Then Came Heaven Read Online Free PDF Page B

classroom to carry out the hardest assignment she had ever been given.
    The room had grown noisy in her absence. The fourth-graders were still gathered around the oranges at her desk. She clapped her hands twice and sent them back to their desks, all but Anne Olczack to whom she said, “Please wait here, Anne, by my desk.”
    “Should I put the oranges back in the basket, Sister?” Anne offered. She was a thoughtful child, taught to be helpful by both of her parents, always eager to please in any way she could.
    “Yes, Anne, thank you.”
    Anne had pretty blue eyes and brown hair parted in the middle today and drawn back with matching barrettes. Her dress was green and brown plaid with a white collar and a ruffle that formed a V in the front. Sister Regina touched her on the shoulder and felt a welling inside such as she’d never experienced before, made up of empathy and love for this child who had blithely bid her mother goodbye this morning with absolute trust that she’d be there at home waiting at the end of the school day.
    Who would be there for her and Lucy from now on?
    Halfway down the aisle closest to the windows, Lucy was laboring over her spelling words, gripping her pencil and concentrating so hard that the tip of her tongue was showing. Lucy resembled her older sister, but with a smattering of freckles and one dimple in her left cheek. Teachers were not supposed to have favorites, but Sister Regina couldn’t help favoring the Olczak children. It wasn’t only that they were pretty as pansies, but that they showered their inveterate sweetness indiscriminately on their classmates and on each other.
    Anne, the older, mothered and protected her younger sister. Last year when one of the big boys, a seventh-grader, had knocked Lucy down, Anne ran halfway across the playground and gave him what-for, and told him that Jesus was disappointed in him, and if it happened again she’d march straight to Father Kuzdek’s house and report him. What made Anne Olczak different from the other big sisters was that she’d have done it.
    Lucy, the younger, reflected the care she received from Anne by demonstrating it with others in her class. Yesterday, when her classmate Jimmy Plotnik had cried because he’d put glue on the wrong side of his construction paper, she had patted his shoulder and said, “Don’t cry, Jimmy, that’s the way we learn is by our mistakes.”
    Lucy was dressed today in a starched yellow dress with bubble-shaped sleeves, biting her tongue and forming her oversized spelling words with the concentration of one who believes the only way to make it to heaven is to do exactly as she is told.
    Sister Regina stopped beside Lucy and leaned down to whisper, “Lucy, your father is here to talk to you and your sister. Will you come out into the hall with me?”
    Lucy looked up and took a beat to register this interruption, for even though her father was there every day of the week, this was unusual.
    “Daddy?”
    “Yes. He wants to talk to you.”
    Lucy flashed a smile totally bereft of concern.
    “Yes, S’ster,” she whispered and, with an air of importance, laid her yellow pencil in the groove at the top of her desk, then slid from her seat and led the way to the door. Sister Regina opened it and followed the children out into the hall, her heart heavy with dread for them and for their poor, grief-stricken father who waited. She wondered what was proper, to linger nearby or to return to her room and give them privacy. The children—she sensed—liked her and might possibly feel comforted by her presence. As for herself, the thought of returning to her classes at this moment was insupportable. She was still so stricken that she needed time to compose herself.
    Anne and Lucy, unsuspecting innocents, smiled and said, “Hi, Daddy!” going to him as if he’d come to take them out of school early on some lark.
    Eddie dropped to one knee and opened his arms. “Hi, angels.” His little girls hove