Suncatchers by Jamie Langston Turner

arm.
    â€œThis old gravel irks me all over again every Sunday,” Eldeen said. “I wish they’d pave it. Somebody’s going to stumble someday and hurt theirself bad.”
    As they approached the front steps, the elderly man smiled and opened the door for them. “Glad you’ve come, glad you’ve come. It’s a little warmer today, yes, just a mite warmer all right,” he said, handing each of them one of the papers. On the front of the paper Perry read, “Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.” Under that was a picture of a dense forest smothered with snow, no doubt many miles from South Carolina.
    â€œShirley Grimes types up the bulletins every week,” Eldeen said, smiling down at the snow scene. “That’s a real pretty picture, real pretty.”
    Under the picture Perry read the words “THE CHURCH OF THE OPEN DOOR OF DERBY WELCOMES ALL OF YOU ONE AND ALL.” Evidently Shirley didn’t proofread for redundancy.
    â€œWe meet in here first for opening exercises,” Jewel said as they passed through the lobby into the auditorium.
    Perry had a brief vision of all of them standing in the aisles doing calisthenics the way he’d heard Japanese workers did in their office buildings every morning.
    They sat down in a pew near the front, and Eldeen smiled and nodded to everyone around them, calling out their names softly. “Myrt, Mr. Simpson. Hello, Grady. There’s the Pucketts. Jewel, look, they must be back from Rock Hill already. Nina, hello there. Beverly, I see your mother’s gone and curled your hair up pretty as always. Good morning, Bernie. Hoyt, how’s your back doing today?” Joe Leonard carried his tuba case through the door by the organ and came back out without it.
    It had been years since Perry had been inside a church. His mother had taken Beth and him to an Episcopal church several times as children, but mostly just on Easter and at Christmastime. All he remembered was staring in awe at the high vaulted ceilings and richly tinted pictures on the windows.
    And the summer he was thirteen, when his mother had been taken to a hospital for something mysterious that was never explained to Perry, he had been sent to stay with his uncle Louis in Wisconsin. Uncle Louis and Aunt Marsha had taken him with them to their church—a large Baptist church where everyone looked wealthy—and had even sent him to the denominational Youth Camp for one week. Perry still remembered his intense discomfort that whole week, watching all those people smile so much and sing what they called “youth choruses” and hearing his counselor pray every night for “the teens here in this very cabin who still haven’t yielded to God’s call.” Perry had remained at his seat during the closing service of the week—a candlelight ceremony during which the campers had been invited to light their own small candles from a large one up front to signify a “commitment to God”—and had shaken his head when a man had asked him if he wanted to go to the prayer room. He would never forget the wonderful relief of boarding the bus at the end of that week and heading back to Uncle Louis’s.
    He hardly knew what to expect today at the Church of the Open Door, though. He’d known a girl once who told him that the people in her church—a place called The Bread of Life—moved around a lot during the services and even swayed to the music and shouted with joyful abandon during the preacher’s sermon and hugged each other. He’d seen things like that on TV, too—on the religious channel where men wearing bola ties and middle-aged women with bouffant hairdos sometimes conducted healing services. He certainly hoped no one would try to hug him this morning.
    As a portly man in a rust-colored sport coat walked to the platform, Jewel slipped out and went to the piano. Perry was surprised as she started