Pretty soon she finished and climbed back in. He held back the covers for her, and she found her old spot on his shoulder, with her knee once again across his midsection. “Do you kneel down and pray every night?” he asked.
“It’s an old habit, hard to break.”
“Ah.” He understood.
“Eddie?”
“Hm?”
“I’ll need to get a driver’s license, but first I’ll have to learn to drive. Will you teach me?”
“Of course. Why?”
“So I can take the nuns to St. Cloud or long Prairie when they need their eyes examined, or their teeth filled. Like Krystyna did.”
“Oh. Like Krystyna did.”
“Yes.”
“And maybe we could ask your mother or Krystyna’s mother if they’ve got enough cabbage in the garden that we could make up a big batch of sauerkraut for them like she always did. Oh, Eddie, we loved that sauerkraut so much, and we waited for it every year.”
He smiled and thought what a curious subject to be discussing on his wedding night: sauerkraut for the nuns.
But he understood, there would always be a little touch of Sister Regina left in his wife, Jean. But that was okay with Eddie. After all, it was the nun he’d fallen in love with.
When he was growing woozy he mumbled above her ear, “G’night, Sister.”
But she was already asleep, dreaming of having his babies.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
A songwriter once said of hometowns that when you’re young you want to get away and when you’re old you want to go back. Browerville, the setting of this book, is my hometown. I left it at age nine, but I went back to the area when I was in my forties and built a log cabin close enough to town that I could drive past my old house now and then, walk into my old church and school, buy Polish sausage at the meat market, and remember what I now realize was a growing-up that set me off on very much the right foot. I had family love, a safe little town where everybody knew everybody else, and the grounding of church and parochial school where tradition created a strong sense of security.
It’s not so surprising, then, that when I wrote my first book, I set it in Browerville. And perhaps it’s not so surprising that now, as I write my last, I once again return to Browerville.
This story is a work of fiction. But in memory of my mom and dad and the folks who peopled their world and mine when I was little, I have indiscriminately dropped the names of real people into this book. Many of them are now dead; some are not. Not one of them spoke the lines I made them speak, or knew a nun named Sister Regina, for she did not exist.
But Sister Dora did. And still does. She taught me first and second grades, and I include her as a character with thanks for her send-off that made me love school for the rest of my life. Sister Marl, grades three and four, helped me remember those wonderful school days. She is still a nun today, and a gentle, sweet lady.
My mom was so much like Krystyna. It was she who set hair for pin money, and made all our clothes, and sent my sister and me off to school looking like “Little dolls” (her words). My dad wasn’t the school janitor, but he did make the furniture and cabinets in our yellow brick house, along with our playhouse, and his workshop out back. He did put in a bathroom for my mom, and it was she who painted the cabinets pink. She hung the washer on the light string for us, too.
Our home had an open-door policy and a coffeepot always on the woodstove. Friends didn’t knock. They walked in and poured a cup.
On a cloudy autumn day in 1996 I walked back into St. Joseph’s parochial school to check some detail for this book. It was midmorning. A school day. The building was absolutely deserted, the big doors unlocked, classroom doors thrown open the way doors were left when I was a child. All the kids were next door in the church: it was Grandparents’ Day. I walked over and slipped in, and there they were, performing some pretty little song for their grandpas and grandmas, and I thought how little it had changed. Still a pretty good place to raise kids.
The house where the nuns lived is gone, along with the beautiful altars that were there in the fifties. But the grottoes are still there, and my yellow brick house, too. Though it now houses the Browerville Blade newspaper, the bathroom cupboards are still pink!
It has been fun going back, a trip down memory lane for me, and so too, perhaps, for many of my readers who were raised in little towns like mine, particularly those steeped in the Catholic tradition.
This, then, is my last book. I am retiring, but leaving my many loyal readers with a glimpse of my early life, and with a thank-you for every single copy you bought and every single letter you sent. It has been a grand twenty-one years.
—L.S.
April 22, 1997
Stillwater, Minnesota
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
LaVyrle Spencer, Then Came Heaven
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