All Will Be Well

Prologue

As a child, though.

Maybe for my First Communion – but really, I may look it, but I'm actually not that old.

Your mother probably had beautiful mantillas.

Hats. My mother wore a hat to Mass.

Well, I just love it. It feels -

Everyone wore hats, everywhere. They wore hats to baseball games, to the grocery store, and so they just wore hats to church. Hats.

I felt like the character in that children's book. Caps for sale. Caps, caps caps for sale. What happened to him? Monkeys took all his hats.

I was sorry to interrupt her, but I knew exactly where she was going with this. It was the same place that all the in-the-moment Catholic moms would be going with it – no, not those barre-class, coffe shop-hugging-SUV hot church mamas humblebragging about the hot mess of their lives – no, she was going to the place of the lovely Trad Catholic moms with their 12-passenger vans, a place that was always a little frantic, aspired to mysticism all shared with you with a twang because they were all converts and this is the South, and so their place, this place, is a lot like Young Life, only you can drink Pinot and have statues.

And veils.

She held Zelie's hand in one of hers and the dripping, formerly white, now yellowish-brown chapel veil between the fingers of the other and smiled at me. Of course she smiled. Her t-shirt stretched across her belly and her striped skirt flowed down to her ankles, nearly lapping at the glinting puddles at our feet. And she would never stop smiling, this one. She nodded at the restless sea of yellow, white and navy on the other side of the parking lot.

I really admire what you've done.

She must have taken a vow, embraced some sort of spiritual discipline related to me, to us, something about affirming our life choices for life, for she -whose name I should have known but of course did not - said this or a variation every day as we waited.

You do what you have to do...it's family...

Such a beautiful witness to the culture of life. You write, don't you? You should write a book.

A nun approached.

Brittany!

Yes, of course it was Brittany. It would be that or Ashley or Taylor, and then Zelie, Boniface and John Paul will trail after her, and veils will flutter in soft spring breezes and Mary will be crowned. The pendulum swings, and when it does, it swings hard.

It's not a stereotype to say that you can pick out a nun from a crowd even if she's not wearing a habit. It's just a fact. Like this one, the school principal nun. Not Sister Mary Anything – that was for the old days and now it may be back and for the new days and the new nuns, but this one here, a product of the former and incredulous and disdainful of the latter, is just her squat, sharp-eyed self, rosaries and scapulars gone decades ago, megaphone, walkie-talkie and whistle at the ready instead. She is Sister Jackie, and with her helmet of gray hair, in her yellow school polo, cross pinned to the collar, navy slacks and blocky shoes, yes, you know it. That's a nun, right there.

Thank you so much for the cupcakes, Brittany.

It was a blessing to share it, Sister.

The faculty appreciated it so much.

She reached down and patted the toddler's head.

Remind me of this great big girl's name? Sally?