“If I’d been able to cook,” I told Santa Marta, “I might have stayed.” Perhaps that was blasphemy, to put a mere earthly occupation above holy vows—but really, I’d been told many times as a child that every man honored God by the work he did with his hands. If I’d been allowed to honor God with the food I cooked, I might still be back in that convent putting prayers into the ovens along with the bread. But as a raw young novice, I’d been put under a savage-tempered old cow whose idea of high culinary discernment was boiling vegetables until gray. Even later when my skill with sweets vaulted me a bit higher up the ladder, there was nothing more innovative than, “Just add more sugar, Suora Serafina!”

The two lay sisters in the churchyard had stopped their weeding, the elder wincing as she stretched her stout back, the younger mopping her sweaty face with a grubby sleeve. “Maybe I still would have stayed,” I told Santa Marta. “It’s what girls do, after all, when you have too many daughters. The pretty one gets the dowry and the other takes the veil.” Or in my case, the daughter who kept her virginity got the dowry, and the daughter who surrendered her virtue to a good-looking apprentice behind an orange crate got sent to the convent. I hadn’t been in love with him, and that had made it all even worse—I’d felt enough shame at my sinful lusts that I’d felt I deserved the convent. And since I’d been at the age when I was getting a bit full of my own skill in the kitchen, and inclined to argue about it (like Bartolomeo)—well, my father had been glad to pack me out of his kitchens.

No, I might very well have stayed at my convent till I was old and withered. I could have carved out a place for myself in the kitchens, resigned myself to it all. But—

“It was the way Father came visiting me,” I told Santa Marta. “Every Sunday he’d come to pay a call. He never paid so much attention to me when I lived under his own roof! And it wasn’t me he really came to see at all, but of course you know that.”