“I guess I should have worn my habit. I’m sorry, I didn’t have time to change.” She smiled down at them, finished changing the lightbulb, clambered down the ladder, folded it, and leaned it against the wall. “We lost our handyman last month, and I’ve been sitting here in the dark for three days.” She kissed Bill on the cheek and held a hand out to shake Alex’s, who stared up at her in surprise. She was a tall, robust-looking woman, and the sweatshirt said Stanford, where she had gone to college more than thirty years before. “I’m Mother Mary Margaret,” she introduced herself to Alex. “You can call me Mother MaryMeg. I’m glad you came to visit. It’s pretty crazy here every day. We give lots of classes and seminars for people in the neighborhood, mostly at night since we all work.”
She indicated two threadbare chairs for them and sat down at her desk. Alex found it hard to believe that she was a nun. She seemed more like a schoolteacher, or a principal, or someone’s mother. “We’ve never had someone come to live with us, and we’re not really set up for it,” she said to both of them honestly, “but it could work, as long as you don’t mind living in a busy place, and are willing to pitch in with us. We all take a turn in the kitchen every month. The sisters pray a lot when it’s my turn. I’m better with a hammer and a power drill than at the stove.” Bill knew she had many other skills and had majored in psychology in college, had a master’s in theology, and had been studying toward a doctorate in psychology while working as a nurse practitioner. “How do you feel about staying here, Alex?” she asked her very directly.
“I don’t know. It looks a lot different than I thought,” she said in a soft, hesitant voice.
“I’m sorry about your father. I know this is a big change for you. Bill tells me you don’t want to go to boarding school. Why not? That might be more fun with kids your age.”
“I don’t do a lot of after-school activities,” she said cautiously. “I read a lot, and I like to write. My father and I did a lot of things together. I think I’d feel trapped living at school, and be forced into a lot of things I don’t like to do. I’ve been with grown-ups, or my dad, all my life. My mom…left…when I was seven, and she died when I was nine. It’s been just me and my dad all my life.” Her eyes filled with tears as she said it, but she struggled not to cry, as the mother superior nodded.
“What do you like to write?” she asked gently, assuming short stories or poetry.
“Crime stories,” Alex said with a small smile. “My teachers think they’re weird, so I don’t write them for school anymore. My dad thought they were pretty good.”
“Maybe you’ll be a writer one day,” Mother MaryMeg said in a warm tone. “You’d have to be fairly independent here. The nuns can’t chase you around if you’re not home on time, or don’t tell us where you are. We’d have to be able to rely on you to go to school, keep up with your work, and follow our rules about the house. That’s a lot to expect of you at your age, but it won’t work otherwise. How do you feel about it?” She looked Alex in the eye and spoke to her as an adult, as though she were a young nun coming to live there, not a fourteen-year-old girl, a freshman in high school, about to turn fifteen.
“I think I could do it,” Alex said in barely more than a whisper. Bill Buchanan had made it clear to the mother superior that Alex had been provided for by her father, and would be no financial burden on them. The estate could even pay the convent an amount for her monthly room and board, which Mother MaryMeg had already said could be given in the form of a small contribution to the convent. “How much can she eat, after all?” she had said in a lighthearted spirit. This was not about money. It was about taking responsibility for her, and her willingness to cooperate with them. But looking at Alex and talking to her, the older nun was confident about it. She looked like a good girl, and seemed mature for her age. And her father had had no problems with her that Bill knew of. She was an excellent student, sensible, and well behaved, and the nuns taking her in would be a godsend for her if they would do it.
“What if we give it a try?” Mother MaryMeg suggested after a few minutes. Alex had impressed her very favorably, just as Bill had said she would. “Let’s see how it works out. Would you like to have dinner with us tonight? I could introduce you to the others.” If she came to live with them, she would have twenty-six surrogate mothers, after having none at all for the past seven years. It was going to be a big change for her, and living in community was always an adjustment for everyone, the nuns too. Some nuns lived on their own or in small groups in apartments now. Big bustling convents like St. Dominic’s were rare in the modern church. It was an atmosphere that the nuns there loved, especially with Mother Mary Margaret running it.
“I’d like that,” Alex said in response to the dinner invitation, and looked a little dazed at the prospect of moving into a convent, with a group of women she’d never met.
“Good.” The mother superior stood up and smiled at both of them. “You can leave her with us if you want, Bill. One of the nuns can show her around after dinner and drive her home. You don’t need to stick around.” It was six-thirty by then and the dinner bell had sounded ten minutes earlier.
