Worship

She sits in the row in front of me, because he’s there. The boy is blonde with blue eyes, and that’s all that matters to a six-year-old brunette with hazels. She doesn’t see the cowlicks, doesn’t want to press her fingers against her tongue and wipe them down the way I do. He’s on his knees but not praying like the rest of us are. He’s using the chair as a desk, coloring on the back of the bulletin. Blue, green, red, and yellow colored pencils are piled like pick-up sticks on the floor around him–amounting to her favorite thing, a rainbow.

The preacher is preaching about the Lord’s Prayer, parsing it into small bits in scholarly fashion. Because the one-room Sunday school isn’t open today, she’s getting the etymology lesson right along with me. I mean maybe she would be if it weren’t for the blue eyes and the cowlicks and the pencils. But who am I kidding? I know good and well she’d be dying of boredom — dying a slow, demonstrative, hunchbacked death of sighs.

The little boy’s dad tears out a sheet of paper for her and passes it down the row. She looks back at me for approval, which I give without so much as a word or movement. It’s something she seeks and finds in my eyes. She draws a picture of teeth in a row, circling the front two. “My Loose Toth Poster,” she scrawls across the top. Then she slides it around on the chair hoping the boy will see it. She knocks at her barely loose front tooth, her first ever, with her fingernails and the pencils. She holds the paper up close to her face and then throws her head back and shuts her eyes deliciously. Oh, God, it’s the ecstasy of St. Teresa. The boy doesn’t even look.

As the pianist cues up the music, out comes an empty purple balloon she snuck into her pocket before we left. It’s meant to hold water, so it’s the size and shape of a tiny guppy. I make a certain dark thing happen with my eyes again, and I see disappointment flash in her own. A balloon was the very thing the boy would have liked. My wrinkled old finger reaches over her shoulder and turns to the right page in the hymnal. “It goes first line, first line, first line. Then second line, second line, second line. Then third line, third line, third line,” I whisper. She nods, partly to avoid trouble, partly to let the boy know she can read all those lines. He doesn’t care. He’s a boy.

“Are there any prayer requests?” the preacher asks. The very mention of the word prayer causes her to shoot a look my way, a question of whether her head must bow. I wink at her, and she purses her lips and nods in gratitude. Thank you, Mom, for giving me this hair-fine thread of permission to be human and move freely about the cabin.

“Nanny,” she whisper yells at me. She wants to request a prayer for her great-grandmother. I tell her to go ahead, but it’s like giving her permission to drive the car; she doesn’t actually know how. I ask her what she wants, and she whispers through her cupped hand, “Pray for Nan, because she’s old and in the hospital and dying.” Nan is 94 but in a nursing home not a hospital, and I stop short of telling her we’re all dying. Not just because I have a heart but also because she is picking her nose. In front of the blue-eyed boy, she has zoned out with her pointer trying to swirl and hook a booger, and I feel sorry for her.

I raise my hand and say, “My daughter wants to put in a request for her great-grandmother, who is in a nursing home and sometimes gets lonely.” Put in a request? I think. Like I’m putting in an order for fries? I’m embarassed and my hands start to shake as I smooth out the bulletin on my lap. Public speaking gives me the sweats, making me seem irritated with her when I’m not. My daughter is smiling at the boy. He didn’t hear her thoughtful prayer request. He’s a boy.

When the golden offering plates are passed out, she’s thrilled. “Mom!” she says. “Can I put the money in the plate?” I don’t have a dime, not even a pen to fill out a check. Jesus Christ, kid, shhhhhhhhaaaad up. I can’t give her a look, because people are watching. So, I lie. I lie in the House of the Lord and tell her that we write a check for our offering, and only one a month. I don’t have time to explain that we make offerings only when mommy has spare cash on her. No time to explain why mommy treats the church like a hobo. Besides, she only wanted the boy to see her do it. Like a boy would actually care.

As the last hymn rises up, and the woman next to me rattles my bones with her soprano boom finale, my daughter turns to see if it’s me who is making that music. She points a finger, and I do that thing with my eyes again but also throw in a little thing with my jaw, and she stops. If only it had been me that sang like a bird, maybe the boy would have noticed.

She sits down and clicks her fingernail against the loose tooth, harder and harder and harder. She spins the drawing around under her finger. She flips through the pages of the hymnal. And finally she pulls the balloon from her pocket again, starts to look back at me but realizes that my eyes are going to be doing that thing again. So, she stops her glance and settles her eyes on the boy, putting the balloon between her loose teeth, and surer than salvation, he drops everything.

He sat next to a girl at church, and he didn’t listen to his dad’s whispered warnings. Sit down. Pay attention. We’re almost done. How could he? She was brunette with hazel eyes and held a purple balloon in her teeth.