![]() We used to fight each other for the chance to lean close and tug them loose. Mother Roberta had three stiff hairs on her chin that we could spot only when she sat underneath the kitchen light. “There is no time for nothing,” she used to tell us, when she caught us staring out the window, or flipping through stations on the rectory radio. She taught us to be busy: write our representatives, make bread of brown bananas. She left it on the table until dinner, then wrecked it and started again.Įverything we knew about living, we knew because Mother Roberta had showed us. But while we weren’t looking, she put all thousand pieces where they were meant to be, and one afternoon the puzzle was finished. She began to spend her days behind a newspaper held wide, or at the kitchen table with a cup of Red Rose tea, staring at a spread of puzzle pieces that she never seemed to touch. ![]() Mother Roberta acquiesced-she would try to relax. Twice in one month, we’d had to rummage through bags of trash in search of her false teeth. She was eighty-one, frail as filament, and had started having bad days. When Father Thaddeus came to Lackawanna, he suggested she might take a break. She embroidered pillows, made punch from powder, wrote the homilies for the priest. Twice a year she sewed our made-to-measure habits from yards of a black poly-wool blend. Every morning she brewed the coffee and every night she cooked the meal. Mother Roberta made the rules: no chewing gum, no bicycles, no tree nuts, no pets. ![]()
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