Bill left them in the hallway and promised to call Alex the next day. Mother MaryMeg led Alex down to the basement to the dining hall. You could hear the nuns’ chatter from the stairs. It wasn’t a silent order, and they sounded like any other large group of women, laughing and talking and catching up on the day’s activities. They stood up respectfully when the superior came into the room, but went on talking and called out greetings to her. Several of them noticed Alex standing beside her, looking shy. Mother MaryMeg walked her over to a table of younger nuns who were chatting animatedly and stood up again when the superior approached, and several of them smiled warmly at Alex and said hello. They slid over on the bench where they were seated and made room for her when told she was staying for dinner, and Alex sat down cautiously with them. She was next to Sister Regina, who beamed at her and handed her a platter of roast chicken a few minutes later. “We have pizza on Tuesdays,” she whispered. “Sister Sofia is Italian. She makes great pasta too. I’m a terrible cook,” she admitted and the others at the table agreed, as Alex smiled at them. It was overwhelming meeting so many of them all at once. A few of the nuns around the room were still in their habits from work, most of them nurses from the Catholic hospital nearby, but the others were wearing street clothes, in most cases jeans, which Alex found reassuring.
They were modern and informal, and were a variety of ages, but many of them looked young to Alex, and nothing like what she’d expected. As she helped herself to chicken, spinach, and French fries, all of the nuns at her table asked her questions about school. A number of them had heard about her visit and wondered if she would come to live with them. They told her about all the activities they engaged in, what their daytime jobs were, and the classes they taught at night. Sister Regina said she was the instructor in the new Pilates class, and two of the others taught the art classes for young children in the neighborhood. They made it sound like fun to live and work there.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” one of them asked her, and she thought it was a trick question as she shook her head. She hadn’t been out with any boys yet. There were one or two boys she liked at school, but the subject of dating had never come up, and her father had wanted her to put that off as long as possible, and she still agreed. “I had two at your age,” the nun who had asked admitted, and the others teased her about it, and she said one of them had since become a priest. He still sent her Christmas cards, and was a missionary in Africa.
All the nuns in the group made her feel welcome, and Mother MaryMeg had Sister Regina show her what could be her room if she came to stay with them. It was tiny, and barely big enough for the bed, desk, and dresser that were in it, which were fairly battered and had been donated to the convent. There was nothing charming about the room, and she wondered where she would put all her things, but at least she could put her typewriter on the desk.
“We might be able to squeeze a small bookcase in here for your schoolbooks,” Sister Regina said thoughtfully. Alex didn’t say it, but she wanted to bring some of her father’s books with her too, especially the ones they had loved reading together. It was going to be a tight fit in the small room. “We don’t spend much time in our rooms,” she explained, as they walked downstairs and ran into the mother superior in the hall.
“Would you drive Alex home for me?” Mother MaryMeg asked Sister Regina, who went to get the car keys. Then the nun in the sweatshirt turned to Alex and she could see that Alex was on overload from all she’d seen. Her whole life had changed in the blink of an eye, and where to live, and with whom, was a big decision for a girl her age. “What do you think, Alex?”
“I’d like to come and live here,” she said politely. “Everyone was really nice to me at dinner.” There were tears in her eyes again as she said it. She missed her father, and she didn’t want to leave their home and Elena, but if she had to, at least the nuns seemed friendly and kind and appealed to her more than boarding school. And she might have time to write here, in the tiny room, more so than in a dormitory she’d share with other kids at a residential school. That colored some of her decision, and how welcoming they’d been to her during the visit.
“Why don’t you move in this weekend? There will be plenty of us around to help you. Just let us know when, and I’ll work out the details with Bill,” Mother MaryMeg said warmly, as Sister Regina appeared with the car keys to one of their four station wagons that were in constant use. Alex followed her outside, got into the front seat, and put on her seatbelt, and Sister Regina chatted easily on the drive back to Alex’s home.
“I’m excited that you’re coming to live with us,” the young nun said, smiling at her, when they reached the house Alex had shared with her father. Alex said they were going to rent it out, and keep it so she could live there one day. “I’m sure you’ll miss it, but we’ll take good care of you in the meantime,” she promised, and Alex nodded and thanked her. Sister Regina watched her walk inside after she opened the door with her key, and she saw Elena greet her and peer out at the car that had brought her home, and then the front door closed and Sister Regina drove back to the convent, while Alex sat on her bed and looked around her familiar room.
There was space for almost none of her things in the small cell she’d been assigned, but she was going to take as many boxes of books as she could anyway. She could store them under the bed and stack them in the corners. Her books were all important to her, and were so much a part of her life with her father, and had meant so much to him, that she couldn’t let them all go into storage. She combed his bookshelves for hours that night, pulling out the ones she wanted to take with her. She decided to take her favorite Nancy Drews since they had been her first mystery books, and were symbolic of her early life with him. And taking his favorites was like taking him with her. She was up long after midnight making stacks of their most beloved books, some of them first editions he had treasured. She treated them all with reverence, and the following night packed them all in boxes Elena had gotten her.
She wasn’t sad about leaving her school, since she had just started recently and had no close friends there yet. It was the house that would be hard to leave. She had lived there all her life, and her father had been in it for twenty years before that. It was like leaving the womb, to go out in an unfamiliar world, full of strangers, and a way of life in the convent that was totally new to her. She had no idea how it would work out, or what would happen to her if it didn’t. With her grades, she could have gotten into any boarding school, but they all seemed cold and too big to her. In an odd way, the convent seemed friendlier, and she was used to living with adults.
