Sunday morning, I picked her up at nine-thirty.
She was waiting on the front step in her lavender dress. The good one. The one she’d worn to my wedding and to my father’s funeral and, I realized, to every Easter for twenty years. She had her hymnal under her arm, the old black one with the gold edges gone dull, and the sheet music for the prelude in a manila folder.
She’d done her hair. She’d put on the pearl earrings.
“You look beautiful, Mom.”
“I look eighty-one. Let’s go.”
When we turned onto Church Street, I had to slow down.
The parking lot was full. Both lots. The overflow lot by the fellowship hall was full. There were cars along both sides of Church Street for two blocks, and on Maple, and people walking up the sidewalk from the bank parking lot on Main.
“Mom.”
“I see it.”
“I’ve never seen it like this except Christmas Eve.”
“I see it, Karen.”
She didn’t say anything else. I let her out at the side door and went to find a place to park. I ended up behind the Casey’s three blocks down and walked back.
When I came in through the narthex, I could hear her warming up. Soft. Just the flutes. She always warmed up on the flutes.
The sanctuary was packed.
Every pew was full. People were sitting on the folding chairs the ushers had brought up from the basement and lined along the side aisles. People were standing in the back. I saw the Larsons. I saw Lois Ferris in her wheelchair at the end of the third pew, where they’d taken out a section for her. I saw Jim Kowalski. I saw people I hadn’t seen in church in fifteen years. I saw people I didn’t know at all.
Most of them were old. But not all of them. There were young couples with babies. There were teenagers sitting with their grandparents. There was a whole row of men in seed caps who looked like they’d come straight from chores.
I found a spot standing against the back wall next to my brother Tom, who had driven up from Des Moines at six in the morning without telling anyone.
“Did she know you were coming?” I whispered.
“No. I figured she’d tell me not to.”
Up front, Pastor Whitfield came out of the side door in his robe. He stopped. He looked out at the room.
I watched his face. He was surprised. Then pleased. I could see him thinking that it had worked. That word had gotten out about the praise band. That the young families had come.
Then he looked closer. He saw the walkers in the aisle. He saw Lois Ferris’s wheelchair. He saw that the average age in the room was about seventy.
He looked confused.
He went to the pulpit and welcomed everyone.
“What a wonderful crowd this morning,” he said. “I think this might be the fullest I’ve seen it since I got here. Praise God for that.”
A few people murmured amen. Most didn’t say anything.
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