On the vestry.

Fr. Echeverría

The vestry waved away the Padre's absence and the congregation did not question it. He came back. He has always come back and though his hair is going cloud-white they do not doubt that he will ever not come back.

At the end of the day he leaves the grounds with Rosa. He carries a potted plant needing a home but it is not going to his home. It goes with them to her car. A beat-to-Hell little sedan sits at the curb in wait for her and she wrestles open the hatchback and lets him stick the thing behind the backseat.

"Baja la ventana," he says. "No cabe.""The wind will kill it.""If you don't drive like a pie de plomo it'll be fine.""Whatever. I see you tomorrow.""Yeah, alright."

She gets into the driver's seat and he taps the hood twice with the flat of his hand. Steps back onto the curb to watch her drive off. Looks back at the building and rubs his face now that the last person's gone from the place.

Serafíne

He must've felt her across the street. Even if he couldn't see her, sitting on the stoop of some dilapidated apartment block three or four doors down from the rectory, smoking something slightly more legal than the clove cigarettes she often smokes and slightly less legal than the cigarettes he sometimes carries in the shadow of a gathering evening, on the street in the gloaming. Felt the wash of her resonance against his senses as he tucked Rosa into her beaten up sedan with her battered little houseplant.

Felt her wandering closer as the brake lights of Rosa's car gleam against the gathering desk.

Then he can smell her: sweet and sticky and herbal, the drift of marijuana smoke in the darkness on her last exhale. Oh, if he turns all evidence of whatever she was smoking has been concealed somewhere on her person. Where is another question considering how few places she has to conceal thinks on her person. Maybe it was just a joint she smoked down to a roach, left to drift in the air like a speck of dust.

"Hey."

She nudges him from behind then flanks him. Looks up at the church building. Squinting like she could maybe see what he can see.

"Long day?"

Creature's been by almost every day since the fight with the Nephandi. No pattern or rhyme or reason to her visits, just that they happen.

Fr. Echeverría

Long day?

He checks the watch strapped to his right wrist. Time has gotten away from him. It isn't a sphere he's ever bothered to learn and he tells the hours by the sun in the sky but it isn't a constant. Their planet is tilted and it goes around the sun and not the other way around.

"Yeah," he says once he realizes it's after eight o'clock already. Doesn't ask what she's doing out here. She runs her circuit between the places where people are needing and if he's gotten used to seeing her every day he hasn't come to expect it. Despite the admission he smiles. "One of the girls is having a baby and we gotta decide what we're doing about the roof. It doesn't like it when it rains."

He gestures to it. Nothing overtly wrong with it but that doesn't mean shit from where they're standing. The sky beyond the roof is clear and gives no portent of rain.

"You coming or going?"

Serafíne

"Put a new one on," she returns, blithe and lovely and dreaming, half-dreamy, drawing in this rich deep breath full of the scents of the street and him and the city and the summer, the way heat bakes off concrete, the strong scent of asphalt melting and then reforming beneath their feet. She's back to something like her usual height tonight, wearing boots with both heels and hidden platforms that wrap themselves half-up her calves despite the heat.

Not fishnets tonight but black lace thigh-highs with visible garters beneath a tiny skirt. An old Joy Division t-shirt three sizes too large, sliding off her left shoulder.

Oh, familiarly, she slips her left arm into the crook of his right the way she did the first night he came to see her perform. "That's what I'd do about it. Which girl and when's she having her baby?"

He asks if she's coming or going and she gives him a bare shouldered shrug that says both. Coming and going. She's here to see him and he goes to bed by 9. After that, well.

The night's still young.

"Haven't decided," she finally responds, with a flashing glance at his profile, then back to the silohuette of the church against the darkening sky.

Fr. Echeverría

And he crooks the elbow lower and tighter so she can hold onto it. Not like he's been waiting for her to come along and attach herself to him but he adjusts just as easy as if he had been, same as he moves his arm to make room for her when she decides to sleep on his chest. They stand on the street like this and Rosa has already gone and the neighbors don't give two shits if he's sleeping with some rubia prostitute they never see in the area unless she's coming over to the rectory.

