Sister Clareese of the Greater Christ Emanuel Church is sitting at a church service, feeling annoyed at the Brothers' Church Council for deciding the sisters should wear white every missionary Sunday (she's on her period) and more generally for dismissing her as a woman. She turned to them when her aunt first fell ill, but harbors frustrations with them. She remembers being sexually assaulted by one of the Deacons, Deacon McCreedy, at her home. He fingered her when she was on her period and was disgusted by the blood. He left without apologizing or thanking her for the meal he ate. She hates him. She works at a university hospital, where the other non-religious nurses are annoyed by her constant focus on Christianity. She is considered unattractive—skinny with crossed eyes—and it is a joke at the church that she will have difficulty finding a husband. She tries to think of a new story her church hasn't yet heard, for testimony that day. She recalls miraculous ways in which she believes her faith in God has saved some of her patients, but he has told these stories before as testimonies. She thinks of a bad relationship with two current patients, Mr. Toomey and Mr. Cleophus Sanders, that she worries will result in her being fired from the hospital. Cleophus, an amputee, and Mr. Toomey, a cancer patient, share a room and don't like Sister Clareese's constant religious statements, like loudly wishing them a blessed day. They had all argued. Unable to spin this into a testimony, Sister Clareese simply asks the congregation to pray for her when her turn comes around. Sister Clareese leads the church choir in singing a hymn. Then, Pastor Everett, having borrowed Sister Clareese's home telephone as a prop, gives a sermon about call-waiting and how you can't leave the Lord on hold. Sister Clareese remembers her last phone call, to Mr. Toomey. She calls all her patients after a week. Cleophus had taken the line and asked why she didn't call him, a Black man. She had said she'd only known him two days. He had played her blues tunes on his guitar and goten her to admit she liked it. Sister Clareese thinks critically about how her church seems to want pomp and circumstance over "true belief." Last Wednesday, after the phone call, she had gone to see Cleophus on her day off, determined to save his soul. She asked him to come to her church on Sunday. Cleophus flirted with her a bit. He asked why God would let humans like him suffer in the hospital. Sister Clareese screamed that people don't have a right to live, only to die. The other nurses had heard the screams and she was suspended from her job for a week and told to see the staff psychiatrist. Then, during the service, Cleophus shows up at the church, on crutches, with his guitar on his back. Sister Clareese is confident that he has come not out of belief or a desire to be saved, but for her.