The Church Basement Where It All Began

The casserole dish

Saturday came up bright and cold, the kind of October day in Iowa when the beans are all out and the combines are in the corn and the whole county smells like dust and diesel.

I picked Mom and Dad up at a quarter to two. I had told them on Wednesday that I needed a ride to church Saturday afternoon to return a casserole dish to the funeral committee, and would they come along and then we would get pie at the café.

“Why do I have to wear the brown suit to return a casserole dish?” Dad asked from the front step. Mom had laid it out on the bed for him because I had called her that morning and asked her to, and she had not asked why. She just did it.

“Because your wife says so,” I said.

Mom came out behind him in her lavender dress, the one she had bought for my niece’s wedding two summers ago. She had her good coat over her arm and her purse, and she looked at me sideways, the way she used to when I was fifteen and home late.

In the car, before I pulled out of the driveway, I reached into the back seat and handed her a little plastic box from the florist. Inside was a corsage, white roses and baby’s breath, the same as in the picture.

“Lisa Marie,” she said. “What on earth.”

“Just put it on. Humor me.”

My hands were shaking, so she pinned it on herself, looking in the visor mirror. Dad watched her do it from the back seat and did not say anything. But I saw him in the rearview mirror, and he was smiling at the back of her head.

The church parking lot was nearly empty. That was Pete’s doing. He had told everyone to park over at the school and walk the block, so the lot would not give it away. Some of them were in their eighties, and they walked it anyway.

I parked by the side door, the one that goes straight down to the basement. I got the casserole dish out of the back seat, an old Pyrex that had been in my cupboard for a year, and held it in front of me like a prop in a play.

“Come down with me,” I said. “Bev wants to say hi.”