“The rabbis paled. I’d managed to terrify holy men. Maybe I could beat up a nun for an encore.”

“But are you glad you went to college? Was it a good experience?” I suppose it was. Althought I can’t remember a single thing I learned. Except for Latin, and that’s only because the nuns literally beat it into us and I use it sometimes for the crossword.” There were nuns at Radcliffe?” Yes, it was all nuns.” Are you sure? At Radcliffe?” Maybe it was high school.” But you aren’t Catholic,” I said. “I don’t think you ever went to a parochial school.” Well, I distinctly remember nuns with sticks walking up and down the aisles as we recited Latin. Maybe it was a show I was in, but I doubt it because nuns don’t beat children in musicals.”

“Be proud, Bonito, pretty boy. You can go home and tell your father, Yes, I beat up Ender Wiggin, who was barely ten years old, and I was thirteen. And I had only six of my friends to help me, and somehow we managed to defeat him, even though he was naked and wet and alone--Ender Wiggin is so dangerous and terrifying it was all we could do not to bring two hundred.”

“Still, I believed I understood. Or maybe I just put it in a context I could safely manage.”

“Maybe, just maybe, two broken people could manage to create something whole.”

“Forgiveness wasn’t ever easy, but a feat much more manageable when you weren’t the subject of its grace. Maybe I’d always be a broken recipient of grace. And in that musing, I found rest.”