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same relatives—my father’s mother and my mother’s two brothers—descended on Seattle like a swarm of locusts, all of them bent on going to court to be declared my legal guardian. Father Mark came to see me and asked if I wanted to live with any of those relatives. I told him I didn’t even know them. The last thing I wanted to do was go all the way across the country to live in a strange place called Pittsburgh where I knew no one. Fortunately, Father Mark listened to me. I also think he suspected that my relatives were far more interested in laying hands on the insurance money than they were in looking after my welfare. He got in touch with Catholic Family Services. They placed me in a foster home in Ballard.
    “Adelaide Rodgers, my foster mother, had entered a convent as a young woman but had been forced to drop out after only two years. Her mother had taken sick, and she’d had to go back home to help look after her younger brothers and sisters. These days you hear lots of horror stories about what goes on in foster homes, but Adelaide was wonderful. She was a loving, pious woman who went to Mass every Sunday and who lived her faith every single day. She believed in living frugally. She worked as a teller in a bank, but she sewed all her own clothing, and she taught me to do the same.
    “Adelaide never used a dime of my insurance settlement. She said it was a nest egg for me to use when I was ready to go to college. She invested my money right along with her own. Over the years my nest egg grew to surprising proportions, and so did hers. Adelaide never officially adopted me. I don’t think it was possible for single women to adopt in those days, but as far as she was concerned, I was her daughter. When she died a number of years ago, she left me a small fortune and a farm she had inherited up on Double Bluff Road on Whidbey Island. She left me the property and the money but with an important request. She asked that I use both the property and the money to found a convent in her mother’s memory—which I did. It’s called the Convent of Saint Benedict.”
    “Double Bluff Road. Isn’t there a country club somewhere around there?” I asked. “I think I went there for a conference once.”
    Sister Mary Katherine—I had to teach myself to think of her as Sister Mary Katherine and not Bonnie Jean—smiled and nodded. “Useless Bay Country Club,” she said. “They’re neighbors of ours. We like to think of ourselves as the Useful Useless Bay Country Club.”
    A nun cracking jokes and referring to her convent as a country club? That came as a bit of a surprise. “How did you go from Ballard High School to Mother Superior?” I asked.
    “As I said, because I changed schools so much, I was way behind academically by the time I reached high school. Even with Adelaide’s nightly tutoring sessions, college prep courses were far beyond my abilities, but I was a star in Miss Breckenridge’s home ec classes.”
    Miss Lola Breckenridge—I hadn’t thought of her in years. Even now it seems ironic that the woman in charge of Ballard’s home ec department had been an old maid. She was a tall, bony, yet imposing creature who dressed impeccably in designer-style fashions that she sewed herself. And she was tough. Boys who got crosswise with Miss Breckenridge in study hall or the cafeteria soon wished they hadn’t. A word from her to some misbehaving boy’s coach would have even star athletes benched for that week’s game.
    “Home ec was great. Because of what I had learned from Adelaide, I could sew circles around the other girls. Miss Breckenridge even let me come in before and after school to use the machines. Next to Adelaide, Miss Breckenridge was the best thing that ever happened to me. I may not have been able to make sense of algebra or geometry, but if I could sew well, I knew I’d be able to support myself.”
    “That’s what my mother did,” I put in. The admission surprised me. “She was a