The Church Basement Where It All Began

Why Todd was Todd

I should tell you about my brother, because he is not a bad man, and I did not understand him myself until all of this was over.

Todd left our town the week after he graduated high school. He was eighteen. He packed his Chevy Cavalier with everything he owned and drove to Des Moines, and he did not come back except for Christmas and the occasional funeral.

Dad farmed rented ground and drove a milk truck in the winters to make ends meet. Mom cut hair in the front room of our house for eight dollars a head. We were not poor, exactly, but we were close enough to see it from the porch.

Todd hated it. He hated the hand-me-down coats and the free lunch tickets one bad year and the way the town knew our business. He hated that Dad’s truck was always a little rusted along the wheel wells.

Every time he came home, he brought something. A new television for the folks, a microwave, a recliner for Dad with a cup holder in the arm. Mom would thank him and Dad would sit in the recliner to be polite.

I thought it was showing off. I thought he was rubbing our noses in it. It turned out I was only half right, and the half I got wrong was the half that mattered.

The album

A week after I paid, I stopped by Mom and Dad’s after work. Mom had asked me to find her good white tablecloth, the one with the lace edge, because she wanted to have it cleaned before the dinner.

“Hall closet, top shelf,” she called from the kitchen. “Behind the Christmas tins.”

I dragged the step stool over and started moving tins. The tablecloth was not there. What was there, behind a box of tree lights, was a white photo album with gold letters on the front that said Our Wedding.

I took it down and sat right on the closet floor with it in my lap, still in my scrubs.

October 1976. The first page was the two of them on the steps of St. Paul’s Lutheran, Mom in a high lace collar and a veil, Dad in a brown suit with lapels as wide as a dinner plate.

Then the pictures moved down into the church basement, and I stopped turning pages so fast.

There it was. The same basement where I had gone to Sunday school and Vacation Bible School and every funeral lunch of my life. The low white drop ceiling, the long folding tables with white paper tablecloths.

Somebody had hung gold crepe paper streamers across the ceiling, twisted so they caught the light. There were little paper bells on the tables.

There were trays of ham buns. If you did not grow up in Iowa, a ham bun is shaved ham on a soft white bun, sometimes with a slice of cheese, and there is not a wedding, a graduation or a funeral here without them.