Missing Sisters -SA Read Online Free

Her last sight of the Harrigans was in the tall, black-flecked mirror as they clucked and bowed to Sister John Bosco. What’s one way of life next to another?
    thought Alice. I could have gone away with them and loved it, or hated it. At least here I know what I’m up against.

    Still, she felt cheated. It was certainly within almighty God’s almighty godliness to have restored Sister Vincent de Paul in time. Sure, Alice might still have chosen against the Harrigans, but at least it’d have been her real choice. God knew she was sacrificing for Sister Vincent de Paul, bribing Him so that the burned nun would get better. Alice didn’t care. If a bribe worked, it worked.

    Only it wasn’t working yet. She had to suffer some more for God to relent and be merciful as everyone insisted He was. Sister Vincent de Paul, for all she knew, was no more than a lumpy corpse in a glass coffin at some side altar somewhere. Waxy cheeks and folded fingers.
    A new veil to cover the bubbled scalp, the huge shoe done up with a fine flourish of its laces.
    Maybe even studded in the heel and toe with taps, as the girls had always promised themselves they’d do for her. And outside the walls of the coffin, where the world still wriggled on, beeswax candles making that stiff, hot smell in the cold, stone-squeezed air. A few wildflowers in a jelly jar. But who was there to mourn Sister Vincent de Paul?

    The good sisters of Mind Your Own Sweet Business wouldn’t answer Alice’s questions directly. “She’s safely at rest,” they’d say. “She’s resting comfortably.” What a crock! For one thing Sister Vincent de Paul never , but never rested, comfortably or otherwise. Grimace though she might at the strain to her joints brought on by her bad foot, she was an up-and-at-’em creature. If she was really resting , she wouldn’t be resting ; she’d be twisting in the bed, clanging a spoon against the metal don’t-fall-out rails, knitting with her IV tubes out of boredom, boredom, boredom. “I have no mind,” she used to say in the kitchen. “God said I could either live on the street like a tramp, or cook in a convent. Not for me the classroom or the hospital!
    Wrong kind of bedside manner for a nurse, and no brain to back it up! No brain to deal with the kids! So I chose. Do I mind? Do I mind my choice? Alice?”

    “Do you mind your choice?” asked Alice.

    “Not mo-yound. Mind . Do I mind giving up the hot-cha-cha?”

    “Do you miiiiind giving up the hotchy-chotchy?”

    “No I do not!” A thump of fist into a tired pillow of bread dough. “Not in the least! Don’t mind the choices, Alice; mind the details! The smell of this bread! Here! Stick your nose in it!
    Right into it!” She’d demonstrated, coming up gluey and smelling raw as ripped, wet brown paper. “Mind the moments, Alice, and the choices don’t make a whit of difference.” But you like to cook, Alice wanted to point out. With her face plunged into dough, however, the time to make that remark came and went.

    And what choice might Sister Vincent de Paul have had in resting comfortably? Or was that term just nuns’ hand-lotion niceness, like the Final Slumber, the Bus Ride Home to Jesus, the Great Convent in the Sky, the Eternal Sleep of the Just? Sister Vincent de Paul’s room hadn’t been cleared out; that was some consolation. While delivering linen to the wardrobe outside the sisters’ wing, Alice had stolen for a moment into forbidden territory. Sister Vincent de Paul had a Snoopy cutout on the inside of her door that Alice had made her last Christmas. And there was the door, open, Snoopy taped on it still. Inside: a veil on a hook, a tidily made bed, a bottle of Geritol on the windowsill. Not so much as a tendril of dust. They hadn’t taken down the Snoopy; that was all the proof Alice needed that, platitudes aside, Sister Vincent de Paul was still somewhere in the land of the living.

    Staring for a minute at the brown linoleum floor, waxed so