Chin Up, Honey

The church was filling up. Inez Cooper came f littering past and stopped to point out that the pot in front of the pulpit was off-kilter. Vella didn’t think so.

“Well, it is,” said Inez as she bent to shift it a micro-inch.

Vella opened her mouth, then closed it and pivoted, going to take her normal place in the third pew. As she adjusted her skirt, she looked up to see Jaydee approaching.

“Hope you don’t mind if I sit beside you today,” he said, giving her his winning smile. He was a handsome man. He had always put her in mind of Douglas Fairbanks Jr., not that she ever wanted to tell anyone that. Not only would she be showing her age, but most of the time Jaydee was too annoying to compliment.

“Well…no,” Vella answered, in something of a confused state, but for some reason stopping herself from saying that the spot was saved for the Peele sisters, Peggy and Alma, who sat there every week. There were no nameplates on the pews, after all.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jaydee settle himself and smooth his sharply creased trousers. She wondered what in the world was going on with him. His behavior was hardly customary. The memory clicked in of him being somewhat disgruntled two months previously, when she had purchased the old oil-field building and lot west of town, getting to the property ahead of him. He might now know of someone who wanted to buy it and was hoping to get it from her cheap, then resell it. She had been in financial dealings with Jaydee before. He never could go at anything directly.

The Peele sisters showed up and were affronted at having their space taken. They could have squeezed between Jaydee and Bingo Yardell, who held down the other end of the pew, but instead Peggy Peele said, “We’ll just move back,” and hauled Alma after her, while Alma whined that she was too short to see from the back.

It was rather nice to have a man sitting beside her at church, Vella thought, taking note that Jaydee was a good-smelling man. One thing that she had always appreciated about her now-departed husband was that he had always smelled good.

Then here came Belinda and Lyle.

“Lyle and I thought we’d like to sit with you today, Mama,” Belinda said. She looked right at Jaydee and all but told him to move.

He did—closer to Vella—saying, “Good mornin’. Nice to see you, Miss Belinda.”

“Yes, you, too,” Belinda replied after staring at him a moment.

Lyle said he didn’t think they would all fit in the pew, but Belinda went right ahead, working her way in and pulling Lyle behind her. Vella moved her feet out of the way of her daughter’s little crystal spike heels that could possibly take out a toe.

Vella knew well that it was Jaydee sitting there that had brought her daughter. She felt in a very odd place, with people who rarely had much to do with her suddenly coming at her like magnets.

Belinda leaned around Jaydee and said, “Mama, do you know why the First Methodist Church is called the ‘First’?”

“No…no, I really don’t.”

“Jaydee, do you know?”

“No, can’t say as I do.”

Vella thought her daughter was about to give the punch line to a joke, but instead Belinda said, “Well, I don’t, either, but I’ll bet Daddy would have known. Don’t you think so, Mama? Daddy knew all sorts of details like that,” she told Jaydee. “He came to church here with Mama for over forty years.”

“I remember that,” Jaydee said.

Then Belinda added, “How many times have you been married now, Jaydee?”

“Three,” he replied. “I’ve been lookin’ for just the right one.”

Emma saw the clock as she pitched the ham into the oven. Grabbing her purse, she raced out the back door.

John Cole was at her car, slamming the hood. “Got your oil changed.” He wiped his hands on a rag as he stepped back.

“Oh. Thank you.”

He nodded. “Do you need me to check on anything in the kitchen?”

“No. The ham will be fine, and I’ll throw everything else together when I get back.”

“Have a good time.”

“I will.” She thought they sounded like she was going on vacation, rather than to church services.

They were being exceedingly polite, tiptoeing around each other. Two strangers under the same roof. But still in separate beds.

John Cole wasn’t even in the bed. He had taken to sleeping in his recliner.

She fought with herself about that all the way to church. She really should make the first move and suggest that they both move back to their bed. After all, if they were working on their marriage, it wasn’t a good idea to sleep separately. Another voice countered that John Cole was perfectly capable of making the first move. But she thought that she really should at least bring up the subject.

By the time she pulled into the church parking lot, all of the voices inside of her admitted that both she and John Cole were being childish.

The opening music had started. She went up the steps along with the stragglers who had been catching last-minute cigarettes out on the front lawn. Stepping through the door, she paused, running a speculative eye over the sanctuary, seeing it with her new status as mother-of-the-groom. If the wedding took place in the morning, it would be beautiful like this—graceful and joyous. In late September it would be warm, but not too hot. The fans would stir softly, and the light would fall in an ethereal glow through the stained-glass window over the altar, much as it was at that moment.

Then she saw her mother leaning out into the aisle with a hurry-up expression. Emma did, and her mother smiled in welcome and passed her a hymnal with all the service’s songs efficiently marked by bits of paper.

A moment later her mother leaned over and whispered, “Why do you think they call it the First Methodist Church?”

“I don’t know,” answered Emma, who was still preoccupied with visions of the wedding. Then, noting her mother’s questioning expression, she offered, “I guess because it’s on First Street.”

“I don’t think that answers why there are First United Methodists Churches all over the country. They can’t all be on a First Street…can they?”

Pastor Smith stood on the altar steps and offered up the ending prayer to send the congregation out into the world with love and peace in their hearts. At the piano, Lila Hicks played “Pass It On.”

Emma bowed her head and thought about hurrying home to make the dinner. She thought of all the food she would put on the table and her family gathered around it, and how she was welcoming a new woman into the family. She raised her head and there was light streaming in through the high windows behind the pulpit, and it was as if the light streamed right at her, filling and overflowing her heart with gratitude. She was suddenly starkly aware of what she and John Cole had been about to throw away.

When she got home, she hurried to the guest room and bath, and gathered up all her things and took them back to the master bedroom. A lot of the warm emotion that she had experienced at the church had already begun to wear off, but she sure did not want Johnny or Gracie to see her things in the guest room. What sort of example would that set for them?

7

Mother of the Bride

Sylvia Kinney was a beautiful woman of forty-five who could, and often did, easily pass for ten years younger, even though this would have had her giving birth to her one and only daughter at fourteen. She would rather have people think she had gotten caught up in youthful foolishness than know the truth of her having made a big mistake at twenty-two, when she should have known better. She was desperately trying to save Gracie from making the same mistake.

Gripping the telephone receiver, Sylvia Kinney paced the white carpet of her bedroom in a fashionable apartment in Baltimore and tried talking sense to her daughter. She tried cajoling, threatening and, uncharacteristically, pleading—everything she could think of to convince her daughter two thousand miles away not to marry that bubba with whom she thought she was in love.

Finally, thoroughly frustrated, Sylvia came out with, “My God, Gracie, he’s nothing but a redneck boy with no future beyond the possible ability to acquire a lot of junk cars up on blocks in the yard.”

She knew instantly that she had made a serious error.

“Yes, Mother, I know,” came Gracie’s cool reply. “I’ll always know where he is at night, right out in the backyard playing with our children.”

“Oh, Gracie…I didn’t really mean it like that. I didn’t. I just don’t want you to do something that…”

“I’m going to marry Johnny, Mother. I wish you could be happy for me. Goodbye.”