we scanned the parking lot for North Dakota plates. But alas, not a nun was to be found. At length, we pulled into a parking lot in Shelby, Montana, only a hundred miles short of Glacier National Park. The sun was sinking beneath the still-flat horizon as Molly called the headmaster back in Minneapolis. They were on the phone for a long time. Dennie and I sat on a guard rail, smoking cigarettes and observing the youth of Shelby driving their cars back and forth, back and forth, parading the length of the main drag. We don’t know why they do this, but it is what kids do in these parts. They do it in Bismarck, too. It was full-on dark when Molly got off the phone. The headmaster decided he wanted her to fly to Minneapolis for an interview the next morning. The nearest airport was another hour due south, and not on our route: Great Falls. Happily, Dennie knew some people who lived there and would put us up for the night. We agreed to call them from a hotel parking lot in Great Falls off of I-15. Now bound southward, I was behind the wheel and the road shock was getting to me. I was hallucinating that there were pink alligators and bales of straw in the roadway. We had long since given up on finding the nuns, if they ever existed at all. That last hour of driving was an eternity as the dark highway wavered, expanding and contracting before my exhausted eyes. Finally, we pulled into the parking lot in Great Falls. Dennie went into the hotel to find a pay phone and call her friends. By the time she returned to the car, I was laughing uncontrollably, shaking, tears streaming down my face. “You know those nuns? The nuns we have been looking for all day? We ARE the nuns!” I told Dennie and Molly. They stared at me in confusion until I explained that the three sisters from North Dakota, sought by Montana law enforcement, were to be found inside our own car. “We may not be nuns…but we are sisters.” R Page 54
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