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volunteered. Instead we went up to Sally’s room, closed the door, and played paper dolls until four, then opened the
Baltimore Catechism
and ripped through the week’s lesson.
    In June, when school let out, class would meet six mornings a week for a month. I didn’t look forward to that.
    Most Saturday mornings Mama reviewed the lesson with me before I left home. This morning there had been no time. Now I sat, cramped between Delmore Preuss and the end of the pew, eyes closed, reeling off answers in my head. I was like someone preparing for citizenship in another country—terrified I would be found unworthy.
    The nuns rose from the front pew, where they had been praying since Mass, and strode briskly back to where their charges waited—picking scabs, elbowing neighbors, kicking the pew in front, and biting hangnails—torn by our great reluctance to be there and our equally great terror of hell.
    Sister Mary Frances stood in the center aisle just outside our pew, while Sister Mary Clair took a seat in the pew directly opposite to observe. They taught us as a team, one spelling the other, as by turns they flagged under the burden of our ignorance.
    “Sally,” Sister Mary Frances began when we had completed an Our Father and a Hail Mary, “can you tell us what happens to babies who die without being baptized?”
    What I had begun to ponder as I sat twitching beneath Sister Mary Frances’s gaze, so close to her that I could hear her soft, impatient breathing, was the moral ramifications of gambling. While it was presumptuous to question the state of Papa’s soul, I knew that Mama was upset by his poker playing. Was poker a mortal sin? If I could find out, maybe I could put Mama’s mind at ease.
    While our catechism responses droned or faltered, and we acquitted or disgraced ourselves, I formulated queries for the nuns. Is poker a sin? Is it only a sin if you lose?
    “Lark.” Sister Mary Frances frowned down her long, perpetually sunburned nose at me. It was not a frown of anger, not yet at any rate, but a frown of speculation. What response has this child failed to memorize? For what was the point of asking questions to which the answer was known?
    Taking the heavy cross hanging around her neck into her two hands, which were always red and wounded-looking, as if in her world it was eternally winter and she were forever without mittens, Sister demanded, “Without looking anywhere but at this crucifix, name the fourteen Stations of the Cross.”
    Pushing myself up from the seat, my heart beating in the perversely pleasant way it did when I was called on to answer a difficult question, I lay my furled
Baltimore Catechism
on the pew behind me. I stared fixedly at the silver and onyx cross and at Sister’s knuckles, in whose creases were tiny pinpoints of dried blood.
    “Pontius Pilate condemns Jesus,” I began, turning under the thumb of my right hand. Did Sister use lye soap to wash clothes? Grandma Browning made her own lye soap, and it was strong and harsh. It could make your hands look like that if you weren’t careful.
    “Jesus takes up the cross.” I turned under the index finger of my right hand. Maybe Sister washed her linens on a washboard.
    “Jesus falls to the ground for the first time.” Had she been working in the vegetable garden behind the nuns’ house?
    “Jesus meets his mother, Mary.” Did Sister have Jergens lotion, like Mama had, to soothe her hands?
    “Simon helps Jesus carry the cross.” Maybe nuns couldn’t afford Jergens lotion.
    “Veronica wipes Jesus’ face.” Mama had said that nuns were poor, that they promised to be poor when they married Jesus.
    “Jesus falls down again.” Wasn’t it funny how Jesus had so many brides?
    “Jesus meets women of Jerusalem.” Did Sister mind that Jesus had so many other brides?
    “Jesus falls down a third time.” Maybe Sister refused lotion. Maybe she offered up her pain.
    “The soldiers tear Jesus’ clothing off of him.” She had