Free The Wednesday Sisters by Meg Waite Clayton Page A

in carved wooden detail, and the incongruous sea blue of her eyes, not the peaceful sea you expected on a nun but something more turbulent, a stormy sea that somehow retained its color, that didn’t turn white-capped or gray. She sat at her desk in front of a stack of forms, and she asked me to sit in the chair across from her. Then she did something unprecedented: she picked up the forms and came from behind the desk and sat in the empty visitor chair, pulling it close to me. She took my hand and opened it, and she stared at my palm for a moment as if my future might really be found in the lines there—and why not, since God had created my hand and my future both? “God gives us gifts and helps us see fit how to use them,” she said, and she set the forms in my hands.
    I looked down at the bold black letters: The University of Illinois. It was an application, and below it, forms for financial aid. Underneath them, other college forms, all state schools. She understood my family would never be able to afford a private school for me, not with so many boys to educate.
    When I went through the forms at home that evening, I found at the bottom a copy of a recommendation letter for the University of Illinois from Sister Josephine: carbon-blue letters that said I was bright, resourceful, eager to learn, that claimed I would be an asset to any college, that said I was one of the most beautiful writers she’d ever had the pleasure to teach. Allowing me to go to my father with the idea that maybe
God
wanted me to go to college, Sister Josephine had said she thought He meant me to go.
    My mom sat quietly at the kitchen table that night, her eyes watering as she read Sister Josephine’s recommendation. When my father came home, he sat with us and she passed it to him. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette, scanning the words.
    My mother stood and found an ashtray, brown, plastic, and round. “I could find a position to help with the tuition, Jack,” she said as she set the ashtray in front of him, her voice its very gentlest.
    I started to explain what Sister Josephine had told me, that I could get a scholarship, that if I applied to state schools I might get a full ride somewhere. But my father wasn’t listening, my father was smashing out the short stub of his cigarette, extracting another from the pack in his shirt pocket, focusing intently on the match. Not so much angry as ashamed, I see in retrospect—though at the time it seemed only angry.
    “You want your sons coming home from school to an empty house?” he said to my mother.
    Mom smiled apologetically, and I knew she would say something, and I wanted to tell her
No, don’t, not for my sake.
But she was already speaking, saying, “Of course not, Jack. I didn’t mean that. I’d work mornings. Mornings and early afternoons. I saw a help wanted sign at the market—”
    “The market! No wife of mine—” He took a deep drag on his cigarette, the tip glowing red. “You don’t need to be waiting on others for money, Margaret, not while I’m still breathing and not when I’m gone, either, for Christ’s sake.” He looked down at the linoleum tabletop, tapped his ashes into the ashtray. “I can provide for my family myself.”
    From my mother’s downcast eyes, I knew the discussion was over, I knew she was bending to his will, and I hated that for her—that she was having to bend to him because of me. And I hated that
in
her, too—that she would just bend so easily to his will—and hated what it would mean for me. I couldn’t see my father the way she saw him: the mechanic who worked for barely decent pay and little dignity, who buried his ego at work every day so as not to offend anyone; the man who pinned his ambitions on his sons, who wasn’t quite sure what to make of the fact that it was his daughter who brought home the straight-A report cards—his daughter who was somehow his wife’s child in the same way his sons were his.
    “But Sister