The Saint

She looked at him. This had seemed much easier when she rehearsed it in the car on the way here. It had seemed so simple, like a business deal where everyone paid a fair price for what they got. Crime and punishment, sin and penance, equally balanced. She had even imagined that he might suggest the obvious answer himself.

But now she saw how thoroughly she had deluded herself. St. Kieran McClintock was genuinely horrified, completely bewildered and had no idea what she wanted.

She took a deep breath.

“I want you to marry me,” she said.

He recoiled. There was no other word for it. He even took a step backward, as if she’d hit him.

“Marry you?”

“Yes. You don’t need to look so stunned. That’s frequently what people do in situations like this.”

“But—” He undid the top button of his suit, as though he suddenly weren’t able to get enough air into his lungs. “Those people are usually—they have relationships. Most people who end up in this situation know each other well, have a history, have plans for a future. They’re usually in—”

“In love.” Her voice cracked on the word, and she tightened her throat to avoid breaking down. “I know. It’s awkward. I wish being in love were a requirement for making babies, but apparently it isn’t. Apparently even people who have an utterly meaningless one-night encounter can still end up pregnant.”

“I—I put that wrong. I didn’t mean it like that.”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we are going to have a child. A real, living, breathing person is going to enter this world. I don’t want any stigma attached to his name. I want him to have a name.”

“Stigma?” He frowned. “That’s pretty old-fashioned thinking, isn’t it? I mean, in this day and age, do people really—”

“Yes. People really do.” She thought of Mrs. Straine, who everyone whispered had bought her own wedding ring and sent herself flowers on an imaginary anniversary. She thought of her own mother, who had invented a marriage, then invented a divorce and cried into her pillow at night.

“I work at a very old-fashioned parochial school. I teach middle-school girls, who are becoming sexually aware themselves. I’m already on probation there for the sin of teaching them Hamlet. That’s how repressed the environment is. Believe me, my principal would never allow an unmarried mother to be their teacher.”

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