“Goodbye, little sister,” Ruth said loudly, stepping up to give me a hug. Her long red hair was hanging loose and a strand of it flew up and tickled my nose. She lowered her voice so our mother couldn’t hear her. “Have fun with your sexy priest.”

“Ruth,” I said, feeling my cheeks flush. “It’s not like that.”

“Of course it is,” she whispered. “I see how you look at him. You saucy minx.” Her blue eyes were brimming with tears when she stepped back and I was touched.

“You’ll come to my novitiate ceremony?”

“Of course,” she said. “A room full of virgins and sacrificial wine? Sounds like a hell of a party. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

“You mean ‘sacramental’ wine,” I corrected.

“You’re absolutely right. It’s the virgins who are sacrificial.” She winked.

And then the only person left to say goodbye to was Ma.

And it was leaving her that I had hoped would be hardest to do because I knew how much she loved me, how much she’d pinned all of her hopes on me after she’d been forced to get married and bear children when all she’d wanted was to live a life of servitude to the Lord.

“You will have the life I never had,” she’d said after sitting with Father Thomas one Sunday a year before and agreeing to let me join the convent. “You will be happy.”

My mother was only thirty-six when I left and yet I remember her as an old woman. Being a farmer’s wife, and a supremely unhappy one at that, had aged her prematurely, both in appearance and in spirit. Her hair was completely gray and her skin was worn and blemished. Her brown eyes looked like muddy pools as the tears gathered, ready to fall. She was wearing her usual old housedress because it was a working day, but she’d put her fancy apron on over it to mark the occasion and the special guest.

“Delilah,” my mother whispered fiercely as she cupped my cheeks with both of her calloused hands.

That’s all she said but I knew everything she meant by it. Ma wasn’t a demonstrative woman. I couldn’t recall her ever having told me that she loved me. She was the kind of woman who showed her love in scoldings and smacks against the backside because those were the things that she felt forged a person’s character in the eyes of the Lord. She mostly let our father discipline Ruth (which didn’t amount to much discipline at all) because she just didn’t care enough to ensure that Ruth had moral fiber. To her, Ruth was always a lost cause, but I was the one thing she’d done right, and she wanted to ensure that my path to heaven was free of obstructions.