A Christmas Duet : Two Contemporary Tales of Holiday Romance

by Amy Lamont

  “So, you’re really a priest?” When Faith tuned back into the conversation, her brother was already busy quizzing Father Michael. “How did that happen?”

  “Frank!” Faith could tell her mother wanted to give him a good smack on the back of the head but managed to control herself in front of the guest.

  “It’s okay, Mrs. Leary. It’s a question I get a lot.”

  Father Michael smiled again, and Faith felt herself holding back a sigh like a tween girl fawning over the pages of Tiger Beat. The man was fine. Bet his church was filled to the rafters with women who had to head to confession regularly to atone for their impure thoughts. Before her own impure thoughts could get the better of her, Faith changed the subject.

  “Where are Maddie and Gram and Gramps?”

  “Your sister stopped to pick your grandparents up on her way over,” her mother said. “Knowing your grandmother, she wasn’t ready when your sister got there and now they’re running late.”

  As if talking about the rest of the family conjured them, the front door rattled and was quickly followed by her sister’s cheery voice. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

  “Father Michael, come meet the rest of the family.” Faith’s mother tugged the man out toward the entryway while Frank came to lean a shoulder against Faith’s. The two enjoyed the view of Father Michael’s retreating form.

  “Such a shame,” Frank said with a hefty sigh.

  “Uh huh.” Faith patted her chin to make sure she wasn’t drooling before they followed the two out to greet the rest of the family.

  Maddie did not disappoint. She was dressed to perfection in a cranberry sweater set with fall leaves embroidered around the edges of the cardigan. And in case Faith may have missed her sister’s perfection, her mother pointed it out as she herded everyone into the dining room after introductions were made. “Oh, Maddie, you look just perfect. I love that sweater. Oh, and you brought your pies…”

  Bringing up the rear, Faith mimicked her mother in her head and pulled a face. Only she wasn’t as discreet as she thought. She looked up to find Father Michael only half a step in front of her looking back over his shoulder. He raised an eyebrow and the corner of his mouth twitched as if he knew exactly what she’d been thinking.

  “I know how you feel. My older brother is the favorite.”

  Faith’s jaw dropped. Apparently the guy was a mind reader. But seriously? He was a priest. Didn’t get much better than that in a mother’s mind. “What the heck does your brother do that you being a priest isn’t good enough?”

  “I know, right?” They lingered in the doorway of the dining room. “I mean growing up it made sense. He had the grades, quarterback of the football team, president of the student council. But when I decided to pledge my life to God, I thought I’d have the favorite son thing locked in. But no. He decided to go to medical school. He’s a surgeon now. He mostly does the Doctors Without Borders thing. You know, heading to third-world countries offering aid to poverty-stricken children. Being a priest at a parish in Brooklyn is small potatoes.”

  “Damn.” Faith looked up guiltily as soon as the swear word left her mouth. “I mean, um, just that I can sympathize.”

  “Totally appropriate response,” he assured her as they found their seats around the dining room table. “I think a lot worse every time I stop by my mom’s and hear her singing my brother’s praises.”

  Faith looked at him and they shared a smile. Double damn! It should be illegal for a priest to look so good. What was that line? Lead me not into temptation…..

  Faith’s mother had made place cards so no one got confused about where to sit. Translation: she didn’t want her parents sitting anywhere near each other. One of Faith and her brother’s favorite things in the world was watching their mother’s mortification over their grandparent’s canoodling. Having both passed the big 7-0 a few years ago didn’t stop them from showing their affection. Last Christmas her mom had made the mistake of forgoing the place cards and halfway through dinner Grandma and Grandpa Banks had been necking like a couple of sixteen-year-olds in the back of a Chevy. Right in front of Reverend Grey from the First Baptist Church, too. Faith held back a giggle just thinking of it.

  Not taking any chances, Faith’s mother placed herself at the head of the table with her parents across from each other on either side of her. Faith and Frank were next to each other, and Father Michael sat next to Maddie with Faith across from him. The chair with the place setting at the end opposite her mother remained empty.

