One Quiet Question Before the Pageant

Dustin stepped forward one pace and planted his staff. He looked, as he does, just past the congregation, at a spot on the back wall above the narthex door. I know that spot. There’s a crack in the plaster shaped like the number seven.

“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem,” my son said.

The sanctuary went still.

And then came the pause.

I had heard the pause in the kitchen and in my sleep, and I still was not ready for what it did to a room. He stood with his staff in both hands and took his breath. Two seconds. Three. Four. No one coughed, no baby cried, and I swear I could hear the plaster settle. It was not an awkward silence. It was a silence with a purpose, like the quiet in a field after the combine stops.

“And see this thing which is come to pass,” said Dustin.

He said it clear and slow, in his exact flat voice, every syllable set down like a good stone in a wall. Then he gave a small satisfied nod, the way he does when he finishes a problem, and stepped back into the line.

The choir came in on “Angels We Have Heard on High” a half beat early, and the pageant went on.

I looked for Jeanette.

She was in the side door with her back against the frame, holding it open. Dustin, back in line, found her. He did not smile. He looked straight at his aunt across forty feet of candlelight and gave one short, formal nod.

Jeanette nodded back.

The pageant ended at 5:19.

Afterward Doris Albright, who had not looked at her watch once while Dustin was speaking, told me to my face. “Forty-nine minutes,” she said, leaning on her walker in the aisle, eyes bright as a bird’s. “Nine less than last year, with Bethlehem in the middle of it.”

The bus left at 5:25. The aides got the residents home for supper. Nobody was late.

Dustin found me by the coat rack in the fellowship hall afterward, with a cup of juice in one hand and a lemon bar on a napkin. He stood next to me for a while, watching the room.

“I told you it was eleven seconds,” he said.

“You did.”

“It was eleven. Ben timed it on his digital watch.” He took a bite of the lemon bar and considered it. “Ben dropped his staff during the angels. It was loud. I did not mind.”

I held his hand and he let me.

I want to say a word about what happened to Jeanette, because everyone in town asked me, and nobody asked her.