"Now," he says. "One of our parishioners is a midwife, yeah? She went running outta here right after the NA meeting finished. Girl's seventeen, no idea who the father is, lives with her sister. Didn't tell nobody she was pregnant until about a month ago. If she delivers tonight I'll head over in the morning after Mass but it's her first one, yeah?"

So he will definitely be in bed by nine o'clock tonight.

"We'll worry about the roof tomorrow too. Forgot to have the landscapers plant a money tree when they was out here last month."

Serafíne

"Shit." This quiet curse, uttered soft and low and full of something that sounds like rue as she stands there, companionable as you please. That rue in her mouth too, in the glassy gleam of her bloodshot eyes as she finds his profile again. " - I thought you meant you were still in the planning stages. The parties and shit they have for kids. Whatever they're called.

"They have them before weddings too. Supposed to be one last-blowout before the vows, right?"

Sera seems to be conflating the shower with the bachelerotte, but there we are.

Then, not precisely sobering (she has smoked too much to sober) but: oh, she squeezes his arm and drops her eyes from his profile, up and down the street, watching the march of lights to and from with this lazy, lilting attention.

"She gonna be okay? The girl? What's her name?"

Fr. Echeverría

"Amanda," he says, with Spanish pronunciation and not American English. "She's gonna be fine. We'll get her through her last year of high school, and then she's going to college. Girl wants to be a teacher. I'm not worried about her." A beat. "And when we figure out who the kid is knocked her up, I'm gonna take care of him, too."

It's said in jest but the man is called Padre by a couple hundred people. The girl probably broke down sobbing when she went into his office to admit that the weight gain was a baby growing in her belly and not overindulgence. The sort of thing you don't want to tell anyone let alone your pastor but his tone belies whatever thoughts he has of her conduct. No such obfuscation of his thoughts about the boy in this situation.

Serafíne

"Yeah?" This quiet question back to him; her half-focused eyes slip back to his profile and the swimming half-smile that has crested her mouth lingers at the corners as she looks back to him. Searching his face maybe to read whether that last statement was a jest or not.

"That midwife of yours is gonna get her a prescription for birth control pills, right? After the excitement's died down, I mean." Just the hum of her presence at his side as she shifts, digs one handed through the skull-shaped bag hanging at her side for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter.

It's one of her cloves, he can smell that as she sparks it and hears it by the way she inhales: just drawing the sweet smoke into her mouth rather than her lungs. A glance up a him and she's offering the dark blue cigarette to Pan for a drag if he wants one. This whole time never letting go of his arm, the arm he adjusts to fit her into his space when she seeks it.

"Me, I get the shots."

Fr. Echeverría

And he accepts the cigarette. It's tiny between his fingers and he tries to hold it like a cigar. The closure of his hand eclipses it from others' sight and when he lets go the smoke comes out his nostrils and not his mouth.

"I been thinking about trying the patch," he says, deadpan, as he hands the cigarette back to her. Whether she laughs or not he corrects the conversation's course a second later. "Fix the roof and get the teenager on birth control. You keep coming up with solutions to our problems I'm gonna have to get you on the vestry."

Serafíne

"Patch sucks. Irritates your skin and covers up your fucking tattoos. The hell's the point of tattoos if no one can see them to figure out what a badass you are? The shots aren't bad. I thought about the little things they inject into you but pardon me for being mildly paranoid about the Black Hats, you know? The problem with the pills is remembering to take 'em every day.

"I mean, half the time, I wake up and have no idea where I am or where the fuck I left my bag. So."

She seems pleased with his joke, though, leans into him as she accepts her cigarette back and takes another drag, sighing the smoke out of her mouth.

"I don't know what the fuck that is, Pan. Vestry. Sounds like it involves clothes though and if I get to be on the committee for the reforming of your fucking wardrobe," up higher on her toes, she leans closer to him and plants a kiss against his temple by way of farewell, " - then I'm in. You should put me on the Christmas pageant committee, too.

"We'd bring the fucking house down, man. I hope everything goes okay with the kid. As for the rest of it, you'll find a way. Me, I'm off to find a fucking party. See you later, Pan."

--

The next day, someone leaves an envelope with a $500 fucking gift card to babies 'r us beneath the door of the church.

Three or four days later, one of those big donations that sometimes trickles in shows up. Just in the nick of time. Another one of Francisco Echeverría's miracles.