“Give it time, dear. It isn’t how we stumble, it’s how we regain the path,” Sister Elizabeth offered.

She couldn’t face their disappointment and escaped to the bedroom she shared with her sister Cathy. She removed her habit, dropped onto the bed, and prayed for forgiveness. In the evening, her father came home, his work boots clomping down the hall.

“Annie dearest, what are we gonna—”

“I’m sorry, Da.”

“There’s no shame in it.” He sat at the end of the bed.

“They made me hate it all. God, Mass—”

“Don’t blaspheme, now.”

“I’m so tired.”

“To hell with them, Anne girl.” And there was her father’s wry smile.

In the Irish immigrant tradition, they ate meat and potatoes and no one spoke about it. Days became weeks, and Anne’s mother shrugged off her discontent. Anne applied to Fordham for the fall. She studied literature, the poems of Herbert and Hopkins her favorites. She met Pat Malone on a blind date during the ’66 transit strike. They cruised out to City Island for crab boil. She made the first move that night. They married after graduation. Anne earned her teaching license and had her baptism by fire at Teddy Roosevelt High School on East Fordham Road. The young Mrs. Malone became a fine teacher. Sister Elizabeth referred her to job after job teaching in the parochial schools, sometimes for better money than she was making under Shanker’s new deal, but she balked and demurred. When Pat finished law school, she went on to Hunter for a master’s in counseling. Anne never stopped going to church, that was a clear sin, but her faith wandered. She studied Freud and Jung, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Each poked at the veil in search of something, and the discovery was what she relished about being a teacher, even if it was with a class of clownish kids. The rules of grammar might never take, but her kids would occasionally express a truth or two in shambolic proto-essays about a brother serving in Indochina, an abuela in the hills outside San Juan. She had to be strict, in a constant holler, and was set back by simple tasks like collecting textbooks or getting names onto papers. But each year she battled and attained small victories of concentration. By graduation, her kids returned the favor with quarts of perfume and hilarious costume jewelry bought at Alexander’s. The wounds of Sister Angeline slowly scarred over, and Anne applied for the PhD program in psychology at Fordham. She scored well on Miller Analogies (catharsis : emotion :: absolution : guilt) and was accepted.

Anne was brought out of her reverie by the sound of Dan tapping away at the computer keyboard, his game a bunch of annoying digital chirps. The pot was failing to boil. She made herself a vodka cran before starting on the rest of the dinner.