Chapter 4

Although Alex had always been close to her father, especially since they’d been alone, Carmen’s death brought them even closer. In time, Alex seemed to recover from the shock of losing her mother. Now she no longer had any dashed hopes or expectations of seeing her again, and there was a kind of unspoken closure.

She was reading more than ever. She had graduated to slightly more adult books recently, after finishing the entire Nancy Drew series several months before. Her father had given her some of the gentler “cozy” mysteries, like Agatha Christie, and now Alex was hooked on them. She loved Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, who solved the mysteries, while she tried to figure them out before they did.

She had also been doing a lot of writing. Her fourth grade teacher said she had real talent for writing poetry and haikus. And in fifth grade, she won an English prize for a short story she’d written. It was a very poignant story about a little girl whose mother had been killed. And in sixth grade, two years after her mother’s death, her English teacher, Mr. Farber, called Eric at his office and asked him to come to a meeting at school the next day. The teacher sounded grave, as though Alex had done something terrible, which was hard for her father to imagine since she had never been in trouble at school. He didn’t want to say anything to her about it that evening, until he heard the full story from the teacher.

He went to the meeting with trepidation, and with a somber face, the teacher handed him six pages to read, covered in Alex’s laborious eleven-year-old handwriting.

“I felt that it was important for you to see this, Mr. Winslow. My colleagues and I find it very disturbing.” Eric wondered if Alex had written something shockingly inappropriate, possibly even a hate letter to one of her teachers, or a diatribe about her motherless home life. He was frightened as he began reading after seeing the expression on her teacher’s face. He couldn’t imagine what Alex had written that upset her teacher to that degree. But as he read, he found himself absorbed into a story. She had written it with surprising skill given her age, and a very distinct style all her own.

The first page laid out the characters and initial premise of the story. And by the second page, he was hooked, and wanted to know more. All appeared to be going well by the end of the second page, and on page three she described a gory and terrifying murder, which was pure crime thriller. On the following page, she introduced an intriguing police detective, with a visible sense of humor, despite the horrifying crime. She unveiled several unforeseeable surprises on the fifth page, and on the final page she tied it all together, exposed the murderer, whom one would never have suspected—even Eric didn’t—and sent everyone to jail. It was a brilliant piece of writing and construction for anyone, let alone a child her age, and Eric was grinning proudly as he handed it back to the teacher, thinking he had brought Eric in to congratulate him on his daughter’s writing talent. Their frequent conversations about the crime thrillers he loved to read had obviously paid off and inspired the story.

“Do you realize how shocking it is for a girl of eleven to write something like that?” Mr. Farber said sternly in an accusing tone. “How she can even imagine violence of that nature is something for a psychologist to analyze. Were you aware that she has such morbid thoughts?” he asked Eric reproachfully, who looked stunned for a moment.

“Well, actually, no, I wasn’t aware, but I’m very impressed.” Eric was delighted, and Alex’s English teacher was appalled.

“This is no laughing matter, Mr. Winslow. This story indicates to me that your daughter is a very disturbed young girl.” As he heard it, Eric became severely annoyed.

“It indicates to me that she’s a hell of a writer. The story is flawlessly constructed and even surprised me at the end. I read a lot of crime thrillers, you might say they’re my hobby, and Alex and I discuss them frequently. She appears to pay more attention than I thought.”

“Do you realize how unhealthy and unsuitable it is for a child her age to think about things like this, and have a knowledge of sinister events of this kind? The story reads as though it was written by an adult.”

“I think that’s quite a compliment for her, to have written a short story that can scare the pants off us.”

“You need to take this seriously, Mr. Winslow,” the teacher almost shouted at him.

“I do. She told me several years ago that she wants to write crime thrillers when she grows up. Apparently she was more serious about it than I believed at the time, and this is evidence that with some creative writing classes, she might have the talent to do it.” He refused to believe that her story was the product of a sick mind, but rather the first signs that she might have real ability as a writer, which Eric found exciting. “I am very proud of her,” he said as he stood up. “May I have a copy of the story? I’d like to discuss it with her tonight.” The teacher looked even more outraged, and handed the original to Eric, who folded it and put it in his pocket, and then shook hands with the teacher, who watched him leave his office in disgust.

“You are going to cause her untold psychological damage if you encourage this kind of thing,” were his final words to Eric, and Eric intended to do just that, encourage her. He couldn’t wait to tell her how great her story was.

