The Altar Flowers Too Country for Church

Seven hands went up around the table. Dave’s, too, as a non-voting member, because he said he wanted it counted.

Kristin did not raise her hand. She sat very still with her coat in her lap.

She stood, then. She said “Excuse me” to nobody in particular, and she put her coat on, and she walked out of the library with her bag over her shoulder, and the door closed behind her with a very soft click.

That was all. She didn’t say anything to me. I would not have known what to answer.

Everett cleared his throat.

“Gail,” he said, “I owe you a conversation.”

“You don’t, Everett.”

“I stood at that door while you carried those buckets out,” he said. “Five of them. I held a bulletin out to nobody. I’ve been thinking about that for seven weeks. I think I’ll be thinking about it for the rest of my life.”

“It’s all right.”

“It’s not all right.” He looked down at the table. “I’d like to ask you to come back. The altar’s been bare, or it’s been grocery store mums that somebody set out Sunday morning. Marjorie’s been cutting hydrangea from her yard.

People have noticed. They won’t say it, but they’ve noticed. Would you come back, and do the altar? We’d ask the church to pay for seed. And thread. Whatever you wanted.”

I looked at him. I looked around the table at the others, Phyllis with her reading glasses on her nose, and Lyle Hoffman, and the Dreiling woman, and two or three more I had known since I was a young bride.

I had expected to feel something large in that moment, a sweetness, a vindication. I’d imagined it a hundred times in the shower and the garden and the truck.

Instead I felt the dry paper of the coffee can in my hands.

“I can’t, Everett,” I said. “I have a standing engagement on Sunday afternoons.”

He blinked at me.

“At Maple Court,” I said. “They’re waiting at the door. I can’t make them wait.”

Nobody said anything for a while.

“But I’ll tell you what I can do,” I said. “Any Saturday morning, I’ll teach any of you how to cut a zinnia. The garden is on Cutler Road. Bring clippers and a bucket. I’ve got more seed than I’ll ever plant.

Marjorie has a good eye already. Let the church bring its own flowers, from its own yards. Let each family take a Sunday. They don’t have to be fancy. They just have to be from somebody.”

Everett nodded, and then he wrote it down himself, on the back of his agenda, and I watched his hand shake.

“All right,” he said.

That was how the church altar came back, though not through me.

The first Sunday of November was All Saints, a bright cold morning with the sky wide and clean, and a wind from the north that smelled of cut milo and woodsmoke. I did not go to church.

I had my buckets at the back door of the house by nine, as I always do now, and Elmer loaded them in the truck.

But he told me afterward what the altar looked like. He had gone in early to drop off a casserole for the potluck. The glass cylinder was gone. In its place stood a long row of mismatched jars and cans and a milk pitcher, arranged by the families who had come in with their own.