The Church Basement Where It All Began

The guest book again

The party went the way church basement parties go. People ate ham buns. People went back for second ham buns when they thought nobody was looking, just the way Shirley said.

Dad stood by the coffee urn and shook every hand in the county. Mom sat at the head table with her corsage, and a line formed in front of her that did not get shorter for an hour.

Arlene had set the old guest book at a little table by the stairs, open to the first blank page, with the new blue pen beside it. People lined up for that, too.

When Mom saw it, she had to sit down again. She turned the pages slowly, one by one. Her mother’s handwriting. Her father’s. Uncle Dale’s little fish.

She found Bev’s name with the heart and laughed out loud and called across the room, “Beverly, you were such a pill that day,” and Bev called back, “I was eighteen, I was a pill every day.”

Then Mom came to the blank pages at the back, where the first new names had gone in that afternoon. Clarence had signed first. His hand was so shaky you could hardly read it, but he had written underneath it, Usher, 1976. Still here.

Mom put her fingers on that and closed her eyes.

Dad came and stood behind her chair and put his hands on her shoulders. They stayed like that a long time, the two of them, reading names. Nobody bothered them.

That was the moment I will remember when I am old. Not the clapping. Not the stairs. My mother and father, fifty years married, reading their guest book in the same basement, with his hands on her shoulders.

Todd

It was almost half past three when the side door opened at the top of the stairs.

I saw his shoes first, the shiny ones, and the knees of his good gray slacks. Then the rest of him. He was still wearing his dealership polo with the logo on the chest and his name tag clipped on.

He stopped at the top of the stairs, exactly where Mom had stopped, and he looked down at the room.

I watched his face. I have known my brother’s face my whole life, and I had never seen it do what it did then.

He looked at the gold streamers. He looked at the ham buns and the punch bowl and the white paper tablecloths. He looked at all those old people from our town, people he had not seen since he left, laughing with their coffee cups.

And then he found Mom and Dad at the guest book, Dad’s hands still on her shoulders, and Mom laughing at something Arlene was saying.

My mother has never once looked that happy at any present Todd ever gave her. Not the television. Not the recliner. Not anything. And I could see him know it, standing there.

He came down the stairs slowly and walked right past me to them.

“Hi, Mom,” he said. His voice was strange. “Hi, Dad. Happy anniversary.”

Mom stood up and hugged him so hard his name tag came unclipped and fell on the floor. Pete picked it up and put it in his own shirt pocket, and nobody noticed but me.