The friends who had taken Scholastica to dinner were really only one friend and a husband—a woman who had been in Scholastica’s high-school graduating class, and who had suddenly decided, five years ago, that it was time to have children. Scholastica had done the math a couple of times—Genevra would have been forty when the first baby came along, and forty-three when she had the second one—but the age question didn’t bother her as much as the way Genevra responded to having children in her life. Maybe there was some truth to the things some people said about women waiting too long to have children. Genevra was wound tight as a drum, so hyperactive that the smallest noise seemed to make her jump out of her skin. She was never satisfied with the children, who were, in their turn, unruly and sullen. Scholastica had spent the whole meal not saying the things she wanted to say. Even the parents of her own students didn’t want to hear her ideas on child rearing, on the rather strange assumption that a woman who spent all day with people under the age of twelve couldn’t possibly know what they were like because she’d never given birth to one from her own personal womb. They had gone to an Arabic restaurant, and the children had refused to eat anything that could be had from the menu. They wanted Mc-Donald’s. If they couldn’t have that, they wanted to tell everyone in the room how gross the food here was, and how if they even touched it with their little fingers, it would make them puke. The little one had perfected a high-pitched whine that could have cut through glass. By the time they had reached the small cups of mud-thick coffee, Scholastica was wishing she had begged off this evening even if it meant appearing to be rude.
Out on the sidewalk, the children tugged at Genevra’s arms. The older one, the boy, sat down on the sidewalk and would not let himself be pulled up.
“I’m sure everything will be all right,” Genevra’s husband Tom was saying. “It’s not like the scandals. It doesn’t have anything to do with the Church. It isn’t the fault of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia that some kid murdered his wife and walked into a parish church to commit suicide.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” the older child said. “And you can’t make me.”
“Well,” Scholastica said.
“You really don’t have to take the bus,” Genevra said. “We can afford to put you in a taxi. Even without my working full-time.”
“I keep telling you,” Tom said. “I don’t need you to work full-time.”
“I don’t want to go in a taxi,” Scholastica said. “Really. I’ve been riding in taxis all day.”
“With something like this, the trick is to make sure the police are efficient,” Tom said. “That’s the biggest danger. That they’re going to screw it up, you know, and drag it out. I mean, it ought to be obvious to anybody what happened. The wife was so sick she got too much for him. The kid killed her, then he felt guilty about it. It happens all the time.”
“You can’t make me either,” the younger child said, but she didn’t sit down on the sidewalk. She had that odd fastidiousness some girls did even from infancy. She didn’t want anything near her to have anything to do with dirt.
Scholastica looked up the street and thought she saw a bus far in the distance. A little flag went up at the back of her mind that said: see? prayer can be very effective. She put her arms under her cape and wrapped them around her body. The wind was cold and stiff and made the hem of her habit whip around her legs.
“Well,” she said again.
“I keep telling Tom it’s not a question of if he needs me to work full-time,” Genevra said. “It’s the future. We’re going to want to send them to private schools. We’re going to want to send them to college. What am I going to be making, if I take too much time off?”
“You’re not taking any time off,” Tom said. “You’ve just got a reduced schedule.”
This time, Scholastica was sure of it. There was a bus. Her cape had a collar. She flipped it up against what would have been her neck, if the folds of her veil weren’t hanging in front of it. Sometimes she regretted choosing a life that did not allow her to have children of her own. She never regretted choosing one that did not allow her to marry. The bus stopped three blocks up. Scholastica moved closer to the bus stop sign and leaned a little into the street, to make sure the driver would see her.
“T’hink of it,” Tom said. “You’ll get to meet Gregor Demarkian. The Armenian-American Hercule Poirot.”
“I met him years ago,” Sister Scholastica wanted to say, but that would have taken explanations, so she didn’t. The bus pulled to a stop in front of her, and she leaned over to give Genevra a standard nonpeck on the cheek.