After her train breaks down in a small town in Maritime Canada, a woman is taken by bus to a nearby Holiday Inn where she reads in the newspaper’s obituary that a Sister Barnaby Maclean, a nun in Saddleburg, has passed away.  Sister Barnaby, or Barney as she’s more affectionately remembered, was transplanted from her old order in a failing rural diocese to a much larger and monastic order where she is only tolerated for her work as the convent’s cook. The woman is assigned to the kitchen by the Reverend Mother to provide assistance to Barney who is initially contemptuous and unwelcoming of her, in one instance sweeping the woman out of the kitchen. As time passes, however, Barney and the woman form an unlikely bond. Barney shares her life story, how she lost her parents within one month of each other as young child and was taken in by an uncle who forced her to tend to his four younger children. When Barney was seventeen, her uncle suggested she visit the local convent and take up work as a cook which she pursues for a sense of purpose and place to stay. At the convent, Barney weathers the extremities of climate and poverty in ways that made her invaluable as a cook at an autonomous, poor, and loosely organized order. The order was eventually amalgamated by a more structured diocese and Barney was reassigned to the Saddleburg convent where she is an outsider, having received little formal education and is illiterate compared to the other sisters who all have at least a bachelors degree.  The woman and Barney grow closer and the woman begins to understand Barney’s dour idiosyncrasies as attempts at creating a warm and familiar space in the cold, white, austerity of the Saddleburg convent. Whereas the other sisters have learned to renounce or “sublimate” their histories, their desires, and even color, Barney is defiant, growing assortments of colorful flowers in her kitchen, creating and decorating beautiful birthday cakes and Christmas cards, and possessing archives of pictures of the life she used to know. When the woman transfers to an order hundreds of miles away, Barney hosts a private party in her cell where she gives the woman gifts she’s amassed over the years. The two stay scantly in contact over the years, even after the woman leaves the Order. The woman reads over the obituary several more times and works up the courage to go to the old convent to “respect the reality” of Barney being dead. When she arrives, Barney and all of her personality has been purged: she lays in an all modest box lined with white, she wears an uncharacteristic smile, the scowl lines on her forehead are faded. The woman suspects that everything that Barney owned had probably been tossed in the dump.