Jeanette leaves Amy at the convent

Jeanette leaves Amy at the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy in a deliberate, painful separation that places the child in the care of a nun while Jeanette continues alone. The choice follows a difficult night and is carried out through practical steps rather than a full explanation: Jeanette retraces a bus route, invents a pretext for leaving, and departs after a final embrace, with a note hidden in Amy’s knapsack to speak for her absence.

Background and Decision

By the time Jeanette returns to the motel, dawn is breaking. Amy is asleep with the television still on, and Jeanette expects that someone may come looking for her within a few hours. She washes and changes, then disposes of the clothes she wore on the highway. These preparations mark a shift from merely getting back to Amy to planning what must happen next.

The decision is sharpened by Jeanette’s recollection of earlier mornings with Amy as a baby, when she held and rocked her by a window. The memory sits beside the immediate necessity of departure: she packs Amy’s Powerpuff Girls knapsack with clean clothing, a toothbrush, food, and Amy’s Peter Rabbit, and gathers clothing and money for herself. She wakes Amy gently and tells her they have to go, without explaining the larger plan.

Finding the Convent

Jeanette remembers a stone church she saw from the bus, identified by its sign as Our Lady of Sorrows. She believes the buses will take them past it again if she chooses the route correctly. With Amy beside her, she rides back through downtown and uses the zoo as a landmark: because the church had been before the zoo on the earlier trip, it should come after it when they travel in the opposite direction.

The remembered route brings them to the driveway beside the church, where a sign identifies the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy. Jeanette takes Amy by the hand and walks with her beneath the trees to a stone house with a shingled roof, white window trim, and an herb garden. The ordinary, domestic appearance of the building contrasts with the uncertainty of what Jeanette will find there; it is a house, not the unfamiliar institution she had imagined.

The Pretext for Leaving

A young nun welcomes them and leads them into the kitchen, where labeled cupboards and a large oak table make the convent feel like an ordered household. She points Jeanette to a wall phone and gets Amy cookies. Jeanette dials a number that plays a recorded weather forecast, but pretends that she has reached AAA. She tells the nun a tow truck is coming and that someone is waiting around the corner.

The nun responds by offering to keep Amy while Jeanette attends to the supposed car trouble, reasoning that managing a child on a busy street would be difficult. The offer resolves the practical obstacle Jeanette faced: she does not need to persuade the nun to take Amy permanently or devise another arrangement. She need only accept the invitation and go. The false tow-truck story gives Jeanette a socially plausible exit while concealing the permanence she expects from this parting.

The Parting

Amy sits at the oak table with an untouched plate of cookies and a glass of milk, holding her backpack in her lap. Jeanette watches her, then kneels and embraces her. She tells Amy to be good; Amy nods against her shoulder. Jeanette cannot find the words for what she means to say, and the nun does not see that she is about to cry.

Jeanette has already placed a note in the knapsack, expecting that it will be found when she does not return. The note stands in for the explanation she cannot give in the kitchen: the child will have a message, but not a spoken account of why her mother left. Jeanette prolongs the embrace as long as she dares, then releases Amy and leaves before anyone can say more. She walks down the driveway to the street and keeps going.

Significance

The scene makes separation a sequence of small, purposeful acts: choosing a route from remembered landmarks, packing familiar belongings, securing the nun’s offer with a lie, and leaving written words behind. Its restraint is central to the event. Amy is not given the full explanation, and Jeanette does not transform the goodbye into a declaration; the practical arrangements carry the emotional weight instead.

The departure also establishes the convent as the place where Amy is left in the care of a nun, setting the conditions for her life apart from Jeanette. The hidden note, the packed knapsack, and the final embrace all register both sides of Jeanette’s choice: she leaves Amy behind, yet prepares for the child to understand that the absence was not simply forgetfulness.