Nanette and Josie finished praying and walked toward the bus stop. Josie pulled out her phone. She wanted to show Nanette a group she’d found on Instagram: @NunsAgainstGuns.
“This one is fire,” Josie said.
Nanette looked at a photo of Roman Catholic sisters at a rally. Women in their seventies wearing matching orange T-shirts and carrying signs that read “DISARM HATE.”
Nanette could see the goodness in the women, still marching in the streets in their seventies. Josie was eager for the ministry part of their vocation. For Josie, the challenge of being a novice would be staying close to the convent. Josie wanted to get out and help.Josie said, “I want to be a nun so I can work for the Lord all my days.”
Nanette’s reasons were personal, selfish. She’d said to Sister Phoebe Catherine: “I have known God was calling me to this life for many years. I need to understand why.”
But, “We can help you try to understand that” is what Sister Phoebe Catherine said. At the end of their first conversation, Nanette had stood and seen she’d perspired right through the navy-blue wool trousers she’d been wearing, and there were two outlines of butt cheeks on the chair cushion, so great had been her release.
There was no bench at the bus stop. Nanette was restless. She wished they’d chosen to take the bicycles, even if it did look like rain. She was hot. She fanned her legs with the skirt of her habit. They were in the chaotic weather patterns of a midwestern late spring, where any day might be ninety degrees or fifty.
The bus arrived. They put on face masks.
The road was uneven, and the bus made juddering sounds that were distinctly: Mother, Mother, Mother.
*
“If it happens and I don’t seem to know it,” Barbara had said to Nanette, five years ago, “then you have to tell me. You have to say, ‘Mom, you have Alzheimer’s and now you need to do what you planned.’ I’ll know what to do. Don’t be afraid of telling me, that’s the important part.”
They’d had this conversation in her mother’s car, in the parking lot of the memory care facility where her mother’s sister was living. It had been a hard visit; Aunt Frances was combative. Nanette could remember her mother’s profile, her jaw, her voice, along with the smell of the new Dodge, which was still off-gassing plastics and adhesives.
She had wondered if the conversation itself was a sign of something wrong. It wasn’t like her mother to delegate responsibility. The week before, there’d been an odd moment when it seemed as if Barbara had forgotten Nanette lived in Chicago. Nanette had told herself her mom had gotten distracted, or simply misspoke. And yet, she’d almost seen it–a moment when her mother’s thoughts had simply stopped. Nanette had pictured an empty cooking pot, polished stainless steel, ringing hollow. Later, she would read about the “plaques and tangles” of Alzheimer’s, clumps of protein that were thought to disrupt smooth signaling.
She still thought of dementia as a sudden tip into a shiny, empty pot.
“Promise me,” her mother had said. “Sometimes you hear people say, ‘Oh, stick me in a home and forget about me’ or ‘Oh, put me on an ice floe and shove me out to sea.’ If you hear people talk about ice floes, it’s because they don’t mean it. They don’t have a plan. I have a plan. I mean it.”
Nanette had promised.
What could she have said? “Mom, I think it’s coming for you. I think it might already be here.”
Nanette would talk to her mother tonight. Her mother never liked to talk for long these days, but they could chat a little and Nanette could tell her that she loved her.
It was out of her hands.
She didn’t know if Sloane and Laurel had similar conversations with her mother. It was possible they were all keeping her mother’s secret, separately. Sloane, or Laurel, might have told her mother, “It’s time.”
It was possible her mother had realized it herself.
And Sloane would arrive in Indiana and find their mother dead.
“We’re here,” said Josie.
*
Two not-yet nuns walk into a gun range.
The range was a long, low, single-story brick building, with a large parking lot and an American flag by the entrance. Inside, the atmosphere was not immediately different from a place where you might rent camping gear or sports equipment. The weapons were displayed in glass cases, with branded merchandise and various gun-related accessories arrayed on a pegboard behind them. The clerk behind the counter mistook them as latecomers for the Guns & Gals League, already on the range.
Josie chose a 9mm Glock from the case. They were read a list of rules. Taking video with a cell phone was permitted, but not with a gun in your hand. Maximum of two people in a stall at a time. Pregnant women should not enter the gun range; the noise and the lead exposure could damage the fetus. They were offered their choice of target—a bull’s-eye or the figure of a person. Josie chose the bull’s-eye. “You ladies,” the clerk kept saying.
He gave them large protective headphones, safety goggles, a tray with the gun and ammunition, and the Guns & Gals discount, as a courtesy.
The shooting range itself was not unlike a very clean and high-tech bowling alley, each lane divided by a short partition. Even with the thick headphones, the sound seemed unbearable, unsustainable.
