The Pictures in the Church Kitchen
“Then we will put them by the stove and not over the urns,” Mrs. Tuttle said. “Nobody is hanging these at anybody, Amy. We are hanging them for Marilyn. That is all it is.”
Brenda said quietly, “I’d like it too, Amy.”
“So would I,” said Kim.
Donna said, “Put her by the stove. She would want to keep an eye on it.”
I asked that we talk to Pastor Greg first, and Jan went up and got him out of his study. He came down in his shirtsleeves with his reading glasses pushed up in his hair, and Mrs. Tuttle told him what the women wanted. She did not tell him about the curb. She only said I had come into some of Marilyn’s pictures.
He buried my mother. He also married my father to Connie, eight months ago, after the two of them sat across from each other for a winter at the grief supper he runs on Thursday nights.
“The Ladies Aid has decided what goes on these walls since before I was born,” he said. “I am not about to start telling you now. I’ll mention it to the trustees so nobody is surprised.” He looked at me over the glasses. “Is there anything I ought to know, Amy?”
“There might be by tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “I have to talk to my father first.”
“Then I will pray for tomorrow afternoon,” he said, and he went and found me the stepladder himself.
We hung four. The women chose them out of the boxes in the back of my car. Mother at the range in 1979. Mother and Dad on the church steps on their wedding day. Mother at the pass-through in the nineties with a coffeepot in each hand. And Christmas of 1988, the dining room at home, the table set with the cream and blue china, and my mother at the head of it with me, six years old, on her lap.
I stood on the step stool with the hammer. Mrs. Tuttle held the stool and told me a quarter inch to the left.
When the last one was up she stood back and looked a good while.
“There you are, Marilyn,” she said. “It took us long enough.”
I meant to catch my father on the church steps Sunday morning before he ever went downstairs. I was there at twenty till nine in my good coat, watching for his pickup.
He did not come. Connie came alone at eight, I learned later, to start the urns the way she always did. She would have walked into that kitchen and turned on the lights by herself.
Dad slid into the pew beside her during the first hymn, hair still wet, smelling of soap and, underneath the soap, corn. They had run trucks until one in the morning. It was Reformation Sunday, red on the altar, and I looked at the back of my father’s sunburned neck three rows ahead and did not hear one word of the sermon.
After the benediction Connie went straight down to pour, and I got held up by Kelsey’s confirmation teacher. By the time I reached the bottom of the basement stairs, the fellowship hall was full and loud, and my father was already standing in the kitchen doorway.
He had a white coffee cup in his hand. He had not drunk from it.
He was looking at the east wall.
Connie stood at the pass-through with her back to the pictures, filling cups from the spigot of the urn and setting them on the counter one after another. Her hands were not steady. Coffee had slopped onto the steel.