  “Will Mr. Leary be joining us?” Father Michael asked as Frank and Maddie excused themselves to help their mother in the kitchen. He gestured to the empty seat.

  “Wouldn’t that be something to see?” Grandpa asked.

  Grandma nodded enthusiastically.

  When nothing more was forthcoming, Father Michael raised an eyebrow at Faith.

  “My dad passed away…,” she saw his mouth open, ostensibly to apologize, and rushed on, “…sixteen years ago.”

  Father Michael opened his mouth. Closed it again. An adorable furrow appeared between his eyebrows as he looked hard at the place setting at the end of the table, for all intents and purposes ready and waiting for heaping helpings of Thanksgiving dinner. He looked back at Faith. She just shrugged.

  After her dad was killed in a car accident when Faith was ten, her mother continued to set a place for him at dinner every night, like he was about to walk through the door any minute after a long day at the office. Faith, Frank, and Maddie had long since stopped questioning it.

  Somewhere way down deep, Faith got the warm fuzzies over the idea her mom loved her dad so much, even sixteen years later, she couldn’t let him go. Her mom confided once that at night sometimes, after a particularly rough day—and there were many of those for a suddenly single mother of three young children—she would sit in bed, close her eyes, and pretend to lay her head on Faith’s father’s shoulder as she told him about her day. Even thinking of it gave Faith a squishy feeling in her stomach and made her long for something she didn’t think she’d ever be lucky enough to find.

  “Who’s hungry?” Faith’s mother’s voice interrupted her unexpectedly mushy pondering, and Faith raised a startled gaze up only to meet the eyes of their dinner guest. His look spoke of compassion. Funny how they’d exchanged so few words, but she was left with the sense that he really understood how she was feeling. Was that a priest thing? Or something unique to Father Michael?

  “Mrs. Leary,” Father Michael said, breaking the spell Faith had fallen under, “can I help with anything?”

  “No, no, you just sit. You’re our guest. Frank and Maddie and I have everything under control. You can start serving yourselves.” Faith’s mom and siblings covered the table in platters laden with juicy turkey, steaming, buttery mashed potatoes, and what looked in Faith’s estimation to be forty-seven different kinds of vegetables. Her stomach growled, but she couldn’t help but look up with a sly grin.

  “How about me, Mom? Would you like me to help?”

  “No!” Her mom’s voice was just slightly too loud, and she shot Father Michael a quick look and regulated her volume. “I mean, no thank you, Faith. We have everything under control.”

  “She means she wants all this food to make it to our plates,” Grandma chimed in.

  “Yeesh, you drop a few things….” Faith pretended to be offended at their lack of confidence in her abilities to do anything related to food—from cooking to serving it. The truth was it suited her just fine. She was never asked to step foot in the kitchen, but she still got to partake in all the yummy goodness her mother cooked. Of course, that usually meant she got to cover for her slack after the meal was over. No one seemed to have a problem with her taking care of all the dirty dishes once they’d had their fill.

  “Make sure you get some of Maddie’s stuffing and her green bean casserole, Father. My Maddie is an amazing cook.”

  Of course she was a fabulous cook. Maddie did everything perfectly.r />
  As they filled their plates and her mother sang the praises of Maddie’s dishes, Faith couldn’t help but notice there were no cranberries on the table.

  Chapter 3

  After dinner, Faith cleared the dishes. For some reason, even though her family had done their share of the work, clearing the table while the rest of them got to sit and relax and digest their meals always gave her a Cinderella complex. She stuck her tongue out at Frank as he made a point of leaning back in his chair and patting his full stomach when she picked up his dinner plate.

  “Here, let me help with that.”

  All conversation came to an abrupt stop at Father Michael’s offer. Faith used the moment of surprise to thwart her mother’s protest that guests didn’t help with the dishes. She gave him a grin hoping she didn’t resemble the cat that ate the canary too much, and shoved some dishes into his hands. “Thanks.”

  “Faith!” Of course her mother couldn’t just let it go. “We do not make guests do cleanup duty. Father Michael, please, please, sit down. Faith can take care of the dishes.”

