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on the hospital bed they’d rented from the drugstore. She’d spent the day holding her grandpa’s hand, wondering how many other people had rented this bed to die on. Everyone else had drifted in and out of the room, uneasy with death, but she had stayed by his side,strangely at ease, every now and then patting his hand and wiping his brow. By the time the priest had arrived to anoint her grandpa’s pale head and pray for him, Krista knew God had called her to the ministry, just as surely as if Jesus had appeared in the room, pointed an elegant finger at her, and said, “Follow thou me.”
    “I want to be a priest,” she’d told her mother that night.
    “You can’t. You’re a girl. They don’t allow women to be priests.”
    “You’ve always told me I can be anything I want.”
    There is a tendency among the young and idealistic to believe if people are simply presented with the facts, they will make a reasonable decision. “I’ve been thinking,” Krista told her mother later that evening, “and unless there’s something you haven’t told me, the big difference between men and women is that men have a…well, you know…and we don’t.”
    Her mother blushed.
    “I know all about it,” Krista went on. “They told us about it in health class. They have one and we don’t and that’s the big difference. Right?”
    “There are others, of course, but I’d say that’s the more obvious one,” her mother admitted.
    “So, practically speaking, there’s no good reason to keep a woman from being a priest?”
    “That’s right, dear. Though I think it’s written in the Bible that women can’t be priests.”
    It took Krista two days to find the verse her mother had mentioned, but it was there, in Paul’s first letter to Timothy,chapter 2, verse 12: “I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent.”
    A careful reading of the verse indicated that, although the Apostle Paul permitted no woman to teach, God’s opinion of women leaders was left unstated. When she pointed this out to her mother, her mother said, “I think they believe the Apostle Paul is speaking for God.”
    “But how can they be sure? Isn’t it dangerous to assume someone else is always speaking for God?”
    Her mother sighed, then rubbed her temples. “Krista, honey, I love you to death. But these questions of yours give me a headache. Tell you what, honey, why don’t you write our priest a letter and ask him these things?”
    But Krista had always been told to go to the top, so she wrote the pope instead.
    It was amazingly simple. She wrote the letter on unlined paper, in neat rows and tidy script, expressing her desire to be a priest and wanting to know if the pope might make an exception in her case. “Though I don’t have everything a man has”—she thought he’d know what she meant, so she didn’t elaborate—“I do love God and believe I’m called to spend my life serving Him.” She studied the word Him . She didn’t for a moment believe God was a Him, but she let it stand, just so the pope wouldn’t think she was a radical out to make a point.
    Then she rode her bicycle to the post office, where they gave her the address for the Vatican, which she carefully copied onto the envelope, before sealing it closed and sliding it down the chute into the bin of stamped mail.
    While she waited to hear back from the pope, she practiced being a priest. She conducted three funerals for neighborhood pets and visited Mrs. Harvey, down the street, who’d broken her ankle while carrying in the groceries.
    Though Mrs. Harvey had never married and was technically not a Mrs., it seemed odd to call a woman of her age “Miss.” Krista, in addition to being taught she could be anything she wanted and to always go to the top, had also been advised to call adults Mr. or Mrs. Though Mrs. Harvey had a heavy mustache, she was clearly a woman in other respects.
    Like Krista, Mrs. Harvey was Catholic, and when