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nobody ever looked really fat. Just tented.
    “Susan, Susan, Susan,” she said. “You’ve got to stop saying things like that. Seventeen years, and we didn’t even make you circumspect.”
    “Maybe,” Susan said, “but I can recite the Litany of Loretto from memory. And I can recite the Miserere from memory in Latin.”
    Reverend Mother turned away, opened the top drawer of her filing cabinet, and went rooting around for Susan’s papers.
    In the seventeen years she had known this woman, Susan had never once seen her put anything in its place.
3
    Fifteen minutes later, Susan climbed into the convent van next to Sister Mary Jerome, stuffing the things she was taking with her on the dashboard over the glove compartment. There wasn’t much. A dwarf manila envelope held her fifteen-decade rosary and the brown scapular she had worn under her habit. A larger manila envelope held a small packet of unopened mail. The Miraculous Medal she had worn around her neck was still there, under the shirt and sweater Dan had sent her. God only knew why.
    Sister Mary Jerome sat in the driver’s seat, stiff and cold and disapproving. She was a young nun with an uncertain vocation and a sour face, a well of bitterness that could not be excavated because it had no bottom. Defections always threatened her.
    She pointed to the manila envelopes and said, “If we go up a hill, that stuff is going to fall on the floor.”
    Susan took the manila envelopes and put them in her lap. Sister Mary Jerome frowned at them.
    “I can’t believe you aren’t going to open your mail,” she said. “I always open my mail. We only get it once a week.”
    “And there’s never anything in it,” Susan pointed out.
    “There’s a lot in yours.”
    “It’s just circulars, Mary Jerome. Religious publishing houses wanting to sell me catechisms. Religious supply houses wanting to sell me First Communion gift sets. It’s because I was principal of a school.”
    “You get mail every week,” Mary Jerome said. “I see it stacked up on the table in the living room. Sometimes I go months without seeing an envelope.”
    “I’ll send you some,” Susan said. “I’ll even get my brothers to send you some. Don’t you think we ought to get moving?”
    Mary Jerome turned the key and shifted into gear. “I can’t believe you’re not going to open your mail,” she said again. But she had pulled the van into the drive, and they were moving.
    Through the windshield, Susan could see snow beginning to come down, white against the black bark of naked trees. Saint Michael’s had nearly two acres between it and the road. Standing on the porch at the front of the Motherhouse was like looking into primeval forest. The lawn could have been endless.
    Today the drive itself was slicked with ice and looked dangerous. Mary Jerome was alternately humming the alleluia and muttering under her breath about “we.”
    When they made the first turn of the three that led to the gate, Mary Jerome said, “Some people just don’t know how to appreciate that mail.”
4
    Halfway to town, Susan finally opened her mail. She did it because she was nervous, and because Mary Jerome kept staring at it. Mary Jerome kept staring at her, too, but there was nothing Susan could do about that.
    They were rolling along on ice and snow, going much too fast, skidding across streets that dipped and curved and plunged between white Protestant props. A Congregationalist church. A gambrel colonial built before the Revolution. Susan had never noticed before how deliberately picturesque this town was, as if a Norman Rockwell aesthetic had been imposed on it by legislation, from above.
    “People just don’t understand,” Mary Jerome said. “About mail, I mean. I tell my family and I tell my family, but they just won’t listen. They think just because we’re not allowed to write more than four times a year, they shouldn’t write to us more than four times a year.”
    “My family never wrote to