I nod again. I don’t really care, but I can hear Moony all the way down aisle seven at the grocery, griping that they have the nerve to charge twice as much for half the goods. I turn the ringer off on my phone and lay it in my lap under the table.

“So,” Sabrina says. “You’re Mary’s girl?”

“Yeah.” I smile in a way I hope is sweet. “Did you know each other well?”

“Yes and no,” she says. When I don’t respond, she adds, “She was older than me,” as if that explains it.

We could do this all day, this little dance around the truth. But I don’t have all day. Daniel and I have a lengthy drive back to New Orleans, and I still don’t know where my mother is. And I never want to come back to this town again, which surprises me even as I think it.

“I don’t know how to say this,” I begin. “So I’m just going to say it.”

Her eyebrows rise a half inch.

“Something happened to my mother at that school. And I think it has something to do with Father Terry. And I think you might know something about it.”

She sips her Coke thoughtfully, as if searching for the right words. When she sets it down, she takes a long breath and lets it out very, very slowly. And then she says, “That man deserved a lot worse than he got.”

I kick Daniel’s ankle under the table.

Sabrina narrows her eyes at me. “I guess she doesn’t talk about it.”

I shake my head.

She folds her fingers together and lays them in front of her on the table. “Talking about it is hard. I didn’t say a peep for almost twenty years. Can you believe that? Carrying that around with me all this time. I damn near forgot. Repression is what they call it. Holes in your memory like swiss cheese. And then, a few years back, I started getting these migraines. Powerful headaches that hurt so bad I couldn’t move for a day at a time. And the doctor checked everything he could think of, but there was nothing wrong with me. Finally, he said, ‘Sabrina, I don’t think I’m the kind of doctor you need.’ And he sent me to a therapist.”

I think of Dr. Angela. “Did she help?”

“She did. But it took time. Still does. You don’t just bounce back from something like that.”

I swallow hard and ask her to state the obvious. “Something like what?”

“Rape.” She says it very plainly with no window dressing. She does not pause or change the tone of her voice. There is no undercurrent of hysteria, no tears or heavy breathing. She says it as if she just said “influenza” or “homework” or “sandwiches.”