folded it into precise quarters. Then she checked to make sure that each of the doors of the Chevrolet were locked. Way out here in the suburbs of Minnetonka, Minnesota there was no one to steal it, but it was the proper thing to do. When she was certain the vehicle was secure, she went into the garage.
On Saturdays, Sister Mary Renfro took an envelope recycled from the week’s junk mail and on the back of it she wrote a list of the chores that needed to be done at the monastery. She picked up today’s list and carefully drew a line through “Adjust idle on carb.” The next item was, “Check connection on DirecTV dish.” That would require the ladder. Sister Mary smiled to herself. She loved the ladder.
Sister Mary also loved chores, and she loved lists, but most of all she loved routines. At thirty-four she was already an old lady in her heart, and the only passion in her life was her passionate embrace of repetition, routine and habit. Especially now, after that terrible experience at the Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. She had been on her way home from the wonderfully boring God is Green: Environmental Efficiency in Religious Communities Conference and suddenly, while changing planes at the airport, the world had stopped making sense. She had seen people murdered by their own carry-on items. She had seen those same people restored to life twenty minutes later. She had seen a man who was referred to as Satan (very disappointing looking, to be honest). She had seen beautiful, glowing creatures who must have been angels. She had seen a TSA Employee strip naked and attempt to copulate with a Rosetta Stone vending machine. She didn’t know how drugs worked but she suspected they worked a lot like this. The whole experience had left her shaken.
There are two types of nun. One was the type who braved hails of sniper fire to minister to the sick in the Sudan. These nuns risked their lives to smuggle human rights workers out of North Korea. They held hands with convicted serial killers as they were executed. They were God’s warriors of mercy. Mary Renfro was not that kind of nun. Mary Renfro was a hiding-from-the-world, please-don’t-bother-me kind of nun. She was in it for God, of course, but she was mostly in it for the stability. Nuns couldn’t be fired. Nuns couldn’t be laid off. When you joined the Church you were in it for life.
Sister Mary’s father had been killed in a freak cosplay accident when she was young. He had loved Star Wars but something had gone tragically awry with his reproduction light saber at a convention and suddenly he’d been engulfed in flames on the floor of the San Diego Convention Center, Hall B. It was random, it was bizarre, it was unexpected and after that Mary Renfro had yearned for predictability. She had spent months asking grown ups what jobs were the safest and which careers were the most orderly. Finally, she drew up a list, reviewed it and made the only possible decision.
And so, when she was twelve years old, she had marched up to her mother and informed her that she wanted to become a nun. Her mother had smiled, opened another bottle of Scotch and assumed that her daughter would forget all about it once she discovered boys or drugs or masturbation or all of the above. But twelve-year-old Mary Renfro walked to the local library (safest mode of transportation) and made a list of all the things she needed to do to become a nun and then, on her nineteen birthday, she did them. There was no college, no backpacking around Europe, no hitchhiking adventures in Northern California. Within six months of her high school graduation, Mary Renfro became a nun. Two weeks later her mother killed herself, but Sister Mary told herself that the two events were probably unrelated. Probably.
Being a nun was a good way to live. A precise way to live. And after the horrors of the airport, Sister Mary embraced her familiar routines like a drowning swimmer grabbing a life preserver. Every boring chore, every mundane task, every tiny ritual was a wall that she was building to protect herself from the chaos she had seen on Concourse C. But no matter how strong her wall was, there was still The Other Problem. The one that nagged at her. The one that whispered to her from the back of