Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
Sunday morning, I padded downstairs still in my pajamas thinking I might make pancakes from a mix I’d bought, and found Nana Cole dressed in a tweedy skirt and a peach sweater set. That was weird. How’d she even do it?
I was about to grill her on that point, when she said, “Go back upstairs and get dressed.”
“No, I’m going to make breakfast.”
“We don’t have time for breakfast. The service begins in a half an hour. I don’t want to be late.”
“Church?”
“Of course, church. That’s what people do on Sundays.”
In point of fact, it was not what I did on Sundays.
I went to beer busts on Sundays—not to mention I’d been avoiding church for the four months I’d been there.
Before her stroke, I’d simply refused to go with her.
I’d only been once and that was for the pancake dinner.
I wished they also had pancake breakfasts. I was hungry.
I considered refusing, since I didn’t want to go. But that meant she couldn’t go, which would lead to her doing her best to make me miserable for at least the rest of the day—if not longer.
“Okay, give me ten minutes.”
“Wait,” she said. “Could you zip my skirt up. I can’t quite—”
Apparently, she was having issues getting her fingers to do the things she wanted. I went over and zipped the short zipper on the side of her skirt.
“Thank you,” she said, clearly embarrassed she hadn’t been able to do it herself.
“You did a pretty good job getting dressed by yourself,” I said to be nice.
“Hurry up. I won’t forgive you if we’re late.”
Cheswick Community Church—not to be confused with the big box store, Keswick’s—was north of Masons Bay right before you got to Big Turtle Point.
A small, white church from like a million years ago, it was plunked on a little hill and looked out on Lake Michigan.
Behind it was a pole barn the church used for events, like the pancake dinner.
We parked and I helped Nana Cole out of the SUV, up the walk, and into the church. She was doing better with the walker—though she might just have been tired. Hard to tell.
Inside the church there were two rows of wooden pews with an aisle down the center and two narrower aisles on the sides. The walls were cream-colored, a fan hung down from the high ceiling, while six stained glass windows told Sunday school tales.
The church was only about a third full. Mostly older women sitting in ones and twos.
The sticky smell of too much perfume and dusting powder was strong.
Two of the women were Dolores Abbott, I think, and her daughter, Cheryl Ann.
Dolores saw us and waved us over to a couple of empty spots in her pew.
“I’m so glad you’re up and around,” she said to Nana Cole. Then she quickly switched gears. “Cheryl Ann, you remember Henry. The two of you were going to go on a date.”
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
“Have you seen Opal?” Cheryl Ann asked, as though it were a logical question.
“We had coffee yesterday.” Her eyes filled with tears, and I said, “It was just coffee.”
“I haven’t seen her for a while.”
I felt bad enough to say, “I’ll tell her to call you next time I see her.” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized they made it seem like I was seeing Opal all the time. “Not that I see her, like, you know, much.”
“Should we leave you two alone?” Dolores asked, as though Cheryl Ann and I were having an entirely different conversation.
“Mom,” Cheryl Ann said. “You’re being gross.”
Dolores turned to my Nana Cole and said, “I don’t know what to do with her. She’s so emotional.”
“I’m sure she’ll grow out of it,” Nana Cole said.
I was sure she wouldn’t.
Organ music had been playing since we walked in.
I didn’t recognize any of it. The organ and organist sat on the right side of the church facing away from us.
All I could see was a cloud of white hair.
I wasn’t sure, but it seemed like she was missing notes here and there.
Or at least not hitting all the right ones.
Without looking closely, Nana Cole said, “Sue Langtree is back.” Then she took a good look around the church. “Ivy Greene isn’t here.”
“You mean, Mrs. Hessel,” I replied.
“Yes, that’s… who I mean. And you know that.”
“What about her son? Is he here?”
“No. I don’t see him either.”
After a beat she asked, “Do you think they blame the church?”
“I hear she’s absolutely destroyed,” Dolores said, jumping into our conversation. “Which is no surprise, Reverend Hessel was so marvelous.”
“Yes, he was,” Nana Cole said.
“Such a charismatic speaker,” Dolores added. The two times I’d met him I hadn’t seen any indication of that.
