She expected a quiet place with a statue of the Virgin or a plaque recounting the miraculous event the trees had witnessed decades before, when a girl named Rose felt herself summoned down the path, a little crippled girl known far and wide for her special devotion to Our Lady—something along those lines. A shrine. And the gift shop, Josephine’s interest, would be a modest shed-like affair with a nun inside selling beads and figurines. So Josephine imagined; her ex-mother-in-law, Camilla, hadn’t described the shrine, and Josephine hadn’t asked. She grossly underestimated the zeal of the faithful in Massachusetts. She was driving along, paying more attention to Camilla’s directions than to the snow-banked road, certain she’d missed a turn and looking for a place to pull off, when, coming around a bend, she slammed on her brakes and fishtailed down the mercifully dry pavement, skidding to a halt three feet from the last car in a good half-mile-long line of cars ahead of her. The traffic jam wasn’t the reason she’d stopped.
