On the first Sunday of October, the fourth, I sat in my usual pew with Carla and our kids, Hallie, who is sixteen, and Brady, who is thirteen. The ushers came down the aisle with the sealed cups and the wafers. Orva sat in the fifth pew on the right, in her good navy coat, and she held hers in her lap through the whole prayer. Across the aisle, little Tess Gunnarson tore her wafer open at the same moment as everyone else and put it in her mouth, and she looked up and smiled at her mother, and I thought, there it is. That is why. Then I watched Orva put the foil wafer in her mouth and swallow, and bow, and I could not look at anything else for the rest of that service.
Each Sunday I watched her from across the sanctuary. She never looked at me. Not once. She did not turn her head when I came into the narthex. She nodded to Gene and the pastor and Brenna Gunnarson and she said good morning to the ushers, and she went right past me, with a kind face, the way you would go past a person you had never met. I have never felt anything like it. It was not cold. It was courteous. I do not know how to describe how much worse that is.
The Doorway
On the morning of Sunday, the first of November, the clocks went back, and for once I woke up before my alarm. That day was All Saints. At the end of the service Pastor Ellen read the names of the church’s dead from the past year, nine of them, and we lit a candle for each. My mother’s was not one, because it was seven years too late. I stood there anyway and said her name to myself.
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I was putting on my coat in the narthex when Gene Oleson stopped beside me with his cane. He is eighty and he does not say a word he does not mean. He said, “She takes her loaf out to Tarrant Valley the first Sunday of the month at two o’clock. There were seven of them last time. You might look in.” I said, “Gene.” He said, “I voted no, Dirk. I did not say I was not on your side.” Then he went out to his car.
I drove to Tarrant Valley by myself. I should say I did not decide to. I told Carla I was going to check a nozzle, and I was in the lot of that care home at ten to two. My dash clock said ten to three. It was an hour ahead because I had never learned how to change it. I knew the building. My mother had spent her last six weeks in hospice there, down the east hall, at the window that looks out at the grain elevator. I went in the side door, walked down the hall with my cap in my hand, and stopped in the doorway of the day room.