18.

The years at St. Monica were marked by prayers, beatings, and halitosis. In fourth grade, it was Sister Peter Verona, a wisp of a woman whose habit framed a sullen, heavy-browed, fuzzy-lipped face. Pee Vee, as the students called her, weaved prayers throughout the day. Mornings started with an Our Father, a Hail Mary, a Gloria, an Apostles’ Creed, and an Act of Faith. Schooldays ended with the same, but in reverse order and with an added Memorare and Prayer for the Pope. But it was after recess when Pee Vee truly got the children to reach for God. Fifteen solid minutes of invocation, including a song lead by her delicate falsetto: “I have been a naughty child/Naughty as can be/Now I am so sorry Lord/Won’t you pardon me?”

McKenna felt sure that she hadn’t been naughty. She’d been, in fact, a model child compared to Toby. She’d resisted the pressure to take a hit from the Kool cigarette Toby had stolen from Murray’s jacket pocket and invited a circle of boys to smoke in the woods behind the baseball diamond. McKenna’s refusal had been mocked, while Toby, eyes narrowed, self-assured in his corruption, dared McKenna to nark on him as he dragged deeply.

McKenna was a good daughter, and a damn good one at that. She obeyed her parents without fail, even her father’s nonsensical demands.

“Cut the yard after dinner, McKenna, but son of a Band-Aid, don’t be so noisy about it,” Murray said. “I’m trying to concentrate downstairs, with power tools.”

Having cut the grass a half-dozen times, McKenna couldn’t recall any volume knob on the lawnmower. Toby smirked from across the table, bit a green bean.

Misty scooped potatoes onto her plate. “What your dad means is that maybe you could wait to cut the grass until he’s done working.”

“That’s not what I mean, Mist. Don’t speak for me, please.”

“I want a cold meatloaf,” Audrey said. She sat poised on her knees in a grownup chair. She two-handed a plastic glass of milk to her mouth and drank deeply, with noisy gulps.

“Just don’t rev the damn thing, McKenna. And when you turn a corner, don’t raise the blades off the ground.” Murray stabbed a hunk of loaf with his fork. “The sound gets really loud when you do that. Think about it.”

“Don’t rev the mower, dummy,” Toby said.

“I want a soap,” Audrey said.

Misty frowned. “Your sister is not a dummy. Say you’re sorry.”

“Sorry, dummy.”

McKenna cut the grass with hedge clippers. It took two hours, but it made no noise. Crickets jumped at her hands. The neighborhood was veiled by twilight. The air was chilly. She snipped away, on her knees. Now and then, she looked up at the house. On the second story, a light glowed behind the curtain in Audrey’s room, and McKenna wondered if she should be saving the grass clippings.

So McKenna hated to sing the naughty child song. She also hated the way Pee Vee thrust her face five inches from hers when visiting desks to check homework. “Do you really think Michigan is the second biggest state?!” The raw blast of onions, coffee, bologna, boiled cat—Who knew what went in that slit of a mouth?—choked McKenna. She tried not to inhale. And there was another odor, too, one that she’d also detected on Grandma Pencil’s breath. A sweet, curdled stench.

Perhaps it was food caught in her teeth. Perhaps it was the decay of her gums. Perhaps it was the rot of heart, lungs, stomach—that general wind of death that stirs inside every old person.

In private, the kids called Pee Vee “Muck Mouth,” “Garbage Pail,” and “Sewer Breath.” They imagined what was hidden beneath her veil. They envisioned a crew cut, a scarred, dimpled piece of head fruit. They tried to understand how, even in an afterlife of pillowy clouds and golden loving forgiveness, this woman could ever stand close to God. With her foul insides, hidden disfigurements, and cruel eyes, surely she would be cast out and left to flop like a fish upon the hard dirt of damnation.

Pee Vee, and all of the nuns at St. Monica, took great plea sure in humiliating the children; in separating them into groups (the “fast,” the “average,” and the “slow”; the slow group banished to a table in the back of the classroom); in slapping the boys on the ears; in quivering with rage while dragging a troublemaker like Toby to the front of the room and forcing him to sit on the carpet, facing the chalkboard. The nuns took plea sure in demanding an apology and, when not receiving one, pummeling his spine and shoulder blades with an open hand, the dull thumps echoing off the chalkboard, the globe, and the poster of the girl handing the wheelchaired boy an apple, with the caption, The fruit of kindness is the sweetest fruit. The air was forced from Toby’s lungs in shallow expulsions. His face crimsoned, and his cheeks jiggled. He fought back tears. His lips formed a smile—one without happiness but certainly with plea sure.

Sister Pee Vee was followed by Sister Michael, Sister Maximil-lian, Sister Pat, and Sister Robert Ann. All sadistic, all on missions to uncover evildoers. Like a squad of superheroes whose special powers were never bending to another’s will, never apologizing, and living to the age of one thousand. The nuns were a ruddy, sexless creature of one mind. They had traded individuality and womanhood for unfettered power. They were gnarled trees, eyesores that nobody could chop down. Axes would shatter; saw teeth would break loose and twinkle upon the ground in the winter sunlight.