The Solo Mom Sang From My Tailgate

I did not look at him again. I kept my eyes on Mom, because that is where they belonged.

“Long lay the world in sin and error pining.”

Another door opened. Another. I could hear it behind me, the heavy sound of people coming out of a warm room into the cold, quiet and careful, like folks entering a sickroom.

By “till He appeared and the soul felt its worth,” I would guess forty of them were standing in the lot.

I heard coats rustle. I heard a baby fuss and get hushed. Down the row somebody blew a nose, and somebody else murmured, “Is that Dot Ames?”

“A thrill of hope. The weary world rejoices.”

Mom’s hands stayed folded in front of her. They did not shake. Her voice rose through the line, climbing the way a good road climbs, steady, no hurry, and I understood something I had never understood in all those years sitting in a folding chair in that gym.

She was not performing. She had never been performing. She was telling the truth, out loud, to anyone who would stand there, and the truth did not need a spotlight.

“For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.”

By then the lot was full.

I turned my head, just slightly, to see. They had come out of the lobby and the gym and the cars, and the pickups and the minivans had pulled in around us.

A girl was rolling her grandfather up in a wheelchair, a plaid blanket over his knees. Mrs. Tate from the church kitchen stood with her purse clutched in both hands. Two of Mom’s old altos had come arm in arm, in matching wool coats, and one of them was nodding in time with her eyes closed.

Nobody clapped. Nobody spoke. They had all stopped on their own, and they stood in the sharp sun with their breath showing, a couple hundred of my neighbors, and they listened.

Mom finished the first verse. She drew a breath and I felt Steve come up on my other side without a sound.

She looked at me then. Just for a second. A small nod, the way she used to nod at me from the piano bench when I was nine years old and about to sing in front of the whole fourth grade.

And I knew then that she was going to be all right, whatever happened next. We both knew it.

“Fall on your knees,” she sang, and began the second verse.

I’ll tell you what I had not planned for.

I had not planned for the doors.

Behind us, on the school side, the double doors opened.

Not the glass lobby doors. The heavy gym doors, the steel ones with the push bars, which are only ever opened from inside by someone with a key.

I heard the bar clack. I heard the hinge. I heard shoes on the concrete, quick at first, then slowing.

Mom kept singing. She did not turn her head. I will say that for her until the day she dies: not once did my mother’s eyes leave the lot.

I did not turn around, either. I knew the sound of those shoes. I had followed that sound down a hundred hallways when I was little, hurrying to keep up.

It stopped about six feet behind my left shoulder.