The Left Pocket of Mom’s Sunday Coat

We sat in the fourth pew on the left. I had not decided to. My feet just went there, and Darla followed me, and my father came in last and sat on the aisle, in his own spot, with a space between him and Darla you could have set a hymnal in.

The furnace had not caught up. Darla took the coat off anyway.

She did it before the opening hymn. She slipped out of it and folded it lengthwise over her knees with the lining in, and she sat in a thin gray cardigan with her arms tight against her sides. I saw the gooseflesh come up on her wrists. I had told her to leave it on, and she had heard me, and she had made up her own mind. I did not argue. That much was hers to decide.

There was one purple candle lit on the wreath. Father Paul read the Gospel for the day, the one about staying awake because you do not know the hour. I have heard it every first Sunday of Advent of my life, and it had never before been about a woman at a kitchen table on a Wednesday, getting her envelope ready for a Sunday she was not going to see.

I had the holy card in my hand through the whole homily. I found out where my thumb went on it. There is a worn place, right over my grandmother’s name.

At the collection Mr. Tuma came down our side.

St. Joseph’s still uses the long-handled baskets, the wicker ones on a pole, and Mr. Tuma works his like a man who has done it ten thousand times, in and out of each pew without bumping a knee. He reached it in past my father. Dad put in a folded bill. He has never done an envelope in his life. That was my mother’s department, like the Christmas cards and knowing when the grandkids’ birthdays were.

The basket came to Darla.

She had the envelope out and ready. She laid it in, face up, on top of all the others, and she did not let go of it right away. She kept two fingers on it.

Mr. Tuma looked down.

He saw the number in the corner. He saw the date. He is 81 and he has counted the collection at the kitchen table in the rectory every Sunday for something like forty years, and he knows envelope 114 the way I know my own phone number.

The basket stayed where it was. Three seconds. Four. In our church that is a long time for the basket to hold still, and I heard the pew behind us go quiet.

Then Darla took her fingers away, and Mr. Tuma drew the basket back out, slow and level, like he was carrying something that could spill. He did not go on to the next pew right off. He stood in the aisle, and I watched that old man look at the envelope and bow his head to it, just a small dip of the chin. Then he went on.

I did not cry in the vestibule. I cried then. Darla passed me a tissue out of her cardigan sleeve without looking at me, and I took it.

After Mass we were the last ones out of the pew.

My father went ahead. He said he would bring the truck around, and I did not point out that nobody needed the truck brought around in a gravel lot the size of a hog pen. He needed to be outdoors.