The Pantry Door Nobody Voted To Close
On Sunday I stood at the front doors of First Baptist in my blue dress and watched the parking lot.
At 10:15 Sherry leaned out of the sanctuary door. “I’ve got a table held. It’s the long one by the windows. Room for twelve.”
“I’ll need eleven at the very most.”
“Marlene, you’ll need whatever shows up.”
At 10:20 I saw Teddy Halvorsen’s old Ford pull in with three boys in the back seat and Shelly in front in a flowered blouse. He sat there with the engine off. I watched him look at the church. I watched him put his hand on the wheel and take it off, and put it back.
Then a neighbor’s car, and Hattie Ruble in the passenger seat in the gray coat, with a covered basket on her lap. Then Jolene Marsh on foot, with Lila on her hip. A little behind her came Carl Svoboda, who has emphysema and walks with a green oxygen tank on a little wheeled cart, and last came Gene and Pearl Brandt, who sold their cattle in the dry year and had stopped coming to church that same fall, out of what I think was plain embarrassment.
Eleven of them. They came up the steps without any kind of line. Each one looked at me as if I might say it had been a mistake.
“Morning,” I said. “Anywhere you like.”
Teddy walked his family straight to the last pew on the left, by the door, and sat on the aisle. Carl took the end of the pew in front of them and parked his cart. The Brandts went to the middle of the right side and sat with their hands in their laps. Jolene stopped at the end of a pew where Sherry was waving at her, and I watched Jolene decide, and go.
Hattie did not take my arm. She walked the center aisle by herself, the whole length of it, with her basket, to the fourth pew on the left behind the radiator, and she sat down in the place where I had sat for the last eleven years, and I slid in beside her.
“Somebody’s been using my hymnal rack as a trash can,” she said, and took a gum wrapper out of it.
The room made the soft sound a room makes. I will not claim more for it than it was. Some people looked and then looked away. Some looked longer. A woman across the aisle, Dorothea, whose skillets had been taken in August, moved her purse from the end of the pew to her lap and kept her eyes on her bulletin through the first hymn. I saw it. I did not do anything about it. It is hard to ask somebody to give up a thing she has lost.
Delbert Wheeler, in the second pew with his wife, turned all the way around once, slowly, took in the church, and turned back to the front.
Thurman Hagerman climbed into the pulpit. If the old man noticed that his congregation had grown by eleven, he did not remark on it. He said, “A good morning to everyone, and a particular welcome to any who are with us for the first time,” and went right on to the announcements about the potluck and the roof.
We sang. I sang loud, for me. Across the aisle I heard Jolene’s thin sweet voice on the second verse with Lila’s head on her shoulder.