanted him.  Now.  Every day.  Forever.  The times they could sneak away to be together were too, too few.  So she made these times count, every minute, every second, every racing, pounding heartbeat they were together.

She laid her hands on his shoulders and gently squeezed.

“Hi there.”

He jumped.  Through the fabric of his shirt she felt his shoulder muscles harden to rock then relax.  He turned in the chair and looked up at her.

“God, don’t do that!  My heart almost stopped.”

Carrie tilted his head back and kissed him on the lips.  His skin carried a trace of Old Spice.  She nodded toward the papers on the table.

“What’s so interesting?”

“The translation of an old scroll.  It’s—”

“More interesting than me?”

She kissed the tip of his nose, then each eye in turn.

“Are you kidding?”  Father Daniel Fitzpatrick rose, lifted her in his arms, and carried her toward the guest bedroom.  “Not even close.”

‡

Dan was dozing.  He often nodded off as they snuggled after their lovemaking.  Carrie rose up on an elbow and stared at his peaceful features.

I love you, Danny boy.

They first met about five years ago when he stepped in as the new associate pastor at St. Joe’s, ran into each other occasionally at parish affairs, and for the past three years or so had been working side by side at Loaves and Fishes.  They’d come to know each other well during those years, discovering that they shared the ecclesiastically incorrect notion that the Church should expend at least as much effort in nurturing minds and bodies as saving souls, that the well-being of the last was dependent to a large extent on the health of the first two.

Last year they became lovers.

Precipitously.

A strange courtship—long, slow, and tentative, never kissing or even holding hands.  An occasional bump of the shoulders, a brush of a hand against an arm, long looks, slow smiles, growing warmth.  Carrie doubted it would have progressed beyond that stage if she hadn’t taken the initiative last summer.

Up to that time she had used Brad’s condo as a vacation spa—her private retreat from the soup kitchen, from the convent, from the world in general.  She’d soak for hours in his whirlpool bath while watching old movies from his film library.  She’d return to the convent physically and mentally refreshed.  But last summer she asked Dan to drop her off on his way to the Museum of Natural History to see a new exhibit.  When he pulled up in front, she asked him to come inside and see how the other half lived.

And hour later, one of them was no longer a virgin.

It wasn’t me.  Oh, no...not by a long shot.

After the first time they both went through a period of terrible guilt—Dan’s much deeper and more wracking than hers—and for awhile Carrie feared he might never speak to her again.  Then their paths crossed in a deserted hallway and he took her hand and said they had to talk.  The only place to do that was Brad’s apartment.  So they met there on the condition that they would talk and nothing more.

And talk they did.  Dan poured out his feelings for her, his doubts about his calling, about the priorities of the priesthood and the Church itself.  Carrie told him that she had none of those doubts: Sister Carolyn Ferris was all she ever wanted to be, all she ever would be.  But she knew she loved him and she couldn’t change that.