The Hymnal I Brought Every Sunday

Why I didn’t

Here is what I knew would happen if I called the sheriff.

A deputy would drive out to the west edge of town and knock on Debra’s door. Debra would be polite. She would go down the basement stairs and bring Mom up, and Mom would be clean and fed and warm in her cardigan, because Debra was not starving her. Debra was a lot of things, but she would never have let Mom go hungry.

The deputy would ask Mom if she was all right. And Mom, who had been told for five weeks that her younger daughter was too busy to come by, would lift her chin and say she was fine. Then the deputy would leave, and Mom would know I had sent the law to my sister’s house.

My mother was eighty-four. She was not a child, and she was not a parcel. She had raised two girls and buried a husband and run a farm kitchen through the 1980s when we nearly lost the place. If she was going to leave that basement, I wanted her to walk out of it on her own two feet, because she chose to.

“She has to choose,” I told Tom. “If I drag her out, Debra will have her back in a month, and Mom will feel like the rope in a tug of war.”

Tom looked at me for a long time.

“Then you keep knocking,” he said. “And I’ll put a railing on her back step so she has someplace to come home to.”

That Saturday, in eight degrees, he did. Treated pine, set in concrete, sanded smooth so she wouldn’t get a splinter. I watched him from her kitchen window.

Every Sunday at nine

So I kept knocking.

The fifth Sunday, the fifteenth of February, Debra didn’t come to the door at all. I could see her car in the drive and the television going through the front window. I knocked three times, waited ten minutes, and left.

The sixth Sunday, she opened the door and said, “Karen, this is getting ridiculous.”

“Then let me see her.”

“She doesn’t want to see anybody. She’s embarrassed about the fall. You know how proud she is.”

“Did she say that?”

Debra didn’t answer. She just looked at the hymnal in my hands, and for a second something crossed her face that I didn’t understand yet. Then the door closed.

The seventh Sunday, the first of March, I stood on that step and opened the hymnal to page 476. Mom had kept a faded blue ribbon at that page as long as I could remember. When I was nine, I asked her why, and she said, “That’s my page, honey. Everybody needs one page.”

I didn’t sing it. I just stood there with it open in the cold and let anybody who looked out the window see me.

Nobody opened the door. I went to church, and Marlene asked for prayers for Lois again, and this time I stood up.

“Mom’s not frail,” I said, in front of everybody. “She’s at my sister’s. I’ve been to the door every Sunday. I’ll keep going.”

Nobody said anything. Pastor Ellen nodded at me from the pulpit, and then she went on with the prayers. But after the service, three of the circle ladies came over and squeezed my hand, and Marlene Hurt said, “You tell your mother we’ve got her pew.”