agatha of little neon by claire luchette

“Broke! Bust! In arrears!” Then she stood straight and turned to hock a fat loogie into the grass. “You’re being reassigned! The Buffalo diocese is broke!” And when Therese said nothing, she yelled again, her face beet red. Mother Roberta stooped to yell in the direction of Therese’s head. “I didn’t catch that,” Therese called from under the car. We were fixed to one another, like parts of some strange, asymmetrical body: Frances was the mouth Mary Lucille, the heart Therese, the legs. Back then, our chins were bald, our minds sharp. We were 29 when we moved from Lackawanna, just south of Buffalo, to Woonsocket. The four of us were born in different months of the same year, each of us twenty when we became novitiates, 22 when we made our vows. It seemed impossible then, in the time before Little Neon and Woonsocket, to imagine chin hairs of our own. One of us would crouch and raise a pair of tweezers and, when a hair was plucked free, present it in front of Mother Roberta’s face, so she could close her eyes, make a wish, and blow.

The thrill of it-we were eager, and she obliged, knowing she was too blind to get them herself. We used to fight each other for the chance to lean close and tug them loose. Mother Roberta had three stiff hairs on her chin that we could spot only when she sat underneath the kitchen light. She left it on the table until dinner, then wrecked it and started again. But while we weren’t looking, she put all thousand pieces where they were meant to be, and one afternoon the puzzle was finished. She began to spend her days behind a newspaper held wide, or at the kitchen table with a cup of Red Rose tea, staring at a spread of puzzle pieces that she never seemed to touch. Mother Roberta acquiesced-she would try to relax. Everything we knew about living, we knew because Mother Roberta had showed us. Twice in one month, we’d had to rummage through bags of trash in search of her false teeth. She was 81, frail as filament, and had started having bad days. When Father Thaddeus came to Lackawanna, he suggested she might take a break. She embroidered pillows, made punch from powder, wrote the homilies for the priest. Twice a year she sewed our made-to-measure habits from yards of a black poly-wool blend. Every morning she brewed the coffee and every night she cooked the meal. Mother Roberta made the rules: no chewing gum, no bicycles, no tree nuts, no pets.

Luchette has received grants and scholarships from MacDowell, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Lighthouse Works, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the James Merrill House, and has published work in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Granta. The following is excerpted from Claire Luchette's debut novel, Agatha of Little Neon, a novel of yearning and sisterhood.

Agatha of little neon by claire luchette