Sundays
Ami G.

Last Sunday you had to take an old woman to church. She remembered your name but couldn’t remember any of the people to whom she introduced you. Despite her best efforts, a few black hairs from her cat named Kitty had made it onto her cream colored church suit. Her toes were squeezed into pointed shoes of the same color. You sat in the second to the front row with her. Of the powder blue plastic assembly chairs linked together, she chose the aisle seat, where her dead husband used to sit, and she had you sit beside her, where she used to sit beside him. A smell carried itself to you; it may have been her favorite perfume, but you couldn’t be sure it wasn’t baby wipes.
At church you sat with a slight smile, with your legs crossed. You wondered why, as Mrs. Lee introduced you to friends, remembering only your name, they never told you their own. Was this a Baptist quality they somehow all adopted? You sat and studied the blue canvas hymnal through the church hymns, which sometimes can be nice, but you’ve never heard them before and you can’t sight read. You also can’t sing very well up high like that. You were glad that it was only the choir who had to sing the gory “Nothing But the Blood of Jesus,” which, thank God, came after the kindergarten through fourth graders were excused for children’s church.
This Sunday, you’ll meet up with your new friend Riego. He’s the same age as your parents, but unlike him, they never came close to earning a nickname on an ethnobotanical expedition in the Amazon. Together you will review the photographs you took the night he spun LED hula hoops around his slim frame, drawing wavy colored grids through the cold black air, when he wore sparkly handmade pants to the party and the two of you had coincidentally both dressed in red and black.
You will meet him and walk through his airy white southwestern style estate surrounded by avocado groves, asking him to tell you the stories you still cannot believe about the circumstances in which he captured the framed photographs of Cambodian peasants, Indian elephants, and LSD legends that line the sunlit hallway leading to his art and massage studio. You know that being in the bottom tiers of a pyramid scheme isn’t what afforded him this life, but you don’t want to ask about that, nor about who framed and hung this artwork and who keeps the place so clean. You will prod him for more stories of captaining a sailboat to Vanuatu, and about ayahuasca, divine decoction of shamans. You will meet him on Sunday, but not before you sit through another Baptist morning, helping that widow remember where she left her cane, hearing another sermon assuring you of God’s great plan to take care of everything in your life, and not before you plan how to back away before he again tries to hug you for five seconds too long.
On the Sunday before last, you almost didn’t drive down to see the person who had to stop himself many times from telling you he loved you. It was written in pen, but when you asked by text, “Would you still like to meet for lunch?” he answered evasively, “That was the plan, wasn’t it?” When you asked if you should leave now, he wrote “Ok, well you could just mail me my key.” And then he wouldn’t answer the phone, and said it was because his throat was sore. You almost didn’t go because he wouldn’t budge from his feigned indifference, but you didn’t want it to end this way. So you went there, wondering during the forty-five minute drive why exactly you were making it.
You remembered a time he’d eagerly made this drive to see you, leaving a centrifuge spinning in a deserted biotech lab for a planned few hours that turned into many more—he assured you it wouldn’t ruin things. After letting him pick and eat tangerines from the miraculous tree outside your house, you’d hastily packed a “weird lunch”—burritos of leftover asparagus and cranberry sauce—because he was vegan and you wanted to get a hike in before sunset. When it was dark and you were back in the car, he insisted on showing you where he’d biked up a windy mountain road with a girl who’d insisted on being only his friend. Winding back down, you stopped at a gated Victorian house that caught your attention. Huddled together in the cold, you both looked closer, and as your eyes were better than his, you were able to make out the wooden sign hanging from the eaves. “It’s a bed and breakfast,” you announced, but it was dark, locked, and vacant. When a neighbor’s dog barked and the owner asked, “Who’s out there?” the two of you smiled at each other and got back into the car, giggling silently. The white lighted “Open” sign of a Christmas tree lot proved irresistible on the drive back home. Holding each other’s waist you weaved through the offerings of cut trees and gaudy lawn fountains, and chatted with the Hispanic caretaker. It seemed wrong to leave without a purchase, so he bought five overripe avocados for a dollar. Any excuse was adequate to hang out together a little longer. That had been a Sunday too.