  “Really, Mrs. Leary, I don’t mind. I’m afraid after that delicious meal, if I don’t move myself now, I may still be in that chair come next Thanksgiving.”

  “And, Mom, I pay rent for an apartment across town. So if you want to get technical….”

  Faith let the notion she was a guest in her mother’s home hang there and made a dash for the kitchen, her arms loaded with gravy and mashed potato smeared plates. She didn’t want to make too much of a point of being a guest because that would come back and bite her in the rear end. Like next time she was low on funds and decided her mother’s kitchen was a better option for grocery shopping than the market on the corner.

  Father Michael wasn’t far behind Faith with his own stack of plates. As much as she appreciated the help, she knew her conscience wouldn’t allow her to go on without offering him an out.

  Dang conscience. Who invented those anyway?

  “Father Michael, you really don’t have to help. I know I passed you those plates awfully fast, but it was really more to….” Faith stopped, aware of what she was about to confess. And to a priest, no less. But really, who better to confess to?

  “You wanted to see if you could get your mother’s head to do a complete three-sixty?” He offered her a wicked grin, and his words showed there was no need for her to finish her confession. “Don’t worry about it. Last Christmas I hid the baby Jesus from my mother’s nativity scene just for kicks.”

  Faith let out a gasp before bursting into giggles. Father Michael wasn’t like any priest she’d met before. And since this was her mother’s third or fourth lap around this particular religion, she’d met quite a few.

  “Oh, and please,” he added, “just Michael is fine.”

  Faith smiled at “just Michael” for a few beats as her mind danced over exactly what she’d like to do with the handsome, smiling man in front of her if he really was just Michael. Then she caught herself mid-stare, wearing what was sure to be a dopey grin. She cleared her throat. “Umm, well, thanks. I appreciate the help.”

  They finished clearing the table and stood companionably at the sink, rinsing dishes and cutlery and lining them up in the dishwasher. Faith kept waiting for her mother to hop up from the table and take the dishes from Michael, but after her initial protest, she seemed strangely okay with having the two of them take on cleanup duty.

  “So, I guess it’s obvious what I do for a living,” Michael said. If Faith hadn’t known before dinner, the conversation they had over turkey and stuffing would have cleared it right up. Or, more like, the interrogation. Her grandmother was fascinated with the idea of turning water into wine and seemed to think Michael himself had the ability. “What do you do?”

  Ah, the dreaded question. At heart she was a musician, but her gigs were few and far between these days, and to tell the truth, none of them paid enough to fit the bill of “making a living.” So while she wanted to blurt out that she was a singer and guitarist, for some reason she felt compelled to be completely honest with him.

  “I’m a singer. I have a band I play with a few times a month. To make ends meet, I pick up odd jobs. Like right now I work for three elderly people who hired me to walk their dogs and run errands for them.”

  When she looked at him from the corner of her eyes, he was nodding. He’d rolled up his sleeves and plunged his hands into the soapy water to scrub a pot. Didn’t seem fair that those sinewy muscles and the dark sprinkling of hair on his forearms belonged to a priest.

  “Do you play any instruments?” he asked.

  Faith loved that he jumped into a discussion about her music. Most people seemed to focus on the odd jobs part, often wondering out loud how a woman her age could make a living like that.

  “I play a bunch.” She closed the dishwasher and punched the button to get it running before heading to the coffee maker. Since her yearlong stint as a barista at the local Starbucks, making coffee was one of the few domestic chores her mother entrusted her with. “Mainly the guitar, though. And I sing and write songs.”

  “Wow. What kind of stuff do you play?”

  A switch flipped inside Faith. She loved talking music. As she and Michael finished up the last of the pots and pans, she mentally jumped up and down as he talked knowledgeably about several of her favorite bands. The joy dimmed just a bit when again it popped into her head how perfect for her he seemed. Her earlier words to her brother came back to haunt her. He’s taken.

  “Father Michael,” Grandma asked around a mouthful of chocolate cream pie, “how come you get time off on Thanksgiving? Shouldn’t you be feeding the homeless at some soup kitchen or something?”