He brought it up to her that night, at dinner, over enchiladas and Spanish rice that Elena had left them, with a salad Eric had added to the meal.

“I saw your English teacher at school today,” he said casually, as they dug into the cheese and chicken enchiladas that were their favorite, with homemade tortillas.

“Mr. Farber?” She looked surprised. “Why?” She had no idea of the furor her innocent short story had caused. And her father laughed in answer.

“Because they think I’m fostering some kind of dangerous atmosphere in our home, if you can write about a murder like that. That’s one hell of a fantastic story, Al. How did you come up with it?” She was beaming at his praise, and her father was bursting with pride.

“I used the book you told me about last week as inspiration, but I made up all the details, threw in all the gore I could think of about the murder, but tried to make it as real as possible. I tried to keep it very short and surprise you at the end.”

“Well, it’s dynamite. You had me hooked right from the beginning, and you did surprise me. I think you have real talent.” There was nothing soft or namby-pamby about it. And it wasn’t a “cozy” detective story by any means. “If you work at it, I think you’re going to be one hell of a terrific writer one day. I am so impressed!” They talked about it for the rest of the meal, and she told her father about another idea she had.

“I think you ought to keep those stories at home from now on. Don’t waste them on your English classes. Let’s talk about them here. And write gentler things for Mr. Farber before he has me put in jail.” He was laughing as he said it, so she wasn’t worried. She was still surprised that her teacher had dragged her father to school. But she was thrilled that her father loved her story.

With Eric’s encouragement, Alex tried to write at home every day, and she turned out some very interesting, powerful short stories. Her father would critique them, and she would rework them until she thought she had them just right. Her father saved them in a folder, and when the folder was full, he put them in a binder. At the end of a year, they had more than fifty of them. Some were better than others, but all of them had a remarkably adult and distinctive style, with surprise endings that most of the time even Eric couldn’t guess. She had a definite knack. He began to steer her reading to the crime thrillers and detective stories he liked to read, so she could learn from the style of famous writers such as Dashiell Hammett, David Morrell, Michael Crichton, and even Georges Simenon translations. Alex started spending weekends reading adult mystery books, and then creating her own work.

And on her twelfth birthday, Eric came home with a special gift for her. It was a Smith Corona portable typewriter, in perfect condition, and he taught her how to use it. She was typing with all ten fingers within two weeks and she loved the machine.

“A lot of famous mystery writers use old typewriters. It’s part of the mystique,” he told her. She considered the gift from her father a rare prize, and when she had a friend over from school one day, she showed it to her. Her friend Becky thought it was weird.

“What do you do with that?”

“I play around with it on the weekends,” she said offhandedly.

“It looks like an antique,” Becky said dismissively. Alex didn’t tell her she wrote her stories on it, the more complicated the better, and that her father helped her do it. It was their secret, and she thought some of them were pretty good. And they were so much fun to write.

They had three binders of them by her thirteenth birthday, and her father took her to a mystery writers’ conference called Bouchercon as a surprise. It was a meeting that happened every year in a different city, attended by mystery writers of all genres. Alex listened raptly to several lectures, and wrote a brilliant story afterward. Her father was so proud of what she’d written that he wanted to get the stories published in a mystery writers’ magazine, and they were discussing which ones to submit when her father looked at her strangely, and for just the flicker of an instant, he acted as though he didn’t recognize her.

“Who are you anyway?” he said in a loud voice that didn’t sound like his own. “Are you one of the neighbors’ children? What are you doing in my house?” She stared at him in amazement, and a moment later he seemed normal again, and looked around the room as though he had just returned from somewhere else.

“Are you okay, Dad?” He had frightened her for a moment, and he brushed it off and laughed.

“I’m fine. I was just trying to scare you. You can put that in a story,” he said and went to get a drink of water.

“Don’t scare me like that again. It was creepy.”

It happened again a few weeks later when they went to a baseball game. The Red Sox were playing the Yankees, the score was six to three, and it was an unusually hot day. Eric turned to Alex halfway through the game with a blank look and asked her who was playing. “The Yankees and the Orioles?”

“Are you kidding? It’s the Red Sox and the Yankees.” A moment later he was back again, but his mind had gone blank for a minute, and this time she had seen it clearly. He acted like it was nothing and when she asked him about it later, he said it was the heat.

