Sunday Morning

The Habit

Chapter 3: Sunday Morning

The alarm did not go off because the alarm was not set. Noel woke at 6:14 the way he woke every morning — not to sound but to habit, the body's clock running on a cycle it had learned from twenty years of early shifts and never unlearned. He lay still for a moment, the ceiling above him still dark, the window showing the first blue edge of morning through the blinds.

Sunday.

He had no particular feelings about Sunday. It was the day he did not work. It was the day his mother had ironed his shirt and driven him to Mt. Olive Baptist in the Buick, the engine making a sound like a large animal clearing its throat. It was the day the pews smelled like Murphy's Oil Soap and the choir sang in the key of A-flat regardless of what key the song was written in and Brother Harris read the announcements in a voice that suggested the potluck on Wednesday was a matter of some spiritual urgency.

He had stopped going at sixteen. There had been no precipitating event. No argument with the pastor. No intellectual crisis. He had simply stopped the way a person stops winding a clock they no longer need to tell the time — not because the clock is wrong but because the time it keeps no longer corresponds to anything.

His mother had asked him twice. The first time he said he was tired. The second time he said he would go next week. There was no third time. Ruth Ware was not a woman who pursued a conversation past the point where it became clear the other person had already left the room in their mind.

Now Noel got up. Made coffee in the Mr. Coffee machine that had been in the kitchen since 2014, the carafe stained brown at the bottom in a way that no amount of vinegar could reach. He stood at the counter and drank it black and looked at the backyard through the window above the sink. The grass needed cutting. The Bradford pear in the corner had a dead limb he should take down before it fell on the fence. The fence itself was leaning at the southeast post.

Things that needed repair surrounded him like a congregation of their own.

He finished the coffee. Rinsed the mug. Set it on the rack. He had the day to himself and no plan for it, which was the condition most Sundays occupied: a block of hours with no structure, different from the weekdays the way a room with the furniture removed is different from a room that was furnished — same dimensions, different weight.

The faucet dripped.

Right. Thursday had come and gone. The hardware store should have the washer by now.

He got dressed. Khakis, a clean shirt, work boots because he did not own any other kind of shoe. He drove to the Chapman Highway Ace Hardware in the truck, the Sunday morning roads carrying the specific emptiness of a city where half the population was in church and the other half was pretending to sleep.

---

The hardware store smelled like galvanized metal and rubber and sawdust and the particular hopeful chemical odor of potting soil, which they stacked in bags near the entrance as if spring were a product you could buy in forty-pound increments.

He found the washer he needed in the plumbing aisle — a flat rubber disc the size of a dime, bagged in a little plastic envelope that cost two dollars and forty-nine cents. The washer itself was worth maybe six cents. The rest of the price was for the bag, the label, and the privilege of not having to machine one yourself.

He was standing in the checkout line when he heard the voice.

"Noel Ware."

He turned. The woman behind him was seventy or older, small and upright, wearing a dress that was Sunday-specific in the way that certain women's clothing communicates not where they are going but where they have been. Her hair was silver-white and close-cropped. Her skin was dark brown and her eyes were sharp behind glasses with thin gold frames. She carried a package of lightbulbs and a roll of duct tape.

"Mrs. Calloway."

"Edna," she corrected. She had been correcting him for thirty years. "Nobody calls me Mrs. Calloway except the electric company."

"Edna."

She looked at him the way someone looks at a house they used to live in — with the residual knowledge of where the rooms were, overlaid by the awareness that the current occupant has rearranged everything.

"You look thin," she said.

"I'm the same weight I've been."

"That's what I said."

She stepped forward in the line. He stepped with her. The checkout counter was staffed by a teenager who was scanning items with the focused disinterest of someone counting the hours until the end of a shift that had not yet fully begun.

"Your mother would have made you eat by now," Edna said. She said it the way she said everything: without apology, without softening, the sentence arriving fully formed like a brick placed neatly in a wall.

"I eat."

"Mm."

