The Smell of Other People's Hou - Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Page 0,39
away, as if nuns shouldn’t be thinking things like that. Her face is slightly flushed when she says, “Okay, but just this once.”
Sister Josephine is about half the age of Sister Agnes and Sister Bernadette, but that doesn’t mean she’s young. She’s also the tallest nun I’ve ever seen—at least six feet, if not more. She has a row of whiskers on her upper lip and a few stray hairs popping out of her chin, which are very distracting to look at. She drives way too fast in the old green pickup, taking the corners at a clip that sends me flying across the cab. But it’s the potholes I wish she’d slow down for. I am clutching my stomach with one hand and holding on to the dashboard for dear life with the other when she looks over and says, “Oh my goodness,” as if she forgot I was here.
“I have a bit of a lead foot,” she says apologetically, slowing down just a smidgen. “I grew up on a farm and started driving when I was ten, so it’s kind of a thrill for me to get out on the road every week.”
She’s so much chattier than the other nuns, and I feel out of practice holding up my end of the conversation. “Mother Superior is so good about knowing what each one of us needs and which skills we have that will best serve. She handed me the keys to this old beauty the minute I was fully professed, which was quite an honor.”
“What does it mean to be professed?” I ask.
“Oh, it’s the very, very, very last stage, when you take your final vows. You have to go through a test period for six months, and then you become a novitiate for two years if you seem a good fit, and then you take temporary vows for no less than three years. And then you get professed, which is your final vows. So it’s not a very spontaneous decision to commit yourself to this life.”
I want to say it would have been nice if there were a similar process for getting pregnant, but that would come out wrong, so I don’t. And then she surprises me by saying, “I would have thought your gran would have told you all this.”
I’m more stunned than when she was flying over the potholes.
“You know my gran?”
Her wimple reminds me of the white folds on a turkey’s neck as she swivels her head to look at me. “Of course; she grew up here at Our Lady, from when she was three years old. She really took me under her wing and showed me the ropes. She was such a fun, chatty teenager—not what you’d expect to find in a convent—she never told you about us?”
I shake my head, too shocked to say anything.
“Hmm, I wonder…,” she says. But she doesn’t say what she wonders, and I’m still so stunned by Gran being fun and chatty that I don’t notice we’ve pulled into the parking lot of a log cabin, which turns out to be the mercantile and the post office all rolled into one. Sister Josephine is already hopping out of the truck. I open my door just as a woman is getting out of a yellow Datsun next to us, and the sound of the two metal doors colliding is so loud that everyone close by looks over, including two boys about my age. They look puffy, and I notice they are wearing two coats apiece and they’re all rumpled like they’ve been sleeping in the back of that station wagon for weeks.
The woman in the Datsun is checking the damage to her door, and Sister Josephine has come around to look at mine. “Good thing we all have rusty old cars,” the nun says cheerfully, and the Datsun woman suddenly reminds me of a colorful paint-by-number with her flowered boots and lipstick, compared to Sister Josephine in her black tunic and her habit. If the woman had thought of blaming me for denting her door, she obviously isn’t going to anymore. Who argues with a six-foot nun? She shrugs and steers the boys inside the store, but the older one looks back at me with a quizzical expression on his face.
“Well,” says Sister Josephine, “you wanted to come to town so badly; are you going to hide in the truck now?”
Her eyes are twinkling.
“Will you tell me more about my gran before we get back to the convent?”