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pleading faces made me think I’d come across something too personal for me to see.
    When I finally spied Aurelia, she was clutching the pew in front of her and her lips were moving in almost the same shape as Eddie Crockett’s when he played his horn. Her cousins, Darnell, who I’d met at school, and Garland, who was much younger, flanked her on either side.
    Garland fidgeted with a button on his suit sleeve. He wouldn’t leave it alone. He kept twisting it tight and letting it go, twisting it again, until the threads must have split because the button flew off his arm and popped someone in the back of the head.
    Aurelia’s aunt, who’d been swaying with her fingers knit together over her chest, reached down without hesitation and laid Garland a good one, a sharp swat on the behind. Garland straightened up, just like that, and started flipping pages in the hymnal as if he were old enough to read. What surprised me most was the smile she tried to hide after she’d gotten him, as if she treasured his antics but couldn’t dare let it show. I’d seen Daddy smile when he struck and it wasn’t anything like that. He smiled like he’d be happy to kill you.
    But then, a sharp smack on the behind didn’t seem like much of a punishment to me.
    Just as I poked my hand into my pocket to make sure the penny was still there, my eyes traveled overhead again to the window across the way. There, in a mosaic of golden glass over Aurelia’s head, stood the image of a sheaf of wheat in a field. Maybe it was me rubbing the penny, thinking about the wheat in the window and the wheat on the coin beneath my thumb, that made Aurelia glance my way. All she could see through that piece of dove’s wing was maybe my eyebrow, but suddenly she whispered something to her aunt and sidestepped Darnell. Next thing I knew, here she came, finding me outside, standing looking in the window.
    “Girl, what you doing here?”
    “Looking to find you,” I said.
    “You come on inside, then. You’re gonna make me miss it.”
    “Make you miss what?”
    “We got us a good place today, right beside the new Christians. That’s the best seat in church when everybody starts confessing their sins.” She grabbed my hand. “Come on.”
    I saw she wore loafers with brand-new pennies in them. I pointed toward her feet, “
That’s
what we have to talk about,” but she was too busy dragging me inside to hear.
    The heat was intolerable. Darnell moved over and made room. Garland slammed the hymnal shut and stared up at me like he’d never seen anybody with a white face walk into his church before. Then I realized maybe he hadn’t. Maybe I
was
the first one. I was the only person at Antioch Baptist wearing pedal pushers, too.
    “Hey, kid. How are you?” I asked, giving his head a scrub with my knuckle. When I whispered to Aurelia, “I just want to tell you something important that’s happened,” her aunt glared down at me and, for a second there, I thought she was going to pop me one just the same as she’d popped Garland.
    The windows, which could have blocked my view forever if I’d kept trying to peer through them on the outside, glowed with life and fire now that light shone through. A glass man in the window beside me stood with his arms outstretched for a hug (the thought of Daddy reaching toward me that way made my stomach queasy) and his cape was so red with the sun that you could almost taste the color. A cherry red, a ruby flash. A red better than a cinnamon stick.
    At the front no one showed off, the way Mrs. Crawford did when she bellowed the National Anthem before the fireworks went off over the river on the Fourth of July. (Jean and I called her Mrs. Craw
fish
after that because, when she hit a loud note, she wagged her arms like a crawfish waggles its claws.) The music at Antioch was straight bluesy choir, voices blending smooth as bees as they sweated and danced and swayed.
    I’d never seen so many people leaning from side to side or