She said it was God who told her to leave our childhood home when she was seventeen so that she could fulfill his wish for her to become a nun. I thought it was more likely that it was the hunky priest, Father Somebody or Other, who charmed her so completely that she abandoned our mother’s Dutch Reformed Church for the Catholic faith.

I remember her blushing scarlet when I suggested as much, insisting that he’d had nothing to do with it but of course that was nonsense. He was so gorgeous that I might have joined the church for him if he’d ever given me the time of day. That puppy dog sweetheart of hers, Riaan van Tonder, broke down and cried the night before she left. I know because I followed Dee when she snuck out of the house to meet him in the avocado orchard.

I was there, too, the day Dee became a novice and the whole thing gave me the absolute creeps. Dee wore Ma’s wedding dress, which should have been kept for me since I was the eldest. Luckily, it was way too conservative and not my style at all, so it was only the principle of it that bothered me. The dress was tight on Dee because she’d put on weight sitting around all day praying rather than working on the farm. Her getting fat was karma for her being given something that was rightfully mine.

She and the other pustules (which is what I called them even though Dee insisted it was “postulants”) walked down the aisle like blushing brides, veils over their heads, because they were supposedly taking vows to marry Christ. Ma even squirreled money away for months so that she could afford to buy Dee a gold band for her “wedding” ring.

Watching my sister stand in a row with the other young women so that they could all marry Christ was chilling. I didn’t know anything about cults then, but if I had that’s exactly what I would have likened it to. I remember thinking that God was a terrible polygamist and I hoped like hell that he’d leave Dee jilted at the altar.

We were all shocked when Dee dropped out of the convent just a few months later. She never revealed in her letter what made her quit, all she said was that God had changed his mind about her vocation.

After we got the news, Ma waited impatiently for Dee to come home and explain herself.

Instead, we received a letter from her in Rwanda saying that God had decided that she should head farther north to become an aid worker. I couldn’t understand why a scorned woman would take orders from her ex and didn’t think God should get away with that kind of behavior just because he was the Almighty.