“Did either of you hear,” she went on. “They’re investigating Reverend Hessel’s death as a hate crime.”
“What?!” I said, a little too loud. People turned around. I lowered my voice and asked, “Why would they do that? He wasn’t a minority.”
“They think he was killed because he was Christian,” she said.
“That’s stupid,” I said. My grandmother swatted my arm. “Who’s they?”
“They,” repeated Dolores.
“The sheriff?”
“No. He’s just a pawn of the governor,” she said.
That was even stupider. What did the governor have to do with it? And, to be honest, I didn’t even know who the governor of Michigan was. Then, a middle-aged woman in a floral print dress got up from a few pews down and came over to us. Dolores quieted down.
Crouching, the middle-aged woman said to my grandmother, “Emma, it’s so nice to see you’re back.”
“Thank you, Sheila. It’s nice to be back.”
Before they could say anything else, the organ music grew louder and the choir shuffled in. Sheila crouch-walked back to her pew. The choir began singing. It was hard to understand the words.
I studied the congregation, trying to determine if any of them might be meth heads.
I mean, it seemed a much more likely possibility than a Christian hate crime.
The average age of the congregation seemed to be about fifty—which is not to say that fifty-year-old church ladies can’t also be meth heads, it just seemed unlikely.
Before anything even happened, my eyes began to slowly shut. I could tell I was going to have a lot of trouble staying awake. I did not consider it my fault. Yes, I’d taken an Oxy before we left, but still…
In my opinion a topic like eternal salvation is dull as dishwater.
I mean, seriously, if there is a God, he put us here with sex and television and magazines and fun drugs and art and all sorts of other wonderful things.
And then he wants us to think about the hereafter?
I mean, what was wrong with staying here?
Shouldn’t the reward for good behavior be another seventy-five years?
Seriously, if eternity turns out to be anything like church I plan to take a pass.
As soon as the song was over, Reverend Wilkie walked out.
He was in his early seventies, trim, standing tall with a ramrod straight back.
Even though he was clearly very old, he didn’t look like someone who’d needed to retire.
Especially from a job that probably took a solid four to six hours a week.
Under one arm, he’d tucked what looked like his personal Bible—old and scuffed with a sprung binding. He opened it on the lectern, glanced down, and began, “Today we turn to Proverbs 12:22, and I quote: ‘Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but those who deal faithfully are his delight.’
That seems rather straightforward, doesn’t it?
If you lie, God hates you. If you tell the truth, God loves you.
A simple message, but one that so many of us—no, all of us—have not truly heard.
Think back to the last time you lied. Was it this morning?
Last night? Yesterday? If you’re telling yourself that you can’t remember the last time you lied because it was so long ago—well, then that’s a lie.
“My grandson, who is nine, would interrupt me here and ask, ‘What about white lies, grandpa?’ And I would tell him that a white lie is still a lie. That God does not say it’s wrong to lie most of the time, he says it’s wrong to lie all of the time. Lying is always wrong. So, white lies are wrong.
“There is always a way to tell the truth. If you quiet yourself and ask God, he’ll show you the way.”
Hmmmm, I thought being in the closet was sort of a lie.
Did God want me to come out to my grandmother?
Is that how I should interpret this? Did this mean if I came out to her again and she had a second stroke and died, that it’s what God wanted?
Maybe God did want her dead. Though I couldn’t say why.
If I were God, I’d keep her down here as long as possible. She was that annoying.
Reverend Wilkie continued, though I had trouble paying attention to the rest of it. I kept drifting off. Twice Nana Cole elbowed me. The second time would leave a bruise.
He kept on talking about lying. I couldn’t figure out why. I mean, I got it right off the bat. Lying was wrong. Not a challenging concept. He was basically repeating himself.
When he finally stopped, the choir sang another hymn. This one was numbered, hymn 183, and we picked up the songbooks kept in a rack on the back of the pew in front of us, flipped to the right page, and sang along.
I mouthed the words but did not sing. It was my way of being kind to the world.
I had a terrible singing voice. Since she couldn’t hear me, I got a few side glances from my grandmother as she screeched along to the music.
I couldn’t remember if I’d ever heard her sing before, so I had no idea if that was really her voice. It might have been someone nearby.