I stopped going to Wednesdays

My mother plays keys at the 9:30. She's had the 9:30 since before I had my license, and she covers the 11:15 when Miss Renée is out, which happens more than you'd think, because Miss Renée's mother is in a home up in Dahlonega and she drives up most weekends. Tuesday night is the prayer call. Thursday is the women's study, and my mother doesn't lead that one, she just carries the coffee urn over from the fellowship hall and gets it going, which she'll tell you is not a job. Wednesday was rehearsal.

I played bass up there from eighteen on. Six years, though you probably shouldn't count that first summer, because the DI box was out most of it and I stood back behind the drum shield not plugged into anything anybody could hear.

He ran the team. Before him it was a man named Perry who took a job in Chattanooga, and then for about five months it was nobody. He came in and moved rehearsal an hour earlier on Wednesdays and not one person complained.

He's thirty-eight. Two kids in the nursery, the little one still in the room with the half door on it.

I should say I was bigger then. I'm down sixty since last spring. Fourteen months, if you go from when I actually started instead of from when I told people I was starting. I still buy 2XL. My mother says I look sick and puts a plate down in front of me whether I sat down or not. She doesn't ask. She sets it there and goes back to the sink.

I work the pharmacy counter at the Kroger on Lawrenceville-Suwanee. I sit the PCAT again in October. It's the second time, I didn't do good the first time. There's a woman on the counter named Dedra who's been there nine years and won't work the drive-through window, and they let her not work it. I don't know what that's about.

The men's retreat is in Blue Ridge, second weekend in November. There's a cabin place up there the church has used since before I was on the team. Sessions in the morning. The afternoon is free, so somebody drives into Ellijay for barbecue and there's men out on the porch with the space heater going. The Saturday one was about being a man in your own house, or that's what it was supposed to be about, I wasn't really.

We took the fifteen-passenger. Eleven of us going up and ten coming back, because Deacon Ray's son-in-law drove separate on account of work Monday. On the way up I sat in the second row with the case across my knees even though there was room in the back, because I didn't want the neck getting knocked into anything.

Coming home he drove. We left after supper and by the time we came off 515 and down through Canton the whole van was asleep. I was up front, because somebody stays up with the driver. That's just what you do. We talked about nothing for an hour and a half. He asked about the test. He asked what I was eating now, because I'd been passing on stuff all weekend and men notice that and then they want to know your business.

So I told him about the weight, and he said you look good, man. Then about ten minutes later he said it again, a little different.

We got in around eleven. Everybody got their bags out the back and went, that lot empties in about four minutes, it's fast. The amps and the drum hardware had to go back in the closet off the stage, so it was me and him unloading. That was normal. I'd done it maybe thirty times.

He left the van running with the heater on because it was cold out and we still had two trips. That's all that was. Then we were sitting in it and he had his hand on the back of my neck, and it happened, and it didn't take long. I'm not going to describe it.

Afterwards he turned the heater down a click. He said you good? and I said yes sir.

I drove home. My mother had left a plate on the stove with foil over it. I ate it standing up at the counter without heating it. Then I went to bed.

Wednesday came around and I went. Of course I went. We ran two new ones for Advent and he ran it the way he always ran it, stopped us in the same places, told the sound guy the same thing about the vocal mic he tells him every single week. He didn't do one thing wrong in that room.

I went the next week too. Then the week after that I texted him I had something at work. The one after that I think I said I was studying, or that I was sick, one of those. After that I just didn't.

In January he took a job at a church over in Johns Creek. Bigger. They've got a campus thing and a man whose whole job is video. He announced it on a Sunday in December and the church clapped for a long time and my mother cried a little, but she cries at most things, so I'm not putting weight on that.

The bass is in its case in the closet in my room, standing up behind the vacuum. I had it out one time in the spring for about ten minutes.

Their card came that Christmas and it came again the next one. Both names printed at the bottom, not handwritten. The kids are on a line under that. It's the kind you order off a site with a photo on the front, and last year's was all four of them on a dock somewhere in matching green. My mother put it on the refrigerator with the magnet from the tire place on 20 and it stayed up there until February.

My mother has asked me eleven times why I quit the team. I'm not saying eleven to make a point, I have actually counted, because around the fourth or fifth one I started counting, which is a thing I do. She asks it different ways. Once she asked whether Chris needed a bass player, Chris being the one running it now. Once she asked if I was mad at somebody, and that one I had to sit with a second before I answered it.

I said the test. I said the test all eleven times.

Chris texted me Tuesday. They're doing a combined service with Johns Creek the Sunday before Christmas, both bands together, and he wants to know if I'm playing it.

His name is Brent.

Sunday she's got both services. I told her I'd take her so she doesn't have to park out by the fence. She'll have the gospel station out of Gainesville on the whole way over, she likes the man who does the morning one.