Nanette could see the gals of Guns & Gals at the end of the range, clustered at the back of the stalls, watching whoever was shooting. A large group, all ages. A tiny Indian woman in a sari gestured with excitement to a tall girl with tattooed sleeves. They were both smiling, these potential killers. But of course everyone was a potential killer, whether they were holding a gun or not.
There was a kind of console table, or altar, at the head of their lane.
“Do you want me to explain anything?” Josie pitched her voice under the cacophony in a low shout and put down their tray. “My dad believes every woman should know how to load a gun.”
Nanette didn’t know if her dad, who was now retired and wrote short stories, mostly set in fourteenth-century France, had ever loaded a gun. If he had general opinions about what contemporary women should know how to do, he hadn’t shared them. Her mother had quite a long list of skills every woman should have. Change a tire, rewire a lamp, understand how investments work, be able to do at least basic sewing and seamstress jobs, have a three-course-dinner recipe perfected, clean a gutter, cut your own hair. Guns were not on the list, but watching Josie load bullets into some device that slid into the Glock, Nanette could see knowing how to safely load and unload a gun as something Barbara might approve of, in the interest of preparedness. Her mom was not someone who flinched.
It was a saying: “You really dodged a bullet.”
Her mother had not told her what her plan was. It would not be a gun. Drowning? Something quiet no one would have to clean up.
It was out of her hands.
Two weeks ago, Nanette had spoken to Sloane and Laurel on a video chat. She gathered that her two sisters had been conferring with each other and had decided to “loop her in.” Nanette was used to being the odd one out. She was the late arrival, the one who hadn’t grown up with their father around or gone to the fancy private school in Ohio. Her very name didn’t match. (Sloane and Laurel were chosen by their father, and Nanette had been their mother’s idea. “I just always liked that name.”)
Laurel seemed distracted, on the call. Sloane had kept making prayer hands. Sloane wore rings on every finger, so every time she pressed them together there was a heavy clink, which Nanette heard quite clearly through her headphones.
Josie was now explaining her plan. Nanette would film her firing at the target, then Josie would put the gun down and turn and speak her truth. It would be necessary to add captions, Nanette thought, because of the noise.
Her mother might have changed her mind. God might have changed her mother’s mind. Her mother was in God’s hands.
Nanette did a test video, so Josie could see how she looked in the frame. To get all of Josie in, Nanette needed to back up out of the lane. Nanette was now intensely aware of her heartbeat. She had gotten hot again. She took off her hoodie. In front of her, Josie fired several rounds at the target.
Nanette heard her mother’s voice, so clear underneath the sound of bullets. “I mean it, Nanette.”
Her mother didn’t lie, and she never flinched.
Josie made some adjustment to the gun–the safety?–and placed it carefully down on what Nanette was still thinking of as the altar. Josie turned to face her phone, which Nanette was holding steadily, somehow.
Nanette could only catch a few words of whatever Josie was saying. “That’s the last time”– “not here to judge” – ”I’ve been learning” – “leading cause of death” – “children” – “Black children” – “murders” – “my own choice” – “my freedom” – “God’s will.”
This was language. And yet. Was there any agreement about what these words meant?
Josie finished speaking and took the phone from Nanette’s hand. She asked a question, which Nanette thought she answered, but maybe not.
Something was happening. A curious sensation of lightness was flooding Nanette’s body, as if all the contents of her body, the muscles and bones and tendons, were dissolving.
She had felt like this once before. Sixteen years ago. God had spoken to her on that day, and told her what she should do with her life. She had resisted God’s call, then, and for far too long.
God was coming again.
There was panic in this, yes. And relief.
“I have to pray,” Nanette said. (Maybe said?) “I’m sorry. I have to pray.”
She had to listen. God was coming and there was so much noise, and she had to listen. The Presence was coming into her. Nanette was so grateful. She was going to be instructed. This time she wouldn’t wait sixteen years. She was prepared now, she
knew how to pray, she could meet God halfway.
The Presence was in her body, moving her. There was rubber matting on the floor. Nanette could feel it pressing into her knees, then her hands, then her forehead. Her arms moved outward. Nanette heard a voice above her. Voices. There were so many women here.
Was she praying? Was this prayer? God was reaching for Nanette and God was below and above and inside her.
God was speaking to her, but not with words. God had accuracy. God’s message was deep inside her, a profound certainty, as real as her heartbeat. Every part of her body understood this certainty. It moved through her, like her own blood.
Go home and help your mother die.
__________________________________
From Body Language: A Novel by Meg Howrey. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Meg Howrey.
