The Hymnal I Brought Every Sunday

The first Sunday, my sister opened her front door about four inches and put her body in the gap. She had her blue robe on and a cup of coffee in her hand, and behind her I could smell bacon.

“Mom’s sleeping,” Debra said.

It was nine o’clock in the morning. My mother had not slept past six since Eisenhower, and she had not missed a Sunday at our Methodist church in sixty years. I knew both of those things the way I knew my own phone number.

I held up the hymnal so she could see it. It was Mom’s, the black one with Lois Bauer pressed in gold on the front cover, the corners worn down to gray cardboard from sixty years of her thumbs.

“She’ll want this,” I said. “Service is at ten. I can have her there early, the way she likes.”

“She’s sleeping, Karen. She had a rough night. Her hip.”

“Then I’ll wait.”

Debra looked at me over the rim of her cup. She is four years older than me, and she has been looking at me over the rim of something my whole life.

“You’ll wait out here in the cold for nothing,” she said. “I’ll tell her you came.”

Then the door closed. Not a slam. Debra never slammed anything. She just closed it, the way you close a door on a salesman, and I heard the deadbolt turn.

I stood on her front step for a full minute with the hymnal against my coat. Then I got back in my car and drove to church by myself and sat in Mom’s pew, third from the front on the window side, and I did not sing a word.

How it started

It had started right after New Year’s. Mom slipped on the back step of her house on Elm Street, the one Dad never did get a railing on, and she went down hard on her right hip. Nothing broken. The doctor in Columbus said it was a deep bruise and she was lucky.

Debra was at Mom’s house before I even got off my route that afternoon. I drive a school bus for our district, a seventy-two passenger Blue Bird, and in January that means I am out the door at six-fifteen and scraping a windshield in the dark.

By the time I got to Mom’s kitchen, Debra had a suitcase open on the bed.

“She’s coming to stay with us,” Debra said. “Just until she’s steady. I’ve got the basement room all made up. It has its own bathroom, and she won’t have to do any stairs to get to it from the side door.”

“Mom,” I said. “Is that what you want?”

Mom was sitting at the kitchen table with a bag of frozen peas on her hip. She had her reading glasses pushed up in her white hair.

“I want to not fall again,” she said. “Your sister has a nice room. I’ll be home by Valentine’s.”

So I helped carry the suitcase. I want to be honest about that. I carried her suitcase out to Debra’s car myself, and I put her African violet on the floor of the back seat so it wouldn’t tip, and I kissed her and told her I’d see her Sunday.

That was a Monday. The fifth of January.