“I’ll call you next week,” she promised. Then she smiled at Tom and hurried up the steps into the bus, her token in her hand. The other nuns at St. Anselm’s had told her that there were drivers who would not take fares from nuns in habits, but the idea of accepting that kind of favor made Scholastica extremely uncomfortable. She had the token in the stile before the driver could say anything at all. Then she smiled at him, with more warmth than she had managed for Tom, and went to the back of the bus.
There were some favors that were so universal, and automatic, that Scholastica had given up worrying about them. It was the end of the day, and rush hour. The bus was packed. A young man in his twenties got up to give her his seat, and she thanked him and sat down. The old woman she sat down next to patted her arm, and said, “Bless you, Sister.” Scholastica wondered, idly, what it had been like to be a nun in the days when people knew what it was nuns did, and how important it was that they did it. These days, people had the money to write checks for what they wanted. It wasn’t the case that if the nuns didn’t work for almost nothing, their children wouldn’t be able to go to Catholic school.
The bus lumbered, and Scholastica closed her eyes. This was why she hadn’t wanted a taxi. She needed the time to unkink. For some reason, she had the prayer on the Miraculous Medal running through her head: O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to you. It hummed through her brain like bees on telephone wires at the start of the summer. The first time she had ever received a Miraculous Medal had been right before her First Holy Communion . She could still remember the old nun who had taught religion at her elementary school, leading the whole class over to the church where the medals were sitting in a big box near the Communion rail. There were brown scapulars, too, hanging from the hands of the statue of Mary in the little wall niche next to the candles. The nuns in her elementary school had been Sisters of Divine Grace. She wondered if that was usual. Did girls always enter the same orders their elementary school teachers came from? The method was working. She was relaxing. She was at peace for the first time all day.
She was so much at peace, she nearly fell asleep and missed her stop. She saw the lit windows of Cardman’s Books at the last minute. She would have jumped to her feet, but in her long habit it was nearly impossible. As it was, she knocked her veil off center, letting her hair, as grey now as it was red, spill out. She smiled sheepishly at everybody around her and tucked it back in. There was something that was good about the old habits with their collars and their wimples. You’d practically have to be decapitated to have your hair spill out. Scholastica went for the back door, pulling the bell cord on her way. When the bus screamed to a stop, she went out by herself, feeling like a black thing in the night. There was something about habits she could get behind. The Sisters of Divine Grace should change theirs from black to something colorful, like the sky-blue that used to be worn by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Scholastica was tired of looking like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
She actually had four blocks to walk to get to St. Anselm’s. She could have transferred to another bus, going in the right direction, but it hadn’t seemed to her worth the effort. The cold was waking her up. Her nerves were no longer on edge. She turned right and hurried along the crowded street toward the floodlights that illuminated the spires of both St. Anselm’s and St. Stephen’s. When she got to St. Stephen’s, she noticed that something seemed to be going on there, as usual. The notice board at the end of the walk said something about a “reading circle.” Scholastica liked to read, but she had never liked the idea of sitting in a circle and talking about a book. In her early days in the convent, she had resented most the habit of having a Sister read aloud at meals and recreation. To this day, she couldn’t stand the sound of audio books on the convent van’s radio.
She crossed the street and went down along the side of St. Anselm’s, to get to the convent entrance. She let herself in the wrought-iron gate and looked around at the courtyard. The school was dark. It would be, at this time of night. The convent was mostly dark, too. It couldn’t be much later than twenty minutes to seven. She went down to the annex where the offices were and tried the door. It was locked. She let herself in with her key.
Whoever had been last to leave this place had not been very careful. There were lights on in the hall, and in at least two of the offices. Scholastica left the lights on in the hall and turned the office lights off automatically. “Let me inform you,” her novice mistress had once said, “of the concept of the kilowatt-hour.” She got to her office and tried her door, but that was locked as well. She got out her keys and opened up, wondering who had bothered with the lock, and why. She had told Thomasetta long ago that there was nothing in her office that needed to be protected like money in a vault.