Read Online When We Were the Kennedys by Monica Wood - Free Book Online

Mum isn’t kidding. Reasonable or not, “scrubbing floors” is her fear.
    I absorb these fears during our first fragile weeks without Dad, keeping up my own appearances by brushing my teeth in a military right-left precision, parting my hair with a wetted comb. I’m timid in any case—“desperate odd,” Dad always said, which meant shy—but now I have something big and bright and lumbering: a deceased father. The only solution: Lie low. Lower. Be a good girl. Do everything the nuns say. Get your homework in not early, not late, but exactly on time. Uniform skirt smoothed before sitting down, smoothed again before standing up. Look normal. Look normal. Look normal.
    Just as May turns to June, the weather prematurely hot, Sister Ernestine surprises our class by taking us outside for lunch and sitting splat on the ground, flipping back her veil like a ponytailed teenager. We sing something religious as grace, then eat our lunches on our laps, picnic-style. I pick at my bologna sandwich, watch a game of jump rope that I decline to join, sit on the grass with my feet straight out, ankles politely crossed.
    At day’s end, Sister keeps me after school. It’s not, as far as I know, my turn to do
le ménage
—clapping the erasers outside, washing the blackboard, lining up used chalk by size. I come to the front of the room and wait, uneasy. Sister Ernestine is plump and short-limbed, not much taller than I, in fact is a good bit shorter than the tallest nine-year-old in the class. What can she possibly want? Zero chance that I neglected my homework, or talked out of turn, or allowed my eyes to stray briefly to the paper of my neighbor. Has she guessed that Cathy and I sneaked up the embankment behind the convent last fall to snicker at the dowdy white undies flapping on a clothesline? Does she know we peeked into the cellar windows and saw her roller-skating in the basement?
    â€œYour daddy . . .” she begins, and my stomach drops, and her eyes well, and I stand in an icy terror. She’s going to
talk about it.
But I hold her gaze anyway, because I love her. She’s old, I believe, though it’s hard to tell—in those ponderous garments the nuns look no age at all. Her hairline, what I can see of it beneath her starched headgear, shows as a glint of silver, and she wears rimless glasses that sit atop her apple cheeks and jounce a bit when she talks.
    â€œYour daddy,” she stammers again, the tears now coursing freely down her cheeks, “was called home to God.”
    â€œYes, Sister.”
    Her hands are hidden inside her blousy black sleeves; her forehead pearls with sweat. Her chestnut-size rosary beads belt her at the waist, a silver cross dangling like Marley’s clankety chains, all the accouterments of her faith unshakably displayed as she faces me with reddening eyes in front of the map of the world. Back in September she’d pointed out the big bright country of Mexico, then traced her finger across a whole continent to find the piddling speck that was us.
    â€œGod wanted your daddy . . .”
    â€œYes, Sister.” Look normal. Look normal. Look normal.
    â€œ . . . to come home to Him . . .”
    â€œYes, Sister,” I whisper, gulping now, lost to her sympathy.
    â€œGod called him home . . .” She pauses, shaking her head; has she misplaced her point?
    I gaze at her, then at my shoes. I ask the only question I have, the only question anyone has. It takes all my breath: “Why?”
    She lays a hand on my shoulder. “For no reason I can fathom,” she tells me. “No reason at all, Monica.”
    I pause, taking in my own name. “Yes, Sister.”
    She closes her eyes. “Your poor mother. Your poor, poor mother.”
    My poor mother. Despite her blued hair and pretty shoes and secret sleeping hours, her fear has come true: pity even from the nuns, who consider personal