Tres boring.
She was still a fifth-grade student at St. Thomas’s Elementary School,
because continued attendance was a strict condition of her adoption.
(Trial adoption. Nothing final yet. Could blow up. The Harrisons
could decide they preferred raising parakeets to children, give her
back, get a bird. Please, God, make sure they repare that in Your
divine wisdom You designed birds so they poop a lot. Make sure they
know what a mess it’ll be keeping the cage clean.) When she graduated
from St. Thomas’s Elementary, she would move on to St. Thomas’s High
School, because St. Thomas’s had its fingers in everything. In
addition to the children’s care home and the two schools, it had a
daycare center and a thrift shop. The parish was like a conglomerate,
and Father Jiminez was sort of a big executive like Donald Trump, except
Father Jiminez didn’t run around with bimbos or own gambling casos.
The bingo parlor hardly counted.
(Dear God, that stuff about birds pooping a lot-that was in no way meant
as a criticism. I’m sure You had Your reasons for making birds poop a
lot, all over everythug, and like the mystery of the Holy Trinity, it’s
just one of those things we ordinary humans can’t ever quite understand.
No offense meant.) Anyway, she didn’t mind going to St. Thomas’s
School, because both the nuns and the lay teachers pushed you hard, and
you ended up learning a lot, and she loved to learn.
By the last class on that Tuesday afternoon, however, she was full up
with g, and if Sister Mary Margaret called on her to say anything in
French, she would probably confine the word for church with the word for
sewer, which she had done once before, much to the delight of the other
kids and to her own motion.(DearGod,please remember that I made myself
say the Rosary as for that boner, just to prove I didn’t mean anything
by it, it was only a mistake. When the bell rang, she was the first out
of her seat and the first out of the classroom door, even though most of
the kids at St. Thomas’s School did not come from St.
Thomas’s Home and were not disabled in any way.
All the way to her locker and all the way from her locker to the front
exit, she wondered if Mr. Harrison would really be waiting for her, as
he had promised. She imagined herself standing on the sidewalk with
kids swarming around her, unable to spot his car, the crowd gradually
diminishing until she stood alone, and still no sign of his car, and her
waiting as the sun set and the moon rose and her wristwatch ticked
toward midnight, and in the morning when the kids returned for another
day of school, she’d just go back inside with them and not tell anyone
the Harrisons didn’t want her any more.
He was there. In the red car. In a line of cars driven by other kids’
parents. He leaned across the seat to open the door for her as she
approached.
When she got in with her book bag and closed the door, he said, “Hard
day?”
“Yeah,” she said, suddenly shy when shyness had never been one of her
major problems. She was having trouble getting the hang of this family
thing. She was afraid maybe she’d never get it.
He said, “Those nuns.”
“Yeah,” she agreed.
“They’re tough.”
“Tough.”
“Tough as nails, those nuns.”
“Nails,” she said, nodding agreement, wondering if she would ever be
able to speak more than one-word sentences again.
As he pulled away from the curb, he said, “I’ll bet you could put any
nun in the ring with any heavyweight champion in the whole history of
boxing-I don’t care if it was even Muhammad Ali-and she’d knock him out
in the first round.”
Regina couldn’t help grinning at him.
“Sure,” he said. “Only Superman could survive a fight with a real hard
case nun. Batman? Fooie! Even your average nun could mop up the floor
with Batman-or make soup out of the whole gang of Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles.”
“They mean well,” she said, which was three words, at least, but sounded