  “Mother, really.”

  Faith shoveled a heaping forkful of pumpkin pie into her mouth to avoid snickering at her mother’s outrage.

  “What?” Her grandmother demanded. “Isn’t that what most priests do on Thanksgiving?”

  “She’s right.” Michael poured a hefty dollop of cream into his coffee. “Volunteering on Thanksgiving has become pretty common. Actually that’s why I’m not doing it this year.”

  “Really?” Maddie’s voice came out just a tiny bit breathless. Faith wrinkled her nose as her sister leaned slightly closer to Michael and looked up at him through her lashes.

  Michael looked down with a friendly smile. “Yes, we realized a few years ago we didn’t get much of a turnout when we served Thanksgiving dinner. There are enough churches and restaurants around the city serving dinner to the homeless or anyone who can’t afford a decent meal on Thanksgiving.”

  “Oh, that’s so interesting.” Maddie leaned in and placed her hand on Michael’s sleeve.

  What was going on here? Faith gritted her teeth and worked on convincing herself her sister was not flirting with a priest. Never mind that some of her own interactions with him had leaned in that direction.

  “We also noticed we had more people than usual coming to the church’s soup kitchen and pantry the weekend after Thanksgiving and far fewer volunteers than we normally have. So we decided to close on Thanksgiving and recruit more volunteers for the weekend after.”

  “What a wonderful idea,” Maddie said, again with the breathless voice.

  Faith barely restrained herself from jumping over the table and stabbing her sister’s hand—still planted on Michael’s sleeve—with her fork.

  “It is lovely,” Faith’s mom agreed. “We’ve often talked about volunteering on Thanksgiving.”

  We have? Faith couldn’t imagine doing anything but what they were doing right now on Thanksgiving. Every Thanksgiving had been exactly the same as far back as she could remember. In fact, she’d bet good money her mother would become apoplectic at just the mention of doing anything else.

  “Well, I know it’s too late to help on Thanksgiving Day,” Michael said, “but we’d be more than happy to have your help this weekend. We open early and stay open late all three days. We need help cooking and serving, clea
ning, and making up boxes of donated groceries for families to take home.”

  Faith kept her laughter to herself as she swung her head to see her mother’s reaction to being caught by her own words.

  “That’s a wonderful idea. I think we should all plan on volunteering this weekend.”

  “What?” Faith dropped her fork on her plate.

  “We all have the weekend off,” her mother said. “We can be at the church to volunteer. It’ll be a lovely family activity.”

  “I agree.” Maddie smiled up at Michael. “I’d love to help.”

  “We could go for a few hours and help serve food, couldn’t we?” Faith’s grandfather hopped up from the table and went around to pat his wife’s hand. Then he slowly slid his fingers up along her arm. Her grandmother’s words of agreement were lost in a giggle as he began nibbling on her neck.

  “If those two keep it up, all the homeless people will lose their appetites,” Frank leaned over and whispered to Faith.

  Faith nodded, but didn’t take her eyes off the elderly couple necking at the end of the table. It was like a train wreck. No matter how much you might want to, you just couldn’t look away.

  “And you two will be there, too,” Faith’s mother said.

  Faith finally pulled her gaze from her grandparents at her mother’s command. She stared right at Faith and Frank, leaving no doubt who she was referring to.

  “Sorry, Mom, I’d love to, but I’m on call all weekend. It was the only way I could get today off.” Frank was an intern at New York-Presbyterian. It amazed Faith how much of her brother’s behavior her mother overlooked now that he was a doctor.

  Her mother turned the full force of her scrutiny on Faith. Not having a medical degree to back her up, Faith’s mind scrambled for an excuse to get out of volunteering. Spending time with a man she found charming, witty and incredibly sexy was something she’d usually jump at, especially given the dry spell she’d been going through lately. But given the object of her interest was a priest, she thought it better to pass. She was on the receiving end of her mother’s wrath often enough. She didn’t need to get on God’s bad side, too.