Then it happened at work. He came out of his office with a vague look and asked his secretary what she was doing there on the weekend. She didn’t know what to say. Afterward when she saw him in his office, she decided it was a joke. He was fine.

It occurred half a dozen times over the next few months, and when he asked Elena who she was and what she was doing there one day when he came home from work, he realized that something terrifying was happening to him. He made an appointment with his doctor, explained the symptoms to him, that for several minutes his mind would go blank and he wouldn’t remember where he was, who the people were around him, and sometimes even his own name. It was as though he couldn’t think for a few minutes, and the power lines were down in his brain. He was afraid he had a brain tumor, and his physician was concerned, and referred him to a neurologist, who sent him for brain scans and tests.

Eric said nothing to Alex about it as he waited for the results. The neurologist called him in to discuss their findings a week later, and in the elevator on the way to the doctor’s office, he got confused again. He rode the elevator alone for nearly ten minutes, up and down, unable to remember where he was going and why he was there, and then it came back to him again, and he pressed the button for the right floor, and arrived at the doctor’s office looking shaken. He told him he had just had another episode. The doctor looked serious as Eric sat across his desk. It was occurring once a week now, and sometimes more frequently than that, only for a few minutes, but long enough for him to realize that something frightening was going on in his brain.

“Do I have a brain tumor, Doctor?” he asked, desperate to know the truth and if it was something that could be fixed. Maybe it was stress. Things had not been going well at work, business was down, and he was afraid they would blame him. They had lost several important bids recently, for no reason he could explain. He had made the presentations, and they hadn’t gone well.

“No, you don’t have a brain tumor,” the doctor answered his question. “But I’m afraid I don’t have good news. We took images of your brain, and there are some abnormalities.”

“Did I have a stroke and not know it?” The doctor shook his head.

“From the exams we did on you, there are indications that you have early-onset Alzheimer’s or dementia. There are medications we can give you to slow it down, but we can’t stop it and the damage can’t be reversed. It’s difficult to say how severe it will get or how long it will take to incapacitate you, but it’s a progressive disease.”

“My father had dementia at a young age, in his early sixties. But I’m sixty-four years old, and I’m a widower with a thirteen-year-old child. Are you telling me I’m becoming senile? Who’s going to take care of her?” Eric asked as tears filled his eyes.

“It’s something you need to think about, Mr. Winslow,” the doctor said gently. “I’m sorry for this bad news. Things may remain as they are for a while, even quite some time, but if our assessment is correct, ultimately we can’t reverse the disease.” He gave Eric a prescription for the medication and told him he wanted to see him in a month, unless things got markedly worse before that. Eric left the doctor’s office feeling as though a bomb had hit him. He had been planning to go back to work, it was only two-fifteen, but he was so upset that he called in sick and went home instead. Elena was in the kitchen when he got there, and for several minutes he didn’t know who she was and couldn’t remember her name.

“You okay, Mr. Winslow?” she asked him, worried about him, and he said he was fine, but had a touch of the flu, and went to his room to lie down. His mind was racing as he lay there, and he had no idea what to do about Alex. He had no family to leave her to, no one to take care of her. He had provided for her responsibly with his savings and a life insurance policy, but she couldn’t be on her own for the next five years. He made an appointment with his lawyer for the next day.

When Alex came home from school, Elena told her that her father had the flu. She thought he was sleeping, but he was lying on his bed in tears, with his door locked so Alex wouldn’t see him cry.

When Eric went to see Bill Buchanan, his lawyer, the next day, he explained the situation to him, and Bill was devastated to hear it. They weren’t close, but had known each other professionally for thirty years. They went over his financial arrangements for Alex, and she would have enough money to live carefully for several years and get an education, but the big question was where she would live if something happened to him. Earlier he had designated Bill as her trustee, but the arrangements he had made were more of a cautionary formality, and he had expected to live another twenty or thirty years, if he was lucky. Even if he lived that long now, it would be without full cognizance or all his faculties. And he might need his savings for his own care, and how would he care for her? It was a frightening situation, and they discussed alternate options for Alex, but none of them were what Eric wanted for her.

