Sister could feel him looking past her, as though she had already gone to join the saints. Sister thought to snap her fingers in his face, poke one of his eyes, make him certain of her still-living presence in the world through some madcap Laurel-and-Hardy-style violence. Instead, she stared at the stained-glass windows behind him. One portrayed the Virgin Mary kneeling at the base of the cross in submissive, sorrowful prayer. Another depicted Mary serene, cradling a swaddled babe. Sister had been praying the glorious mysteries on the rosary, deep into the coronation of the Virgin. Sister prefers the Mary of Revelation—pregnant belly rounded like the moon under her feet, twelve stars shining in her hair, defying the demon dragon that intends to eat her newborn infant. Sister has never seen Revelation Mary in stained glass.

Sister knows better than Father Morel about the possible harms of the drilling project. The church supported Sister through a PhD in ecology when she was a novitiate, and then it asked her to spend her lifetime as a kindergarten teacher, tying shoelaces and zippering jackets, which she did without complaint, which she came to truly love. Now, her aching joints burn despite the pillow she places between them and the wooden kneeler. She has belonged to her order, to the church, to God, and she once found solace in that belonging, was ever obedient to it. Now she struggles with what, exactly, her faith demands, how to behave when she suspects that God's laws and the church's laws are not an exact match.

Mano, Sister's younger blood sister by eight years, arrives and kneels on her right side. Mano's hair is wind-tousled, spruce-scented. Ruth, Sister's other blood sister, a year older than Sister herself, kneels on her left. Ruth smells like burnt toast. Her sisters often meet her for morning prayers, and Sister is glad for their company. There are no other nuns left at St. Paul's—some have died, some have moved to convalescent homes, one is in prison for writing Bible verses in blood on nuclear warheads after breaking into a secure facility. Sister has always seen this last act as vanity, action to get attention more than action to do good, but now she feels more confused than certain. She doesn't know whether a lifetime of prayers for a broken world, prayers she has fervently delivered, is sufficient. Her prayers have become heavy with her doubt.

“Father Morel,” Ruth says, “is planning to let John March put a gas drill rig on the vacant lot behind the school.”

Ruth likes to be first with the news. Sister is fine allowing this.

“Right there behind the playground?” Mano asks. “So close to the children?”

“These ridiculous men,” Sister says, shaking her head, “and their nonsense ideas.”