The Church Basement Where It All Began

The stairs

You can smell a Lutheran church basement before you see it. Coffee in the big percolator, floor wax, and something baking. That is what hit us at the top of the stairs, the smell of the coffee.

Mom stopped on the top step. She put her hand on the rail.

“Somebody’s made coffee,” she said.

Then she heard it. Or she heard the lack of it. Eighty people in a low room trying very hard not to make a sound sounds like nothing else on earth. It sounds like a held breath.

Dad looked at me. I could not say anything. I just nodded down the stairs.

He took Mom’s hand. Not her arm, the way he usually does now on stairs, to steady her. Her hand. Their fingers laced together, his big rough farmer’s hand and her small one with the wedding ring worn thin.

And they came down those stairs together, the same stairs, fifty years and one day after the first time.

I walked behind them with that silly casserole dish. I was smiling so hard my face hurt, and I could not see very well.

When they were halfway down, everybody stood up. You could hear the folding chairs scrape back all at once on the tile. And then everybody started to clap.

Not loud. Not a cheer. Just a long, warm clapping that went on and on, from eighty people of every age, from Clarence leaning on his nephew to the Haugen grandbabies on their mothers’ hips.

On the last step, Mom stopped. She put her hand over her mouth.

She looked at the gold streamers twisted across the ceiling. She looked at the two long tables with the white paper tablecloths, and the trays of ham buns, and the dill pickles in the glass dishes, and the pastel mints.

She looked at the punch bowl, with the lime sherbet floating on top just the way Bev’s mother used to make it, a green cloud in the middle of the table.

Then she turned around on that last step and looked up and found me.

“Lisa,” she said. “About the steakhouse.”

What Mom said

I thought I was in trouble. I truly did. I thought she was going to tell me I had embarrassed my brother, that I had gone behind his back, that I should not have spent money on this when Todd had worked so hard.

She came back up one step so she was eye level with me. The clapping was still going. She took my face in both her hands, the way she did when I was little and had a fever.

“We’re still going to that steakhouse,” she said. “And you and I are going to eat every bite of that ribeye, and we are going to tell your brother it was the best supper we ever ate in our lives.”

“Mom…”

“Hush. Listen to me.” She was crying and she did not even notice. “Your brother has been trying to buy us a nicer basement since he was eighteen years old. He doesn’t know we never wanted one. This is the one we wanted.”

She kissed my forehead. Then she turned around and walked down into the room on Dad’s arm, and the clapping turned into a crowd, and everybody was hugging everybody.

I stood on the stairs holding that empty casserole dish and cried like a fool. Pete came over from the coffee table and took the dish out of my hands and set it on the step, and then he just stood there next to me with his arm around me while I got it out of my system.

“Told you,” he said, which made no sense, because he had not told me anything. But I knew what he meant.