She gets the 5 a.m. duty because she will leave soon to go swimming.
For now, she goes back inside and there in the warm kitchen, with coffee almost ready, the women who live upstairs come down to talk. Big things, little things. McLarney, 75, a sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet, listens, the women’s ease and candor settling in more each day since they arrived at the new Journey House — dates they can cite immediately.
“Because that’s the day we got out of prison,” said Sher Bialczyk, 53.
This is an odd-couple story. For years, the Catholic nuns here lived in the quiet peace of a convent. Now they share digs with 15 younger women who have been stabbed, beaten, molested, hooked on drugs and done time.
“I don’t think the sisters knew what they were getting in to,” one of the women said. “I’ve seen them go count to 10.”
The idea of Journey House — viewed at first as a crazy idea by four old nuns, a take the nuns did not totally reject — is that they would help the women with job searches, life skills, rehabilitation and health care while keeping them off the streets and out of trouble.
The sisters quote Scripture; the women speak something else. But these two groups have come together, an embrace of one’s need for help and the other’s will to give it. That goes both ways.