27.

Doctor Burger cannot be called “the first casualty of Audrey Mapes’s reign of terror,” as the geezers have argued. At sixty-three, Burger was no poster boy for healthy living. He, like most senior citizens of the 1970s, appeared older than his years, with his liver-spotted hands, his anemic crown of white hair combed within an inch of its life, his low-slung, rubbery jowls, his labored breathing. A two-pack-a-day smoker for more than three decades, his lungs were the color of the Grim Reaper’s cloak. His arteries were packed with the slough of a sloe gin fizz and Eggs Benedict diet. If Audrey hadn’t scared him to death, some opossum in his garbage can on a Sunday morning surely would have.

No, I assert that the first casualty of Audrey’s “reign” was not a body, but a soul. Annabelle Pensolotschy’s soul, to be precise.

Such a sweet name, Annabelle. So pure. So melodious. Two palindromes snuggling a “b” (group hug!). Four doubled letters arranged in perfect symmetry, 1-2-1, 1-2-1, like a line of hills inflamed to coppery gold by the sun’s plunge. A name that speaks of constancy, poetry, innocence. My beautiful, my graceful, my Annabelle.

How fitting, then, that the mushmouthed toddler McKenna (Toby later tried to claim credit—he could never give anyone else credit for anything) couldn’t pronounce “Grandma Anna” without sounding like a barnyard animal. Grandma’s appellation was changed, first to her surname (But who could pronounce Pensolotschy?), and quickly thereafter to a truncated, easy-on-the-tongue version—Pencil.

So accurate! So reflective of her personality! A tool that depends upon sharpness and pointedness; a tool that can stab and poison; a tool that communicates feelings, yes, but impermanent ones, feelings that change with the rub of an eraser and leave no evidence of the original. A fickle, untrustworthy—dare I say cheap—piece of wood that messes your lap with curled shavings and breaks when you push on it too hard.

Grandma Pencil—or “Cheesepurse,” as some of the kids took to calling her because they could always sneak a slice of Kraft out of there—became a regular presence at St. Monica’s. She was a “floater,” a “helper,” an “aide” (all unofficial titles, all off the books) who appeared in classrooms without warning to assist in administering tests, buttoning winter coats, or monitoring playground behavior. And always, always, always Grandma Pencil devoted precious time to standing in the corner, or at the chalkboard, or in the hallway . . . with the nuns. A little group time for commiserating, whispering, judging, scheming.

Grandma Pencil first met her surrogate sisters on that fateful “Bring Your Grandparents to School Day” when McKenna and Toby were starting fourth grade. This was less than a year after Doctor Burger’s fatal coronary. Who knows what it was, exactly, that made Grandma’s initial St. Monica’s visit so meaningful.

Had it reawakened an unfulfilled desire to be a teacher, or perhaps a nun?

Or did the sisters merely seem like an attractive crew? Buddies that Grandma could envision herself hanging out with? Shoulders to lean on, cry on, and rub with Ben-Gay? Ears to chew?

Maybe it was simply their age that brought them together, that unspoken camaraderie of the almost-dead, that sorority of Great Depression barn photographs and Tommy Dorsey albums.

Or perhaps Grandma was chiseling her way into a clique with front-row tickets to the concert of Eternal Bliss. If so, who could blame her?

More realistically, though, experiencing Catholic school on “Grandparents Day” had probably revealed a structure that Grandma Pencil’s own life had always lacked, one that fate had stolen from her. She’d been uprooted from her birthplace of Kalamazoo and taken to the Philippines, where she spent four of her most formative years (six through nine) in an internment camp.

There, the only dependable things were the murderous sun and the empty stomach she carried every day, the stomach that grew to hate her, the stomach that growled and rebelled when she so much as sipped the tainted tap water. Her stomach was a mangy, beaten dog that she longed to snuggle but that she ended up ignoring out of fear that it would soon die anyway. Ten hours a day, Annabelle stood on bare soles beside her mother and three older sisters, cooked by the 120-degree heat, in a line of ragged people as long and depressing as the Vietnam Memorial, only to receive half a bowl of rice and a tin cup of body-temperature water that tasted like blood.

Her father was gone, a hole in their lives. He’d disappeared from their hut two days after they were captured. The unspoken belief was that he was either a POW or was dead. In either case, they were powerless to bring him back. Each day of not knowing his condition meant a fortifying of Annabelle’s psychic defenses. Each day meant that another piece of her father—his deep, sonorous laugh, the softness of his flannel against her cheek, his firm palm on her back, coaxing her to brave the public pool—was excised from Annabelle’s mind. To hold onto any part of him was too painful, too dangerous.

Her mother tried to raise their spirits by invoking Daddy, by showing them his picture, by telling about the time he dropped his shoe into the toilet or when he accidentally hammered a hole in the kitchen wall. But Annabelle stared coldly at the photograph and listened to the stories without expression. This man was a stranger. She had already buried him, mourned, and moved on. (And so had his POW barracks-mates, as it turns out. Shot in the head.)

So St. Monica’s Elementary was where Annabelle Pensolotschy finally found her family, her routine, her stability.

Nuns are nothing if not predictable. They commit their lives to the sanctity of routine. After all, remember their husband’s M.O.—the sun, the tides, the rotation of the Earth—and maybe you’ll get some small sense of a Catholic nun’s aspirations.

Sister P.V., Sister Robert Ann, Sister Maximillian, Sister Pat, and Sister Michael lived together in the convent behind the church. They woke at 5:45 a.m., even on weekends. Each Sister, beginning with the eldest, was allotted seven minutes of bathroom time. “Age before beauty!” the younger ones loved to say, with chuckles. They said grace before slurping tea and unsweetened oatmeal at one big table. They strolled to the garden to water vegetables and pull weeds. Yes, it was quite a community. They lashed each other’s naked buttocks with rosaries if the laundry didn’t get done on time. Fortunately, it always got done on time. You see, the laundry routine, like every other routine, was carved into the stone tablets of their wizened heads.

In addition to sharing bathrooms, the nuns shared delusions. They also shared an unwillingness to perform self-examinations of any kind.

Undoubtedly, these qualities appealed to Grandma Pencil.

Where you would see stubbornness, the nuns saw conviction. Where you would see vindictiveness, the nuns saw the even hand (read: the open backhand) of justice. Where you would see pettiness, the nuns saw the Devil in the details. Where you would see nosiness and invasion of privacy, the nuns saw council.

Where you would see hate, they also saw hate (of the “sin,” not the “sinner”).

Where you would see sin, they saw the sinner.