Beach Day

25: I Looked Out The Window (And What Did I See?)

She has changed so much since then. A church is a place of baptism and rebirth, but it's also a place of repentance— a place where you go back to who you used to be when you were righteous.

The door far behind Matt and the pulpit draws her attention when it opens and familiar figures step out of it, all exchanging farewells. Brother Hooper, a tall man with thinning hair, adjusts his suit coat on his way out of the office. When he sees Tiff in the second row of pews, he raises his eyebrows in a look of pleasant recognition. "Tiffany May! It's nice to see you again. I had forgotten about you."

She tries her hardest not to cringe at that. "It's nice to see you, too, Brother Hooper."

"I trust you're doing well?"

"Of course, sir."

He nods, puts one hand on the side exit of the chapel. "God be with you, Tiffany May. Until we meet again."

"And you, too," she says, somehow unable to complete an exchange she knows well. The words won't come out of her mouth.

He nods, pushes open the door to humid air and the smell of threatened rain, and disappears toward the parking lot.

He's a man she once knew well. She knew his daughter, Alice; she was a few years younger than her. She knew his wife, who led the girls' youth group activities for a time. It's like they barely know each other anymore. Maybe it's a lack of interpersonal object permanence on Tiff's part— or maybe everything has changed over and over again, and the thing she always feared as a child is coming true: not that nobody knows her, but that they are actively pretending they don't. It's a silly, paranoid thought, but something about it sets off the bells in the back of her head.

She still rests her head on her arms. None of it matters all that much anyway. The church is putting her on edge. That's all it ever was. It should be easy to jostle her leg and convince herself that she isn't feeling what she's feeling. It doesn't work, of course; the mind isn't so easily fooled. The attempt is better than nothing.

Peepaw goes to step out of his office once Brother Hooper is gone. Tiff snaps her head up and blurts, "Peepaw, I need to talk to you."

"Here and now?" The confusion is evident on his face as much as his voice.

She nods, rises from the pew. "Could we?"

"I guess it has been long enough since we had a chat, not as family, but as members of the congregation. How about you step into my office and we speak for a moment before lunch?"

She nods. It sounds good enough to her, as she climbs the stairs to the area behind the pulpit. It makes her heart beat a little quicker than it should be when he gestures for her to shut the door behind her.

It's a nice enough office. It was last remodeled in the seventies; Tiff heard somewhere that the desk had to be replaced in the nineties. The office itself, like the chapel, has been around since the real first chapel was abandoned and lost.

The hands of the man who uses this space are evident in the decoration: sparse, conservative, and overly-concerned with those who came before. Ancient gilded-paged Bibles and books of history line shelves broken by portraits of ancestors, of Biblical figures, and of Christ himself. Eyes watch her from all around the room. She tries not to notice; she tries not to feel seen.

Tiff takes a seat in the chair across the desk from her grandfather's. Hers is a metal folding chair— the beige paint and the banality of faith. She can't shake it.

Peepaw Zacharias leans back in his old chair, high back stretching up above his head. "What seems to be the issue, Tiffany May? Does it have to do with your faith while living out in the world?"