Free A Heart Most Worthy by Siri Mitchell

when she had to and kneeled when she was supposed to. She even prayed along with the priest. But she couldn’t bring herself to partake in Communion. And so she sat in the back pew like a heathen, watching the parishioners stream to the front of the church. She ought to have left, but there was only hopelessness waiting for her at the tenement. Had she been able to be completely honest with herself, she might have admitted that the fact that her grandmother depended upon her so completely frightened her. But you know as well as I how fear can make even the eloquent inarticulate.
    So that’s where Father Antonio found Luciana after church. In the back pew, still pressed into her corner, after the rest of his parishioners had melted away.
    “You are new?” He spoke in the synthesis of dialects that the immigrants, of all regions, relied upon to make themselves understood.
    Luciana glanced up at him and then inclined her head, unwilling to lie to a priest, but unwilling also to reveal any particular knowledge of herself.
    “Are you well, my child?”
    Well? No. She was hardly well, but she was healthy. She was not hungry. She was alive. And she recognized that in spite of all her previous assumptions to the contrary, those things were not assured to any person in this new county. She nodded.
    “May the Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”
    Peace. Sì. Peace would be a start. “Grazie, Father.”
    “You are from the north?”
    Once more, she inclined her head.
    “What is your name, child?”
    “Luciana.”
    Light. Child of light. Then why did her eyes seem so shadowed by darkness? She should be singing. Or dancing. Laughing.
    “How can I help you?” For it was quite clear to the father that she was in great need. Of something.
    Help? Her? “No one can help me, Father.”
    “Perhaps it seems that way to you, but God can do the impossible.”
    She wanted to laugh. Oh, how she wanted to laugh! God had already done the impossible. He’d killed the one person she’d loved the most and taken her away from everything she’d ever known. But she didn’t laugh. She smiled. A very bleak, very sad smile. “My problems are too difficult, even for Him.”
    Father Antonio was used to speaking to the wounded of the faith, but he’d never before encountered one so set on God’s impotence. Usually people were longing to be reminded of His great power and great love. But the words he’d meant for cheer seemed only to deepen the girl’s despair. He reached out a hand to touch her, to bless her, but she slipped away from him and was gone.

9
    Twenty minutes earlier and fifteen pews up, Julietta had been nursing a smile that had nothing to do with the rites of mass or the sacrament of the Eucharist.
    Angelo.
    Angelo Moretti.
    Such a nice name was Angelo. For such a nice handsome face. For such nice thick hair that curled so delectably over his ears. And such nice brown eyes that had glowed as he’d looked at her. And his lips . . .
    Julietta bit her own lip.
    His lips were . . . divine. They were large and . . . and . . .
    The word that she wanted was sensuous, but even she couldn’t quite bring herself to think it while the father was conducting mass under the patronage of God’s all-seeing, all-knowing eyes. There was something about his lips. Something about the way they curled up at one corner. In almost a kind of . . . It wasn’t a sneer, really. Not quite. It was just that . . . he didn’t seem quite . . . nice.
    Julietta’s lips suddenly curved into a full-blown smile. She’d figured it out.
    He wasn’t quite nice.
    And that was exactly the reason she liked him so much. Who better to rescue her from the chains of propriety and the shackles of decency than a man who wasn’t quite nice? She couldn’t wait to see him again. And again.
    And again.

    Madame Fortier sat behind her desk on Monday, pulling her appointment book from some cards of buttons and a pile of trimmings. The twenty-ninth