Home: Part 39

What follows is a work of fiction. Nothing here is either true or relevant. Read at your own risk. Expect nothing, and that's exactly what you'll get. Oh: This could go on for a while.

January 1958

My parents, starting at some point in their marriage and our lives, went for long stretches of time without speaking. They would barely acknowledge each other, though how they dealt with Cindy and me did not seem to change. My father would leave for work in the morning and say goodbye only to me and my sister, and our evening conversations at the supper table involved us all, but never the two of them directly. 

Home again after my first visit to Cindy's church, my mother walked into my bedroom and asked me about my experience. I told her it had been fine, and that I had neither sung the hymns nor closed my eyes during the prayers. "Do you want to go back?" my mother asked.

"I'm not sure why I would," I told her. "Do you think I'm a bad person and need to go to church?"

She smiled. "No, I don't think you are a bad person. But it wouldn't hurt you to keep going. You'll learn about god, about doing good things in your life."

"That's what Cindy says, too. And she wants me to go to Sunday school."

"You might like that more than church since you'd be around people your own age."

"It's just more school," I said.

She didn't say anything else about it. Later that day, though, my father asked me similar questions, and I gave him similar answers. We were in the garage sorting through his tools. He kept them clean, regularly wiping them with a rag. I enjoyed sitting with him and smelling the oil and dust emanating from the workbench he had built. 

He handed me a Crescent wrench to clean. "There are things worse than going to Sunday school."

I wondered why my mother hadn't already covered all of this with him, why I had to relive the same conversation. "Mom already told me all of this," I said. I handed the cleaned wrench back to him.

"She did?"

"When I got home. We talked about all of this."

He nodded. "Oh."

For an hour we cleaned tools and sorted out the bins of nuts and bolts that crowded the workbench. That night, Cindy stopped me in the hallway that ran through the middle of our house. "How about Sunday school next week?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said. "I already told Mom and Dad that I don't think I want to go."

"I'll talk to them," she said. "I'll tell them why it's a good idea." She walked away, leaving me in the hallway to consider my choices.