One Quiet Question Before the Pageant

“I need to do it two more times,” he said. “That is how I practice.”

Jeanette took her hands down. Her face was wet and red and nothing but her own.

“Will you still say it Sunday?” she asked.

“I already said I would,” said Dustin. “My sandals have been by the door since last Sunday.” He picked up his pencil. “You can sit in that chair. Please do not talk during the second one.”

Jeanette pulled out the chair and sat.

He said it twice more. She did not talk. I stood at the sink with the water off and the dishes undone, and nobody asked me for anything.

At 4:30 on the Sunday before Christmas, Bethel Methodist was full the way it is once a year, families and grandparents and a few folding chairs along the side aisle. At 4:15 the bus from Prairie View Manor had pulled in and the aides had wheeled fourteen residents in their good sweaters down the side aisle. At the very back, in his co-op jacket, hair standing up on one side, sat Bob, who had slept maybe nine hours since Friday.

Pastor Ken did not make a speech. He read the second chapter of Luke from the King James, all the way through, in his plain reading voice, while the children processed in behind him.

Hannah Calhoun’s halo had been rewired with a coat hanger. The three kings wore cardboard crowns. A baby doll lay in the barn-wood manger Bob had built nine years ago. Kris and Doris ran the show from a card table in the side aisle with a flashlight. Doris had her watch in her lap.

Jeanette stood at the side door in the chancel, where the wheelchairs came in, holding it open for the aides. She wasn’t running anything. Her hands were empty. She was just a woman holding a door.

When the shepherds came in, there were four of them. They came down the center aisle in a line, in bathrobes and dish towels, each carrying a hickory staff from Bob’s fence row.

Dustin was second.

I had thought I would be calm. I held my back straight in the pew and my hands in my lap, and then my son walked into the candlelight in his flannel robe, with his hickory staff, and I forgot how to breathe.

He did not wear his headphones. That had been his decision, made alone, on the drive over. “I will not need them,” he had said.

The shepherds reached the star Kris had taped on the floor, and stopped.

Hannah, as Gabriel, said her piece from the pulpit steps. The shepherds looked up. Ben Foley, third in line, glanced sideways at Dustin, and his small shoulders dropped an inch with relief.

Then it was time.