Antsy Does Time

I nodded a quiet acceptance.

“Your mother’s up in the chapel,” Lexie said.

I gave a quick greeting to relatives and friends, then went to find her.

***

The place wasn’t much of a chapel—there were only four rows, and the pews seemed too comfortable to be effective. There was a small stained-glass panel, backlit with fluorescent lights. There was no cross on account of it was a spiritual multipurpose room, that had to be used by people of all religious symbols. The chapel’s best feature was a huge bookshelf stocked with Bibles and holy books of all shapes and sizes, so nobody got left out. Old Testament, New Testament, red testament, blue testament. This one has a little star—see how many faiths there are. (This is the moment I realized how exhausted I really was.)

Mom was alone in the room, kneeling in the second row. It was so like her to take the second row even when she was alone in the room.

“Did you fall asleep in the car?” Mom asked, without turning around to see me.

“How did you know it was me?”

“I can always tell when you need a shower,” she told me. Between her and Lexie, who needed sight? At least if she didn’t look at me too closely, she wouldn’t see my swollen eye.

“Come pray with me, Anthony.”

And so I did. I knelt beside her, joining her—and as I did, maybe for the first time in my life, I understood it. Not so much the words as the whole idea of prayer itself.

I’ll never really know if prayer changes the outcome of things. Lots of people believe it does. I know I’d like to believe it, but there’s no guarantee. Some people pray and their prayers are rewarded—they walk away convinced that their prayers were answered. Others pray and they get refused. Sometimes they lose their faith, all because they lost the roll of the dice.

That night, as I prayed, I wasn’t praying for my own wants and needs. I prayed for my father, and for my mother, I prayed for my whole family. Not because I was supposed to—not because I was afraid of what would happen if I didn’t. I was doing it because I truly wanted to do it with all my heart, and believe it or not, for the first time ever, I didn’t want it to end.

That’s when I realized—

—and excuse me for having a whole immaculate Sunday-school moment here, but I gotta milk it since they don’t come that often—

—that’s when I realized that prayer isn’t for God. After all, He doesn’t need it. He’s out there, or in there, or sitting up there in His firmament, whatever that is, all-knowing and all-powerful, right? He doesn’t need us repeating words week after week in His face. If He’s there, sure, I’ll bet He’s listening, but it doesn’t change Him, one way or the other.

Instead, we’re the ones who are changed by it.

I don’t know whether that’s true, or whether I was just delirious from lack of sleep ... but if it is true, what an amazing gift that is!

***

I let my mother decide when it was time to stop. Like I said, I could have just gone on and on. I think she knew that. I think she liked that. Then I think she started to worry that I might become a priest. This wasn’t a worry of mine.

It was still the middle of the night. Three-thirty, and no word. Mom looked at me, and seemed to notice my swollen face for the first time, but chose not to ask. Instead she said, “I think you were right. Maybe I should call Frankie now.”

She took out her phone and called. When it connected, the sheer look of horror on my mother’s face even before she said a word got me scared, too.

“What? What is it?”

But in a moment her terror resolved into something else I couldn’t quite read. “Here,” she said. “Listen to the message.”

I took the phone just as the message started to repeat.

“Hello. You’ve reached the Kings County Morgue. Our offices are closed now, but if this is a morgue-related emergency, please dial zero. Otherwise please call back during normal business hours.”

I looked at her, gaping and shaking my head. This was my doing. Just like I said, I had programmed the morgue into her speed dial as a joke, and I must have programmed it over Frankie’s number. What stinking, lousy timing.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so, so, sorry.”

My eyes started to well up, because right here, right now, it almost seemed like a bad omen, and she was getting all choked up, too. She turned away. Then I heard her give a little hiccup, and then another, and when she turned back, I could see that in the middle of tears, she had started laughing.

“You rotten, rotten kid.”

And then I was laughing, too. I put my arms around her and held her, and both of us stood there laughing, and crying, laughing and crying like a couple of nutjobs, until the doctor came in, and cleared his throat to get our attention. Maybe he understood what we were feeling, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he’d seen everything. He started to speak before we had the chance to brace ourselves.

“He made it through the operation,” he said, “but the next twenty-four hours are crucial.”

We relaxed just the slightest bit, and Mom finally got to call Frankie instead of the morgue.

19. I Love You, You’re an Idiot, Now Let’s All Go Home

My father almost died again the next day, but he didn’t. Instead he started to get better. By Friday, they moved him out of intensive care, and by Saturday, he was bored. He tried to squeeze news out of my mom about the restaurant, but all she would say was, “It’s there,” and she forbade anyone else to talk about it, for fear that talking business would send my father back into cardiac arrest.

With my dad on the mend, and more than enough people doting on him, my thoughts drifted to Kjersten and Gunnar. I went to visit on Sunday morning, to see how they were handling their own hardships, and give whatever support I could. The Christmas wreath was gone from their door, and the foreclosure notice glared out for the whole world to see.

“Good riddance,” I heard one beer-bellied neighbor say to another as I walked down the block toward their house. “After what they did to our yards, let ?em go back where they came from. Freakin’ foreigners.”

I turned to the man. “No, actually I was the one who did that to your yards, and I ain’t going nowhere. You gonna do something about it?”

He puffed on a cigarette. “Why don’t you just move along,” he said from behind the safety of his little waist- high wrought-iron fence.

“Lucky you got that fence between us,” I said. “Otherwise I might have to go samurai on your ass.” I have to say there’s nothing more satisfying than lip delivered to those who deserve it.

Mrs. Umlaut answered the door, and pulled me in like she was pulling me out of a blizzard instead of a clear winter day. She barely allowed Kjersten to hug me before she dragged me into the kitchen, practically buried me in French toast, and had me tell her all about my dad’s condition. Now that I had fought various members of the Umlaut household and had been struck repeatedly by a blunt object, I guess that made me like family.

I went upstairs to find Gunnar in his room, watching a black-and-white foreign film called The Seventh Seal.

“It’s by Ingmar Bergman, patron saint of all things Swedish,” he said. “It’s about a chess game with death.”

“Of course it is,” I said. “What else would you be watching?” I sat down at his desk chair. There was dust on his desk, as if he hadn’t done homework for weeks.