The lawyer suggested boarding school, and she could go home with friends for the holidays, if something happened to him. She couldn’t continue to live in their house alone with a housekeeper with no relative or parental supervision as a teenager, but Eric knew she would hate being locked away in a boarding school, and he didn’t want to do that to her. And she couldn’t spend every school holiday with strangers. She was more accustomed to the company of adults, with him, than to kids her own age. But there was no one he could rely on to take care of her. They had no family other than each other. Even Carmen was dead. And Eric didn’t want to tell Alex what was happening to him. It was too frightening for him to face, let alone for her at her age.

The lawyer couldn’t think of any solution for her, other than boarding school. She attended the best private school in Boston, and would be going to high school the following year. She was an outstanding student, and deserved the kind of education Eric was able to provide for her. But she needed more than a school. If Eric died or were incapacitated, she needed a responsible caretaker.

“There may be no place to put her other than boarding school,” the lawyer said sensibly. And he was even more concerned about Eric once dementia took over his brain, which was no longer an “if” but a “when.” He hoped it wouldn’t be soon. Bill Buchanan had agreed to become Alex’s trustee, so he could help make decisions for her, as well as be executor of Eric’s estate, but neither of them had come up with a satisfactory place for her to live once he was gone.

The medication seemed to slow the episodes down a little, but he was aware of them, even for a few instants, almost every day. It was getting harder and harder to work at the office, and two months after his diagnosis, the CEO called him in and told him he was no longer on top of his game. Eric assured him he would get things back in control, he said he’d had a slump recently, but the CEO reminded him that he would reach retirement age in a year, and felt he was ready for it now.

“Why not enjoy the good life?” He tried to make it sound like a positive experience, but he made it clear they wanted him to leave. It felt like the beginning of the end.

They gave him a wonderful retirement party and a bronze plaque a few weeks later, but after he stopped working, Eric found himself at home all day with nothing to do. He went on long walks, and at times forgot where he lived. It would come back to him while he was walking, but late one afternoon, he couldn’t remember his address or his name. A kind young woman saw how lost he looked, and drove him around the neighborhood searching for his home. He remembered then, and he was surprised to realize how far he’d walked. Alex was already at home when he got in, after thanking the young woman for getting him safely back to his address.

“Who was that who dropped you off, Dad?” She was a very attractive young woman, and Alex wondered if he was dating someone he hadn’t told her about. She knew how bored he was now that he’d retired. And he wasn’t reading the crime books he loved as much as he used to.

“No one, just a friend from work I ran into this afternoon.” He couldn’t tell Alex that she was a stranger who had picked him up and brought him home like a lost child. More and more he felt infantile and not the adult he used to be. The realization of it filled him with rage. He was short-tempered with Alex now, which was the last thing he wanted to be. And she looked hurt when he shouted at her. He didn’t seem to be enjoying his retirement as he had said he would when he announced it to her, and she had no idea it had been forced on him. No one at his old office knew he was suffering from Alzheimer’s either. Only his attorney and his physician did, although increasingly Alex could see that he was confused.

He still bought the newest crime novels by his favorite authors, but he never seemed to finish them, and left three or four of them open, lying around the house.

“Are you feeling okay, Dad?” She worried about him.

“Of course.” He smiled at her. But he noticed that the medication was working less well than it had in the beginning, which the doctor had warned him would happen.

They spent three weeks in Maine on vacation before she had to start high school in September, and he got lost in the woods on their third day there. The hotel they stayed at had to send out a search party for him. They found him easily, wandering around, and Eric was mortally embarrassed when they got back to the hotel. He said his compass was broken, and he’d gotten confused. The rest of their stay was uneventful, but he forgot her name several times, which shocked her. He had never done that before.

She had written a lot of stories over the summer and put them in the binder, but he never read or commented on any of them. And he didn’t offer to drive her to school on the first day. There were lots of subtle changes in his behavior, and Alex noticed all of them. She wondered if he was depressed or worried. He seemed distracted all the time, disoriented when they went out, and he was wandering around the living room in his boxers one day when she got home from school. He had never done that before either. And Elena said he’d been sleeping all day.

By her second month of high school, it was obvious to Alex that there was something seriously wrong with her father. He was confused most of the time now, and even Alex could see that dementia had set in. She called their doctor one morning when he refused to get out of bed, didn’t seem to know where he was, and couldn’t remember her name. The doctor came to the house and spoke to her, and told her what was happening. He found her amazingly mature for a fourteen-year-old. He told her that eventually they would have to put her father in a residential facility, and she said she wouldn’t allow it, and they would keep him at home and care for him there.

