“So what do you think, sisters?” she asked, as they handed around a plate of toast. They took turns in the kitchen, and the food was basic.
“Do we really want to be responsible for a fourteen-year-old?” Sister Thomas, one of the older nuns, looked skeptical. She had six children herself and had come into the order when her youngest turned twenty-one, after her husband died. “That’s an awful age,” she said with a grimace, and the others laughed.
“You would know.”
“It’s all sex, drugs, and rock and roll at that age. And a lot of backtalk. Even my two girls were awful at that age.”
“She’s got nowhere else to go,” Mother MaryMeg reminded them. She had already made up her mind at mass, but she wanted the others to come to it on their own. She didn’t want to drag them to it, or force them, or it wouldn’t work. “What if we try it for a while, with the understanding that if we can’t manage it, or if she’s too difficult, she goes to boarding school, like it or not?”
“Where would she go to school here?” Sister Regina asked. She was their youngest nun at twenty-seven, and had had a vocation since she was fifteen, which Mother MaryMeg thought was much too young, but she had done her novitiate in Chicago, and come to them after she’d taken her vows. Mother MaryMeg would have encouraged her to do so later.
“She’d have to attend the parish school,” Mother MaryMeg said. “We can’t drive her into town to her current school. But she’ll get a decent education in the parish. She’ll manage if she’s as bright as my cousin says. Why don’t we meet her? She might not like us anyway. It was my cousin’s idea.” They all agreed to that, and then left for work hastily after taking their plates to the kitchen, rinsing them, and putting them in the dishwasher. It was a busy house. After breakfast, Mother MaryMeg checked her messages, ordered wholesale groceries and supplies to save money, and then called Jane. “The consensus is we’d like to meet her, which I think is a good idea. She might not want to live in a convent full of nuns either. Boarding school may sound great to her in comparison.”
“And if you and the sisters like her?” Jane was hopeful.
“We’ll try it for a few months and see how it works out.”
“I’ll tell Bill. You’re a saint,” she told her cousin, and Mother MaryMeg laughed.
“Not likely. I had too much fun before I got here. But it would be nice if we could help her out. Do you think he can get her here tonight?”
“I’ll try.”
“We have classes here tomorrow night, and it’s chaos on the weekends. Tonight would be better.”
“I’ll tell Bill.”
“We could meet her right before dinner at six o’clock.”
“He can leave me a message if I’m out.” Jane and MaryMeg had grown up almost as sisters, and they were still very close.
After they hung up, Jane called Bill at the office and told him to have Alex at the convent at six to meet the sisters, if the idea appealed to her at all.
He met Alex at the house after school and explained the situation to her. It was the only alternative plan he could come up with.
“In a convent? With nuns?” She and her father had gone to church occasionally, but they weren’t deeply religious. “Will they expect me to become a nun?” She looked shocked at the idea.
He smiled at the question, although it was reasonable for her to ask. “Not if I know my wife’s cousin. If they do this, it would be to help you out. They’re the busiest bunch of women I’ve ever met. They all work as teachers and nurses, and have classes there at night. I think they’d expect you to go to school, get good grades, and pitch in to help. You would go to their parish school.”
Whatever she did, she would have to leave the school she was in. Her whole life had been turned upside down by her father’s death, and after Bill left, she sat in her father’s room and looked at the bookcase full of books he had loved and they had shared. They were going to put everything in storage now, until she was older and came back to this house or had a home of her own. All that she had known and that was familiar to her was going to be boxed up and put away. Everything was about to change. And now she was going to meet a bunch of nuns, and maybe live in a convent. It was either that or boarding school, and she couldn’t decide which sounded worse. There were tears rolling down her cheeks as she walked out of her father’s bedroom, and Elena was crying in the kitchen when she walked in. The two women clung to each other and cried, and Alex didn’t know if she was crying for her father or herself.
Chapter 5
Bill Buchanan left his office earlier than usual to pick Alex up and get her to St. Dominic’s convent by six o’clock. She was waiting for him in a plain black dress and flat shoes when he arrived. When she got in the car, she looked like she’d been crying, which he could well understand. He couldn’t blame her father for not resolving her living situation before his death. Even he was having a hard time figuring out what was best for Alex. And in the last months of Eric’s life, her father had been incapable of making any decisions, let alone one as complex as where his daughter would live. Before that, in his early sixties, it didn’t dawn on him that time was running short.
Alex was silent as Bill drove her to the convent. She sat staring out the window as depressing images wended through her head of a dark, dreary convent, ancient nuns, and then of her father in his final days.
“Are you okay, Alex?” Bill asked her, and she nodded. “I think you’ll like my wife’s cousin. She’s a character even if she’s a nun. She’s got a great sense of humor, and she’s a nice person.” Alex had trouble making the connection between humor and the mother superior of a convent. It didn’t make sense to her. She just nodded and sat stone-faced when they arrived, and didn’t move for a minute. Boarding school was beginning to seem like the less unpleasant plan.