The teenager scanned his washer. Two forty-nine. He paid. Edna paid for her lightbulbs and duct tape. They walked out together into the parking lot, the morning sun already warm, the asphalt giving off the faint shimmer that precedes the full heat of summer.

"Ruth was proud of you," Edna said.

Noel did not know what to do with that sentence. It landed on him and sat there, solid and warm and unexpected, like a hand placed on a shoulder without warning.

"She told me," Edna continued. "Not often. She wasn't that kind. But sometimes, after service, she'd say, 'Noel got a commendation at work,' or 'Noel fixed the gutters himself.' Small things. She kept them the way some women keep good china — brought out once or twice a year, handled carefully, put back."

They had reached Edna's car — an old Camry, champagne-colored, the kind of car that runs not because it is well-maintained but because it has decided to. Edna set her bag on the passenger seat through the open window.

"Are you eating?" she asked.

"You already asked me that."

"I'm asking again."

"I eat fine, Edna."

She looked at him. The look lasted longer than was comfortable. It was not unkind. It was the look of a woman who had spent seventy years in a church that taught her to see people as they were, not as they presented themselves, and who had learned from that practice the difference between a man who was eating and a man who was feeding himself.

She patted his arm. Her hand was small and dry and very warm.

"Come by for supper sometime," she said. "I make too much for one person."

"I'll think about it."

"Don't think about it. Just come."

She got in her car. The engine turned over with the patient authority of a machine that had outlasted several of the opinions held about it. She pulled out of the lot and turned left toward wherever it was she had been going, and Noel stood in the Sunday morning heat holding a two-dollar-and-forty-nine-cent faucet washer and feeling, for reasons he could not have articulated, as though he had just been examined and found to be approximately four times past the acceptable sag.

---

He fixed the faucet that afternoon.

The repair took twelve minutes. Remove the handle. Remove the packing nut. Remove the stem. Pull the old washer off the seat. Press the new one in. Reverse the sequence. Turn the water back on. Test.

The dripping stopped.

The kitchen was silent for the first time in ten days. Not the silence of an empty room — the silence of a room that had been making a sound and was now not making it. The difference was specific. The silence had a texture: it was the shape of the dripping, outlined in negative.

He stood at the sink and listened to the silence and felt, for a moment, the strange satisfaction of a small repair correctly done. The faucet was fixed. The washer was seated. The water was held. Until the next time it wasn't.

He cleaned up the tools. Put them back in the drawer. Wiped the counter.

"There you go," he said to the house.

---

That evening he sat at the table with the composition book. The first two entries were on the page, small and orderly. He uncapped the pen.

The thought arrived, as it had the night before, not as a voice but as a weather: a fine mist of pointlessness that settled over the act of writing the way humidity settles over a windshield, not blocking the view entirely but making everything slightly less clear. What's the point of writing about fixing a faucet? The faucet is fixed. The fact exists whether he records it or not. Writing it down does not make it more real. It makes it — what? Documented. As if his evenings require documentation. As if anyone, anywhere, will ever read this notebook and care that Noel Ware replaced a faucet washer on a Sunday afternoon in June.

He wrote anyway.

Roof of the Coleman place looked worse from the street than the file suggested. Drove by on the way to the hardware store. Also fixed the faucet. Quiet now.

He looked at it. The entry was about two things — a work observation and a household repair — and neither of them was the thing that had actually happened to him today. The thing that had actually happened was Edna Calloway in a parking lot telling him that his mother had been proud of him, and he had not written that because he did not know how to write about a feeling that was still sitting on his shoulder like a hand that had not been removed.

He closed the notebook. Went to the porch. The evening was cooling. The neighborhood was doing its Sunday evening thing: quieter than Saturday, the bass turned down, the dogs calmer, the quality of the air slightly different in a way that had nothing to do with meteorology and everything to do with the fact that Sunday evenings carry the specific weight of a day that is ending without having quite been lived.

He sat. He pressed his thumb into his palm. He listened to the kitchen, which was silent now, the faucet holding, and the silence felt like something earned.

Not much. But something.