"Adds up to what?" 1 asked.

She gave me a withering look. "To one coinkidink too many, that's what. You mark my words-somebody's got it in for them nuns." She turned to Ruby and modulated her tone. "You oughta try a piece of Betty Ann's peach pie, Sister. She brung it in this morning. Fredericksburg peaches, fresh outta her freezer."

Ruby couldn't resist. "Bless you, my daughter," she murmured. Beatrice smiled and walked briskly toward the kitchen.

"Bernice must be exaggerating," Maggie said. "If the fires were serious, Dominica would have written to me." She frowned. "But I haven't heard from her since before Christmas. I wonder…"

We stirred our coffee. A mechanical cuckoo popped out of a red-plastic cuckoo clock and whisded the first bars of "The Eyes of Texas." Johnny Cash had finished "Ring of

Fire" and Buddy Holly was starting on "Peggy Sue." After a moment, Ruby poured cream into her coffee and leaned toward Maggie.

"I've known you for over two years and I've never heard how you got to be a nun, Maggie.''

Maggie's mouth was wry. "Why did I do such a crazy thing, you mean?"

Still captured by the image of herself as a monastic, Ruby frowned. "Maybe it wasn't crazy," she said.

"My mother thought I'd lost my mind," Maggie said reflectively. "I'd just finished my degree in social work, and I was volunteering with the Sisters of the Holy Heart in Chicago. One morning I woke up, put on my clothes, walked into the Vocations Office at the convent, and said, 'I want to be a nun.' "

Ruby blinked. "That was it?"

"That was it," Maggie said matter-of-factly. "No finger of God, no choir of angels, no heavenly light. It was just something I had to do. It didn't even feel like I had a choice."

"How did you get from Chicago to Texas?" I asked.

"I ran into Mother Hilaria at a conference. She was looking for sisters to help get St. T's up and running. I told her I wasn't interested, but she wrote to me and sent me some pictures and…" She was tracing a wet design on the table with the tip of her spoon. "God wanted me here, I guess. So I came. If it hasn't happened to you, it's kind of hard to explain. We say we've been called. We've been given a vocation."

Ruby cleared her throat. ' 'If God wanted you here, why did you leave?'' The question might have been tactless, but it was on my mind, too.

Maggie picked up her coffee mug. I could sense a softening in her, a sadness. "I thought I'd be at St. T's for the rest of my life. I loved the quiet. I loved my work in the kitchen. I even loved the garlic field.'' She paused and took a sip of coffee. When she spoke again, her voice was low.

"It wasn't easy, believe me. Leaving was like tearing out a piece of my soul."

I was startled. I'd expected to hear that she felt stifled by the discipline or fell in love with a priest. This was something quite different.

Ruby stared at her. "Then why did you do it?"

For a minute, I thought she wasn't going to answer. " Vocations are fragile," she said finally, without inflection. "Sometimes they last a lifetime, sometimes they don't I was angry. I was fed up with the Church's attitude toward women. We're okay for cheap labor, but they'll never allow us to be full participants. They can't afford to. They know we'd change things."

Bernice came with our food, and the next few minutes were filled with moving plates around and making sure we had what we needed. While we got started eating, I was thinking. Anger against the hierarchy must drive a lot of women out of the Church these days. But something made me wonder if there hadn't been another reason for Maggie's leaving. When she'd spoken about living at St. T's, her voice had been soft and shaken, deeply truthful. When she'd told us why she left, she might have been reading from a newspaper. I could feel her longing for the life she had abandoned. But I couldn't feel her outrage.

Ruby was blunt. ' 'But if you really liked your life at St. T's, why didn't you fight for it?" She pushed her sleeves back and picked up her fork. "The Vatican is seven time zones away, for cryin' out loud. They wouldn't know if you got together with a few nuns and celebrated Communion. Or you could have joined a group and tried to change things."

"I'm sure you're right." Maggie looked down at her plate. ' 'But about that time my father died and left me some money. It was as if God had handed me an invitation to do something else with my life." A smile ghosted across her mouth.

I was about to observe that the money might have been a test of her desire to stay just as easily as it could have been an invitation to leave, but Ruby spoke first. "You've been happy doing your restaurant thing, haven't you? You always seem happy."

Well, maybe. I wasn't sure that it was happiness I'd sensed in Maggie as much as acceptance. She takes life as it comes, without trying to do much about it. It's a state of mind-of soul, maybe-that I have to admire. It's totally different from the aggressive I'm-going-to-get-what-I-want-come-hell-or-high-water attitude of the people I knew when I was practicing law. But acceptance can be a problem too. If I had chosen to live at St. T's, you can darn well bet I wouldn't have let myself be driven out by the backward ideas of a few old men.

Maggie nibbled on an onion ring, musing over Ruby's question. "Am I happy? Mostly, I guess. The restaurant has given me self-confidence-I needed that. And I've loved having friends, especially you two. But I still miss the community. Mother Hilaria, the other nuns. It's…" She swallowed. "It's as if I've been in exile for the last two years."

"Well, if you miss it so much," Ruby said practically, "why don't you-?"

The rest of her question was lost in a sudden whoosh of chill air from the open door. A fair-haired man in a dark Stetson, jeans, and boots strode in, shrugged out of his sheepskin jacket, and hung it on a peg by the door. He turned in our direction and stopped.

There was a long moment, freeze-frame, while our eyes met and held. My heart lunged to the top of my windpipe and stayed there while I struggled to breathe past it.

"China?" the man asked. "China Bayles?" He was lean and narrow-hipped, almost thin. His face was more tanned and weather-beaten than I remembered, but then it had been eight years since I'd seen him. He covered the distance in three strides, not taking his eyes off me.

"China? What the hell are you doing here?"

"I'm eating lunch," I said incoherently. Ruby gave a delicate cough. "With friends," I added, and waved my hand to cover my confusion. "Ruby, this is an old friend of mine, Tom Rowan. Tom, Ruby Wilcox."

' 'Hi, Tom,'' Ruby said, lifting a graceful hand. She caught my eye. "An old friend, huh?" she asked meaningfully, with a Why-haven't-you-mentioned-him-before? look.

I ignored her. "And this is Maggie Garrett."

Tom glanced at Maggie, and his brown eyes lightened. "Maggie Garrett," he exclaimed, taking her hand. "Haven't seen you since you left St. T's. What are you up to these days?"

"I run a restaurant in Pecan Springs." Maggie squeezed his hand and let it go. "So you and China know one another?"

"You bet." Tom took the fourth chair at the table, next to me. "Last time I saw China, she was defending some big-time crook." His eyes went to my left hand for a fraction of an instant, then came back to my face. "You got the bastard acquitted-Douglas, wasn't that his name?" He glanced at Ruby. "Excuse me, Sister."

Ruby colored. "Oh, I'm not… I mean-" She looked down at her robe, couldn't think of any logical explanation for her monkish garb, and blurted out the next thing that came into her mind. "Has anyone ever mentioned that you look exactly like Robert Redford?"

I didn't have to listen to his flip response-I'd heard it a dozen times before. I was thinking of the Douglas trial, the most demanding of my fifteen-year career. Interminable days in the courtroom, long nights and weekends at the office. Somewhere during that period, my relationship with Tom Rowan had come to an abrupt and catastrophic end.