Page 13 of Blood Hymn

The sanctuary is bright and cold and smells like carpet glue and coffee. Every head turns when I come down the side aisle, but not all at once. It moves through the room the way wind moves across a field, a few heads and then a few more, until it reaches the front. The choir director stops fussing with her music and looks too.

I take the last pew on the left, against the wall. I sit, bow my head, and let them look. That's what a prodigal daughter does. She comes back broken, sits in the back, and doesn't ask for anything. I've watched it my whole life, and I know every beat.

A hand settles on my shoulder.

"Oh, baby." Aunt Charlotte's voice breaks on it. "Oh, my sweet girl."

She slides into the pew beside me before I can answer and wraps both arms around me, and she smells the way she's always smelled: of Jergens and Aqua Net and the peppermints she keeps in her purse. She's older. Her hair has gone completely white, and she wears it set in the same helmet of curls she wore when I was a child. Her hands are thinner and spotted, all knuckle. She holds my face in them and looks at me with her eyes full.

"You didn't call. Six years and you didn't call once, and then Dee, and I thought I'd lost both of you."

"I'm here now."

"You're here now." She kisses my forehead. "You'll sit with me. You'll come to lunch. You're not staying in that awful house by yourself."

"I'm staying with a friend."

"What friend?"

"From Baton Rouge." I squeeze her fingers. "Let me get through the service, Aunt Charlotte. Please."

She pats my knee and doesn't let go of it.

Charlotte cleaned me up the night of the hymnal stand. She was the one who found me in the church basement with blood to my elbows and my mother's cross lying on the floor by his head. She picked the cross up and put it in her pocket. She washed my hands in the utility sink, burned my smock in the incinerator behind the fellowship hall, and drove me to the bus station in Alexandria with four hundred dollars in an envelope, and she told me never to tell a living soul. She told me she did it because she loved me.

I lean against her shoulder, let her hold my hand, and look at the hymnals.

They're in the rack on the back of the pew in front of us, the red Broadman, the same edition we had at the old church, same gold lettering on the spine, two per rack. While the organist plays the prelude, I slide one out and hold it in my lap the way you do when you plan to follow along, and I open the front cover. There's nothing inside but the church's stamp and a donation plate reading IN LOVING MEMORY OF MAVIS THIBODEAUX.

The congregation rises for the first hymn. We sing "Come, Thou Fount," and while I'm singing, I return the hymnal to the rack and take out the other one and open it down against my hip where no one can see.

Inside the front cover, in pencil, small, in the upper corner, somebody has written a number. 302.

I know that number. It's the first one I ever learned in our code, because it stands for one. Hymn 302 is "Rock of Ages." Delilah and I built our whole alphabet off the Broadman because it was the only book in our house nobody would ever look inside twice. We thought we were so clever.

I keep singing, close the book, and put it back.

When we sit for the announcements, I let my cardigan slide off my shoulder, and when I reach down for it, I pull the hymnal from the rack across the aisle. It's clean. So is the second. I work down my own pew during the offering, while everybody watches the plates, and there's nothing in any of the others. Just 302, in one book, in one rack, in the last pew on the left.

My pew. My seat.

The sermon is on the prodigal son. Brother Nate Douglas walks the aisle while he preaches it, back and forth, no notes, his Bible open on his palm like a waiter carrying a tray. He's younger than I expected, forty maybe, with a runner's build and a good haircut and a voice that goes soft when he wants you to lean in. He talks about the son in the far country, eating with the pigs. He talks about the father who ran down the road to meet him. He talks about coming home.

He looks at me when he gets to that part. Not long. Just once, and then away, as if it slipped.

Three pews up, a woman turns around in her seat to stare at me. So does the man beside her, and after him a girl in the choir.

I bow my head again and count the backs of their necks.

When the benediction ends, the doors jam with people waiting to shake the pastor's hand. Charlotte gets pulled into a knot of women by the water fountain, and I murmur something about the restroom and slip down the side hall past the nursery and the library and the Sunday school rooms, all with their doors open and their lights off. At the end of the hall hangs a bulletin board covered in construction paper pumpkins, each with a name in marker, and across the top in cut-out letters it announces YOUTH CHOIR, HALLOWEEN GATHERING. CANDLE BEARERS.

Eleven pumpkins. Eleven names.

I stand in front of the board and read them. Some I know. Most I don't; they were children when I left. The fourth pumpkin from the left carries a name written in a round, careful hand with a heart over the i.

Nellie Roach.

Someone has penciled 302 on the pumpkin's stem.