The Hymnal I Brought Every Sunday

The phone

That first Sunday, the eleventh, Debra called me at eight in the morning and said Mom had a cold and was staying in bed. I believed her. It was January in Nebraska, and half my bus had a cold.

That week I called Mom’s flip phone every evening. It rang and rang and went to the recording she had never learned how to change, the one that still had the phone company lady’s voice on it.

On Thursday I called Debra’s house.

“Her phone’s charging,” Debra said. “She kept losing it in the couch cushions. I put it up on the counter so it wouldn’t get lost.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“She’s lying down. Karen, she’s eighty-four. She gets tired. I’m the one down there with her all day, I know how she is.”

I let it go. I have let things go with Debra since we were girls sharing a bedroom on our farm south of town, and she drew a line down the middle of the rug with a bar of soap. My side was smaller. I let that go too.

Then on the Saturday after that, Pastor Ellen called me.

Pastor Ellen

Pastor Ellen has been at our church for six years. She came to us from a bigger church in Lincoln, and she is the kind of pastor who learns your grandkids’ names and remembers which ones are in the Army.

“Karen,” she said, “I don’t want to overstep. But I tried to stop by your sister’s on Thursday to see your mother, and Debra met me at the door and said Lois is too frail for visitors right now.”

I was standing at my own kitchen counter with a dish towel in my hand. I remember I just held it.

“Too frail,” I said.

“That’s what she said. She told Marlene and the circle ladies the same thing at the grocery store. She said the doctor wants her kept quiet. The ladies have a card going around for her, and a casserole list, and Debra told them not to bring anything.”

My mother was not frail. My mother, at eighty-four, still did the crossword in the Omaha paper in ink. She had a bruised hip. She had driven herself to Bible study the week before she fell.

“I’ll go see her,” I said. “I’ll take her to church tomorrow.”

“I’ll save her pew,” Ellen said. “I always do.”

The first knock

So the eighteenth of January, I was in Debra’s driveway at nine o’clock with Mom’s hymnal. Mom always left it on the little table by her front door with her church gloves, and I had let myself into her house on Elm Street that morning and picked it up.

I thought if she saw it, she would come. I thought it was that simple.

That was the morning Debra opened the door four inches and said Mom was sleeping.

I went to church alone. During the prayers of the people, when Pastor Ellen asked for joys and concerns, Marlene Hurt stood up and said, “For Lois Bauer, who isn’t well,” and the whole church nodded and bowed their heads.

I sat there in Mom’s pew and could not say a word, because I did not know what was true anymore.