Sunday Again

The Long Saturday

Chapter 40: Sunday Again

The morning after the anniversary is Sunday.

Which would have sounded like symbolism once.

Now it sounds like the calendar doing its job.

I wake before the alarm and lie there in the thin gold light on the ceiling and listen for panic out of habit more than expectation.

It doesn't come.

What comes instead is a complicated quiet. Not relief, exactly. Relief implies a pressure gone. This is more like a pressure survived. The room still contains yesterday, but it no longer owns the furniture.

Below, the florist is already unlocking the shop. A church bell from downtown goes off ten minutes early because Mercer is a town committed to imprecision.

Sunday.

I put coffee on. Slice a bagel. Text Mom:

Alive?

Her reply:

Rude question. Yes. Bring coffee.

Then, before I can answer:

Norah:

If your mother gets all the coffee I will file a complaint.

So I bring three cups to Mom's house in a cardboard tray that immediately begins failing under the moral weight of morning.

She opens the door in the green sweater from yesterday and takes one look at the tray.

"Bad engineering."

"Inherited trait."

"Probably."

Norah is at the kitchen table already, hair up, one of Mom's dish towels under her mug as if she has been here for years and has simply edited herself into the house retroactively.

"Good," she says when she sees the third coffee. "Crisis averted."

The kitchen smells like toast and rain through the open window. It rained sometime before dawn, enough to darken the porch boards and wake the basil from whatever argument it was having with June.

Mom sits. We sit.

No one performs aftermath.

We talk about ordinary things first.

Kira texted from Colorado at 5:40 AM with a photo of sunrise on a ridgeline and the caption:

Still west.

Jude, apparently, wore the suspicious cardigan to the pantry yesterday and got barbecue sauce on a cuff in a way that feels doctrinal.

Mrs. Pacheco won the florist war by bringing her an apology pound cake no one was emotionally prepared to refuse.

Then Mom gets up to refill her coffee, pauses by the sink, and says without turning around, "I'm glad it's Sunday."

No one answers immediately because there is nothing to add that wouldn't make the sentence worse.

So I stand and take the kettle from her and refill the mugs and the kitchen keeps its own counsel.

At church the sanctuary is less crowded than last night, more honest.

Sunday attendance in summer always sorts the sentimental from the committed. The tree is gone. The poinsettias are long dead. The room is itself again — wood, light, hymnals, the third pew on the left.

Mom slides in first. Norah beside her. I take the aisle.

Jude steps to the pulpit in shirtsleeves because June has become vindictive again after the rain.

He looks at the room and says, "Good morning," in the tone of a man who has decided the day deserves no qualifiers.

We sing badly. We sit. We stand. The children are released to Sunday school in a flap of paper and Velcro.

The sermon is on manna.

Of course it is.

Daily bread. No stockpiling. The old humiliations of dependence.

At one point Jude says, "God often gives enough for today and almost never enough for the whole story at once," and I do not look at him because I know better than to encourage that level of accuracy in public.

Norah taps my wrist once anyway.

Rude.

After the service the foyer fills with the low hum of people comparing casseroles and weather fronts and summer plans.

Maria corners me by the coat rack.

"Are you coming Wednesday?"

"Probably."

"That means yes."

"You are becoming impossible."

"I know."

She says it with such perfect teenage serenity that I nearly bless her on instinct.

Outside, the church lawn is wet and shining. The unsound snowman is thankfully a memory. The maples along the road are thick with June now, no hesitation left in them.

Mom pauses at the bottom of the steps and looks up at the sky, which is doing nothing dramatic at all.

"You know what I keep thinking?" she says.

"Dangerous opener."

"I keep thinking he would be furious we made him this sad."

Norah laughs. I do too.

"He'd want music," I say.

"And chips," Mom adds.

"And an offensively bright shirt," Norah says.

We all nod because this is now the official Micah canon.

At Lark an hour later, the green awning throws a clean stripe of shade across the sidewalk. We take the corner table because it is open and because part of me will always register this place as the first room in which the future made itself known.

Mom comes with us and complains about the coffee and drinks all of it anyway.

Norah steals half my scone under the doctrine of proximity.

The room is full of people on their phones and in their conversations.

At some point Mom gets up to order another coffee she doesn't need and leaves me and Norah by the window in the soft late-morning light.

"You okay?" she says.

I think about the lake yesterday. The wake at 2:17. Chips on the beach. The kitchen this morning. Jude on manna. Kira's ridge line.

"Yeah," I say. Then, because the word deserves respect when it's true: "Yeah."

She studies me a second, then smiles the small real smile I trust most.

"Good."

Outside, Mercer is going about Sunday in all its bad timing and ordinary weather and people walking places with paper cups.

The bells ring noon from downtown, three minutes late.

Mom comes back with her refill and says the barista has no sense of urgency.

Norah rolls her eyes.

I look out at the street and feel, not peace exactly, but something close enough to live on.

I reach for my coffee while Norah says something dry about barista standards and Mom answers with full widow authority and the whole ordinary room goes on holding us without effort.

I don't ask the day to be more than it is.

I don't ask it to stay.

I stay.