The doctor helped her find a male nurse to drive her father and keep an eye on him, and she insisted that on weekends she could care for him herself. All he wanted to do now was sleep anyway. She read to him from the familiar books he loved, although he usually fell asleep or seemed not to be listening to her. She spoke to him as though he still understood everything she said, and treated him with the dignity and respect he deserved, although it broke her heart to see him so confused. The disease was advancing by leaps and bounds, and by Christmas, he recognized no one except her. They added a second nurse. She could no longer manage him on her own. He had wandered down the street in his pajamas, and took his clothes off in the kitchen while Elena stood there and cried, watching him, and then ran screaming from the room. There was no hiding from the reality anymore. Less than a year after the first signs, his mind was severely impaired.

Alex was trying to keep up with her homework, hadn’t written a story in months, and worried about him all the time, even when she was at school. Over Christmas vacation, he stopped eating and wouldn’t get out of bed. After a week of IVs, they transferred him to a hospital and fed him from a nasogastric tube. Pattie and Elena stood with Alex when they took her father away in an ambulance. And then Pattie held her while she cried.

Alex spent the rest of her vacation at his bedside at the hospital, and by New Year’s Day, he stopped recognizing her too. His mind was a blank now, and he returned to an infant state. He slept and cried, laughed for no reason, refused all food, and pulled out his nasogastric tube and had to be restrained.

The week before she went back to school, Alex was with him every night at the hospital, sleeping on a cot next to his bed, even though he didn’t know who she was. And on the first day of school after vacation, she left for class from the hospital, and came back that afternoon. His bed was empty when she got there, and she was startled to realize he had been moved. She wondered if they were doing tests on him again, and the head nurse came to see her while she was looking lost in the room, trying to guess where he was. She knew the minute she saw the nurse’s face. The nurses had grown fond of her during her father’s stay. Alex was very mature for her age, and always polite and respectful to them. And she was obviously devoted to her father. She took care of him like an adoring mother and never left him for a minute.

“I have bad news for you, Alex,” the nurse said gently, and put her arms around her, as Alex went stiff as a board, and knew she shouldn’t have gone to school that day. She hadn’t even had a chance to say goodbye to him, but there was no one left to say goodbye to. The father she knew and loved had been gone for months by then. The nurse told her that he had died peacefully in his sleep right after she left for school.

They called Elena for her, who came to pick her up. Bill Buchanan handled everything with Alex, and helped make the funeral arrangements. The church was full, with all the people who had worked with him, and known and admired him. And at the cemetery, she was shocked to see her mother’s grave. Her father had never told her that he’d had Carmen buried there, but now they were together, with her father’s first wife. She went home from the cemetery with Elena, and a few close friends came to visit her, but with Alex alone, most people didn’t want to intrude, and there was no gathering afterward. Alex sat in his room all that night in his favorite chair, feeling him with her.

Bill Buchanan came to see her the next day, and said the court would confirm his trusteeship as a formality, according to her father’s will. He also explained to her that her father had been unable to decide where Alex should live. He told her that her father had appointed him her trustee, but he had no solutions either.

“Can’t I just live here with Elena?” she asked in a quavering voice. She had hoped that would be possible and if not, what was going to happen to her? Bill had told her that her father had provided for her financially, for her education and to help her afterward, within reason, but where she would live was still unresolved. And she was too young to live alone. Eric had wanted the house kept for Alex for when she was older, and had suggested to Bill that they rent it out in the meantime, which Bill thought was a good idea. It would provide some income and preserve the house for her until she could use it.

“I don’t want to go to boarding school,” she said, reading the lawyer’s mind. But there were no relatives to send her to, and she couldn’t live with the neighbors for the next four years until she turned eighteen, nor at the house, with Elena, who went home at night.

“Let’s both think about it,” the lawyer said reasonably. “And for now you can stay here.” But boarding school was the only solution he could think of. Elena had agreed to stay at the house with Alex until they came up with a solution.

He was so upset about the dilemma of where Alex should live that he talked to his wife about it that night.

“Her father didn’t want her in a boarding school either. He knew she wouldn’t want that. But what am I going to do?” He felt like an ogre sending her away, but she was a fourteen-year-old girl with no living relatives. What else could he do? As her trustee, he had an obligation to solve the problem but had no idea how, other than a residential school. But even vacations would be a problem with nowhere for her to go.

