Uncross My Heart Read Free Page A

lightly snoring Ketch to guard the unlocked door as I traipsed across the open field toward the back side of Sylvia’s brick farmhouse. Having walked these fields for many years, I thought nothing of striding across twenty acres in the near dark.
    She was standing on the porch with a drink in her hand, which she set on the porch rail as I climbed the two-by-six wooden steps, and she held the door for me, saying how grateful she was to see me.
    Her curly auburn hair was a bit damp, as if she’d just showered, or perhaps she was in a nervous sweat over the animal intruder. She wore short-shorts and a yellow V-neck golf tee, despite the cool night air, and a lot of jewelry, broadcasting with her plunging neckline that she wasn’t suited to a rural environment. Her presence made me long for Mrs. Brown, Brownie as we called her, a squat, heavyset woman who could beat a snake to death with a rolling pin.
    “You’re wonderful to come over. Brownies?” Sylvia extended a platter, startling me by producing a culinary version of my remembrance.
    “Maybe we should look for your alien intruder first.” She drew back and pointed toward the broom closet. “You’re sure it’s in this closet?”
    “Something’s moving around in there and my dog’s in the bedroom. He’s a city animal and more afraid than I am.”
    I opened the closet door and shined the light inside. Nothing. I poked at the clothes with my walking stick. Nothing. Sylvia peeked in gingerly. “I swear there was something in there.”
    Suddenly a big black blob flew out of the closet right between us. I jumped back, nearly losing my balance, and let out a yelp. She screamed and flung herself on me, clinging and jumping up and down.
    “Ahh, ahh, ahh.” She screamed in rhythm with her feet leaving the ground. I tried to visually track the black creature as she bounced me along with her. I spotted it by the door—a bat.
    Extracting myself from Sylvia, I crept up on its angular backside as it clung to the wall and gave it the gym-towel snap, knocking it to the floor, and before it could gather itself up, I tossed the towel over it.
    While it tried to claw its way out of the maze of terry cloth, I scooped it up and shook it loose out on the porch, where it flew away. I reentered to find Sylvia standing on top of a kitchen chair, her hands clasped tight up against her chest and her face contorted into a little-girl grimace.
    “Done,” I said as she squealed her thank-yous, hopped down, and hugged me again.
    Collecting my tools, I prepared to leave but she thrust the brownie plate in front of me again and begged me to stay a minute longer.
    Never one to pass up chocolate, I took a seat at the kitchen counter, noting Sylvia had torn out my favorite place in the old farmhouse—the built-in pie cabinet that faced a battered old kitchen table where I used to sit and talk to Brownie for hours. In its place, Sylvia and her husband had installed a granite countertop with black leather bar stools.
    Without asking, she poured me a tall glass of wine and pushed it in my direction.
    “Priests drink wine, that much I know.”
    The dry wine chasing the sweet brownies made a rather unpleasant combination, but I smiled and gave her baking an appreciative little toast.She held her own glass up in the air. “Here’s to…not going bats.”
    Her voice held a tinge of sadness, and for a moment I thought I glimpsed a lonely woman most likely as locked away from her dreams as the poor creature we’d just freed. “So, what do priests do in their spare time other than save souls, read boring books, and chase their neighbors’ horrors away?”
    The fascination with women priests was a constant topic at any gathering and barely allowed me to do much more in any new relationship than spend time brushing aside preconceived notions of priests as sanctimonious, saintly, or celibate. I concluded my dissertation on “priests as ordinary people” about the time my wineglass reached empty