The Front Pew and the Choir
The Phone Call
On Saturday afternoon, I called Denise.
I had thought about it all week. I did not want to call her. Part of me wanted her to find out at the hearing in January, in front of the judge, with her face going red.
Then I thought about Mom. Mom would not have stood for that. Mom used to say you don’t keep score in a family, you keep the door open, and some days that’s the hardest work there is.
So I called. Rick answered. He sounded tired, and he said Denise was out in the garage, and he went and got her without saying anything else.
“What,” Denise said.
“Dad got his hearing aids Thursday,” I said. “He can hear. He heard the clock at the audiologist’s. He heard the blinker in the truck.”
She did not say anything. I heard a radio somewhere on her end, a ball game, and the scrape of something metal.
“I’m taking him to church tomorrow,” I said. “He wants to sit in the front pew. The choir’s singing. If you want to come, come.”
I did not yell. I never have. My voice shook a little at the end, but I did not yell.
She hung up without a word. I stood in my kitchen with the phone in my hand, the way I had stood in Dad’s kitchen in August. Only this time I was not as surprised.
Dan was reading the paper at the table. He looked up. “Well?”
“She hung up.”
He folded the paper. “Doesn’t mean she’s not coming,” he said. “Rick’s been getting his parts on credit at the co-op since spring. Things over there might be a little different than you think.”
I sat down across from him. “How different?”
“Bad,” he said. “The shop’s been going under for a year. He laid off his helper in February. I’d guess they’ve been scraping.”
I sat with that. I thought about March fourteenth, and a withdrawal for twenty-two thousand dollars, and a shop with no helper. It did not make it right. But it made it something I could understand.
Sunday Morning
On Sunday I picked Dad up at eight-thirty. He was already on the porch, waiting, in his brown tweed sport coat and his good tie.
His thin white hair was combed straight back. He had shaved twice, I could tell.
I wore my green Sunday dress. It’s the one I wore to my niece’s wedding and every Easter since, and Dad has told me every time that it was the color Mom liked best on me.
Zion Lutheran sits on a rise between two hayfields, a white wooden church with a steeple you can see from the county road. It is not big. On a good Sunday we have ninety people.
Dan was ushering that morning. He held the door for us and squeezed Dad’s shoulder. “Front row’s all yours, Harold,” he said, and Dad heard him, and grinned at him like a boy.
Inside, the tall clear windows were full of September light. They are plain glass, not stained. The church could never afford stained glass, and Mom always said she would rather see the fields anyway.
Pastor Ben Ostby came down the aisle before the service, the way he does, greeting people. He is sixty and still plays on the men’s softball team, and he shakes hands like he means it.
He took Dad’s hand in both of his. “Good morning, Harold,” he said. “It’s good to see you up here.”
Dad laughed right out loud. Not a polite laugh. A real one, from the belly, that turned heads three pews back.
“I heard that,” he said. “I heard my own name. Say it again, Pastor.”
Pastor Ben did not ask why. He just smiled and said, “Harold Malloy. Good morning, Harold,” a little louder than he needed to, and then he patted Dad’s hand and went on up the aisle.
Dad wiped his eye with his knuckle. “Haven’t heard that in a long time,” he said to me. “You forget what your name sounds like when somebody else says it.”
We sat in the front pew, on the left side, with nothing but open floor between us and the altar. Nobody ever sits in the front pew at Zion, and it was quiet up there.
I folded my hands in my lap and sat close enough to feel him trembling a little, not from being cold, but from the way a man trembles when he has been waiting a long time for something.