“Let me make a call. I have a crazy idea,” Jane Buchanan said, and got up from the dinner table to call her cousin, who was the mother superior of a busy Dominican convent in a Boston suburb. It wasn’t an orphanage or a home for young girls. It was a residence for teaching and nursing nuns, all of them with jobs outside the convent, and most of whom no longer wore the habit. It always reminded Jane of a college dorm for adult women whenever she went to visit her cousin, who was a lively, very intelligent woman who was engaged with the world. They ran seminars and taught evening classes to women in the neighborhood, and maybe she’d have a suggestion or creative idea. Jane’s cousin, Mother Mary Margaret, was the only one she could think of who might help. Her nickname in the family was MaryMeg. She had waited until she was thirty to join a religious order, and was a nurse practitioner by profession. And as usual, when Jane called, it took her forever to come to the phone.

“Sorry, I was taking a Pilates class. We just started it here, and I love it.” She was in her late fifties, and she had taken cooking classes and photography lessons too. She loved taking advantage of the classes they offered, staying current with the world, and meeting the women who came to the convent from the community they served. Their adult classes were her personal and clever way to draw people back to the church. They were heavily attended, although the diocese reminded her occasionally that she was not running an entertainment center, but she insisted it was all in the interest of health and education, and somehow she got away with it. “What’s up?”

“I need your advice. Bill has a problem relating to a client who just died.”

“I don’t do funerals, and I’m not a lawyer. I’m a nurse.”

“And my smartest relative.” She explained Alex’s plight to her, orphaned at fourteen, with nowhere to live.

“And I assume there’s money if her father was Bill’s client,” Mother MaryMeg said practically.

“A respectable amount, apparently. He wasn’t crazy rich. But they have a house, and he had savings and a sizable insurance policy. The problem is no relatives, and no one to live with.”

“Poor kid.” Mother Mary Margaret felt sorry for her, but didn’t see what she could do. “What about boarding school?”

“She doesn’t want to go. Bill says she’s an unusually bright kid. She’s lived alone with her father for years. Her mother abandoned them, and then died when she was nine. Bill says she’s exceptional, and she thinks boarding school would be like prison. I’m not sure how great she is with other kids. He says she’s shy and introverted, and was very close to her father. She may be better with adults than her peers. Her life was pretty different.”

“Where does she go to school now?” Mother MaryMeg asked her cousin, and was impressed by the answer. “It’s too bad to pull her out of there, but you’re right, she can’t live alone. We don’t take kids, or I’d take her here, and you can’t put her in state foster care. That would be a lot worse than boarding school. What do you want from me?”

“Any bright ideas you have. You’re the best problem solver I know. I thought maybe you could think of a place for her. She’s not really a child at fourteen.”

“Nor an adult. Our nuns aren’t babysitters. They all have jobs, and they’re busy with our classes at night.” The mother superior sounded pensive for a minute. “On the other hand, it’s a crazy idea but I wonder if we could keep her here. The diocese would probably have a fit. Maybe I could get special dispensation, and we could try it for a while. If she doesn’t want to go to boarding school, she might not be thrilled with a convent either.”

“She doesn’t have much choice.”

“Let me think about it, and I’ll ask the others. We have a pretty full house. I’ve got twenty-six nuns here at the moment. But I’ve got an empty room upstairs. Wouldn’t it be odd for her to live with a bunch of nuns, though?”

“Maybe you could get her to enlist early,” Jane teased her.

“We don’t do that anymore. Half the women who come in are in their forties, or just over thirty at the youngest. We don’t recruit teenagers.” She laughed at the thought. “If we did, that would probably drive me out of the order. Have you met her? What’s she like?”

“Bill says she’s a lovely kid.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow, let me talk to the sisters.” She ran the convent democratically, although the final say was hers, with the permission of the archdiocese for anything unusual, of course.

“Thanks. I didn’t know who else to call.”

Mother MaryMeg thought about it that night, and prayed about it, and brought it up to the other nuns at breakfast the next day, after six o’clock mass. Most of them had to be at work by eight, and the convent was almost deserted during the day, between the teachers and the nurses. There were two older retired nuns who ran the front office while the others were at work.

“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.