From Those We Love the Most

Part 5

                “Have you been practicing?” Sister Hazel asked Veronica, letting her in. She brushed by the gentle nun’s side, a trace of perfume. The stuff you buy on the cheapest racks in the drugstore. It was all she could afford then. To Charlie, of course, it smelled wonderful. Sister Hazel herself did not use perfumes or colognes. She preferred her natural musk.

                “Y-yes.” And it was not a lie this time.

                “Take a seat at the piano, dear. Do you want any lemonade?” Sister Hazel didn’t like lemonade herself; it was too acidic for her modest tastes.

                “I wouldn’t mind,” Veronica nearly whispered. She had to ask herself- why was she being so quiet? Granted, she was always a shy introvert of a girl, but today it was especially in force.

                Well, Charlie is the complicating factor here, she realized, observing the boy with her eyes as Sister Hazel beelined to the kitchen.

                The kitchen brought Sister Hazel a lot of solace, and she was never sure precisely why. She was not a big cook and her years in the convent, well, the kitchen had been a dump.

                “This is a dump,” she had told the Mother Superior. The Mother Superior had blinked in aghast.

                “Are you seriously calling the Lord’s Kitchen a dump? I will pray for your soul later.”

                “Your skirt is nice,” Charlie told Veronica when Sister Hazel was certainly (cross your heart, hope to die) out of earshot. He smiled.

                “Not now.” Veronica said, a blush in her face, a wham-wham-wham in her heartbeat.

                Charlie’s angst was subdued; he yearned for her when she went through the scales that kicked off every lesson. He yearned for her when she sucked on the unshapely icecubes found in her glass.