The Eleven in the Pews at Bethel

The Wednesday after the funeral

Mom died the second week of September. Her heart, the doctor said, quick and in her sleep, which is the one mercy I keep going back to.

The funeral was a Saturday. On Monday Lisa, as executor, asked me to go out to Bethel, bring home anything personal of Mom’s, and lock the place up for good so she could tell Dale he could come look at it.

I put it off. Work at the clinic was busy, and Josh was hauling out of Omaha all week, so I had Abby, our eight-year-old, every evening by myself.

I told Lisa I would do it Wednesday after work, when my neighbor could keep Abby.

I did not think about it being Wednesday. I want that understood. It was just the first evening I had free.

I drove out at dusk with Mom’s ring of keys on the seat beside me.

There were only five keys on that ring: house, car, shed, the cedar chest, and one old brass one I could not place. The beans on both sides of the road had turned that late September gold.

I expected the building to be dark. It always looked dark from the road, set back behind the hedge trees, and I had my phone flashlight ready for the steps.

Instead, the side door stood a few inches open, and there was light inside.

I thought kids. I thought somebody had broken in to drink, the way they do with empty buildings.

I came up the steps with my heart going and the keys gripped in my fist like that would help me, and I pushed the door open.

It was not kids.

Eleven people

One small lamp was lit on top of Mom’s old upright piano at the front. The last blue light was going out of the windows. The rest of the room was mostly dark, and in the pews, scattered here and there, were people.

They had heard the door. Every one of them turned and looked back at me.

There was a gray-bearded man in a trucker cap, sitting near the wall on the left. There was a young woman in scrubs.

Two old men in feed caps sat a pew apart from each other, the way men do when they are friends and don’t want to make a thing of it.

A young mother sat near the window on the right with a baby on her lap. Five more people sat around the room, one behind the girl in scrubs and a few in the back rows right beside me, all of them still and quiet and looking at me.

Nobody said a word. I stood at the back of the aisle with that ring of keys in my hand and did not know what on earth to say either.

“My mother passed away,” I said finally. It came out smaller than I meant it to.

The man in the trucker cap stood up slowly. He was in his sixties, broad, with big hands and a face that had spent a lot of time squinting into sunrise.

“We know, honey,” he said. “We were there Saturday. We sat in the back.” He reached into his shirt pocket and held up a single key. “She gave me this the first winter. Said somebody besides her ought to have one. I’m Hank.”

“Hank what?”

He smiled a little. “Just Hank, out here. That was sort of her rule.”