Bill had promised to drive her over on Sunday with all her things. And their house would be put up for rent the following week after all their belongings were cleared out. Elena had been told to give her father’s clothes away, and the moving men would pack the rest and keep it in storage at the moving company until the day Alex would be old enough to go through it, and maybe move back into their home again. But that day was a long way off, after college. Eight years away, after high school and university, or when she turned twenty-one. She had a long road to travel until then. And the next chapter of her life would begin on Sunday at St. Dominic’s. She had no idea what it would be like living there, or how long she’d stay. Maybe a few months or a year or two, and after that the fates would decide what would happen to her.
—
Alex was waiting in the living room with Elena when Bill came to pick her up on Sunday morning. She had six suitcases of clothes, twelve boxes of books, her typewriter, and the lamp from her bedroom with blue lambs on it that she’d had since she was a little girl. Her father had always told her that the lambs were blue because they thought she’d be a boy, but as it turned out, they’d gotten lucky when she turned out to be a girl. She had fallen asleep looking at that lamp every night, so she took it with her. And she had her father’s favorite crime books with her, the Nancy Drews she had loved most, some other mystery books that had inspired her, and the binders with her stories in them. And she had packed a sweater of her father’s that still smelled like him, and her pillow from her bed. Everything else would be stored.
Elena started crying long before Bill arrived, and she had promised to visit Alex at the convent whenever she could. She had to look for a new job, after more than fifteen years with the Winslows, and she was dreading finding a new employer, and heartbroken that Alex couldn’t stay in the house with her. Alex clung to her and sobbed before she left, and Elena pressed a little religious medal into her hand for good luck. It was agony walking out of the house for the last time, and just watching her do it, Bill had tears in his eyes when he started the car, an SUV crammed full of Alex’s belongings. It was the saddest thing he’d ever seen. She sat in the front seat, crying and holding her childhood lamp, and neither of them spoke on the way to St. Dominic’s. There was nothing left to say except how terrible he felt that she had lost her father and her home, and the housekeeper she loved. Pattie and her children had come to say goodbye to her the night before, and they had all cried too. It was a tough situation, but out of everyone’s control, and Pattie said she hoped that Alex would be well cared for at the convent. She had talked to her husband about letting Alex stay with them, but they had no room, were already jammed to the rafters with their own four children, and didn’t want the responsibility of another child.
Bill had filled out the paperwork on Friday authorizing Alex’s transfer to the parochial school near St. Dominic’s, and her transcript would be sent there. And he and Mother MaryMeg had agreed that a small amount would be deposited to the convent’s account every month to pay for her room and board, which the archdiocese had approved.
When they reached the convent, the nuns were coming out of the church next door. Many of them had worn their habits to attend mass, but the younger ones hadn’t, and rarely wore them anymore. Mother MaryMeg spotted them when they drove up, and she asked the nuns to help them unload the car and take Alex’s things upstairs. She had given considerable thought to Alex living with them, and had assigned three of the nuns to supervise her, although everyone would help if necessary. Sister Regina had volunteered immediately and had bonded with Alex over dinner and when she showed her the room. She looked barely older than Alex on Sunday morning with her blond hair in a braid, in white pants and a pink tee shirt. She was unnervingly pretty for a nun, which had concerned Mother MaryMeg from the first, but her vocation appeared sound. She had also assigned Sister Thomas, who was the nun with children of her own. She had groaned and laughed when the mother superior discussed it with her. “Not again! That’s why I came here, to get away from teenagers forever.” But she was good humored about it, and willing to give it a try. And Sister Xavier Francis was in her early thirties and a teacher, had a great knack with kids, and could help with her homework if need be, particu
larly Latin and math. All three of them were waiting for her on Sunday, and several of the others carried her heavy bags and boxes up the stairs to the third-floor room. No one could move an inch once they set her suitcases down, and her boxes of books were piled high on the bed. Alex set down her lamp and typewriter on the desk, and Sister Xavier looked at the old Smith Corona with awe.
“What a beautiful machine!”
“I use it to write mystery stories,” Alex said cautiously, not sure how they’d feel about that. “Crime stories, actually.” And the young nun’s eyes lit up at the words.
“I love crime stories!”
“That’s what’s in the boxes.” Alex grinned. “They’re my father’s favorite books.”
“Who are your favorites?” She reeled off a list of her own, including Dashiell Hammett, Agatha Christie, Eric Ambler, Frederick Forsyth, Robin Cook, and a long list of books that Alex and her father had read, and some Alex hadn’t.
“I’ve read a lot of them.” Alex smiled. “I used to love Agatha Christie when I was younger.” She had recently read The Silence of the Lambs and loved it. “My father didn’t like women writers. He said women can’t write crime, only a man. I’ve read a lot of male writers.”
The Right Time Page 6