For the rest of the day, my head was buzzing. I was convinced that my talking with Sister V. would somehow get back to my father. The old man had a thing about divulging family business to anyone outside the house. I remembered one day, back in first grade, when my teacher had sensed that something was troubling me. She pulled me aside and asked what was wrong. It had seemed like a simple question, and I gave her a simple answer: I told her my parents had been fighting and that my father had slapped my mother. When I mentioned this to my father, he blew up. At the time I was sitting on the toilet seat watching him shave. In a blur, he put down his razor and slapped my face so hard that my head flew back like a screen door caught in a windstorm. I was stunned; it was the first time he had ever whacked me in the face, and I didn’t understand what he was so angry about. “Don’t you ever, ever tell anybody our business!” he said, jabbing his finger into my face. I left the bathroom crying, feeling as if I had violated some sacred family code.
After the three o’clock bell, I waited until the class cleared out. Just as Sister V. and I sat down to talk, Mr. Jefferies, the school maintenance man, showed up with a metal toolbox and announced he needed to repair the radiator. Sister Veronica suggested we go up to the convent on the top floor of the building. As we climbed the stairs, the rosary beads around her waist bounced against her leg, the sound echoing through the stairwell.
Outside the nuns’ quarters was a small reception area—a plain room with a gray vinyl couch and a few folding chairs around a coffee table. One of the cinderblock walls was adorned with a two-foot crucifix, along with an oddly placed electric clock mounted above it. An image of my father tapping the face of his watch filled my brain.
“Please have a seat,” Sister V. said.
I parked myself on the couch, and she sat on one of the metal chairs opposite me. I told her about my fight with Connie and my father wigging out, kicking and slapping me.