The lavender suit stood out like a bruised thumb against the dark oak pews of Grace Community Church. Loretta had picked it out herself, telling anyone who would listen that a grandmother needed to look respectable for the photographs. I sat three rows back in Chattanooga with little Grace heavy and warm against my shoulder, her breathing light and rhythmic.
Denise was right behind us, smelling faintly of the lavender lotion she had rubbed into my hands earlier that morning while we finished packing the diaper bag. My sister had flown in from Denver three days before just to be here. She had painted the nursery walls a soft pale gray, spent twenty-two hours holding my hand through a stubborn labor while Aaron paced the hallway until his shoes squeaked, and bought the silver baptismal cup engraved with Grace’s initials. Denise was Grace’s person. Everyone in our family knew it. It was the one thing I had asked for when we started planning the service.
Loretta has never liked that I come with a family of my own. From the wedding reception onward, she has treated Denise like an unwelcome guest who wandered into the wrong party. So when Loretta shifted in her seat during the pastor’s opening remarks, I braced myself for the usual quiet hostility. I expected a sharp comment about how Denise dressed or a complaint that we were sitting too close to the front. I did not expect her to stand up. She smoothed down her lavender skirt, walked right past the pastor who looked completely bewildered, and took the microphone from the stand with the practiced ease of someone who chaired every charity committee in town.
She beamed at the congregation of eighty people, her silver hair lacquered into place, and announced that she had taken the liberty of choosing Grace’s godmother to save us the trouble. Then she named Sue Farrow, her bridge partner, a woman my daughter had met exactly twice at random Sunday dinners.
I felt Aaron go rigid beside me, his shoulder pressing hard against mine. Denise put her hand over her mouth three rows back, her eyes wide behind her glasses. The pews went completely dead. Nobody coughed, nobody shuffled, and even the baby settled into a deeper sleep against my collarbone.
The pastor blinked down from the altar, looking like he wanted to sink right through the floorboards. I should have been furious. I should have felt my face go hot. Instead, I just smiled back at the back of Loretta’s head. I smiled because of Tuesday afternoon.
On Tuesday, Loretta had asked me to grab her heart medication out of her leather handbag while she was locked in our downstairs bathroom. The house was quiet except for the low hum of the refrigerator and the bathroom fan running its steady drone. I unzipped the side pocket, pushed past a crumpled pack of mints, a handful of expired coupons, and a case of reading glasses, and my fingers hit something heavy and stiff. It was a folded document, thick, cream-colored, and officially notarized by someone named Henderson down near the river. I do not make a habit of reading other people’s paperwork.
But my own name was typed right at the top in bold capital letters, and Grace’s name was right beneath it, so my eyes just dropped to the lines. It was an agreement. It was handwritten first, then transcribed clean, and signed at the bottom by Loretta Wexler and by Sue Farrow. It laid out, in plain legal-sounding language, that Sue would be named the official godmother of the Wexler child in all future church records, and in exchange, Sue would consider the matter of the November loan settled in full.
I read those three paragraphs three times while standing in my own hallway. The bathroom fan hummed overhead, and I could hear the faint sound of Loretta running the tap to rinse her mouth. I know what a gambling debt looks like because Aaron’s father spent twenty years cleaning up after Loretta’s secret trips to the riverboat casino before he passed away. She owes people money. She has always owed people money, borrowing from friends and neighbors under the guise of charity projects and club dues. She was selling my daughter’s baptism certificate to cover a marker at a low-end poker table.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket, took a clear, high-resolution photo of every single page of the agreement, and then put the purse back exactly how I found it. I didn’t say a word to Aaron that night. I didn’t say anything to Denise. I wanted to be entirely sure before I let myself break.
So there I sat in the pew, Loretta glowing like she had just performed a miracle, Sue nodding graciously from the third row over while people stared at her in confusion. I could have stood up right then and read the text of that agreement out loud to the whole room. I could have handed my phone to Aaron and let him watch his mother come apart in her expensive lavender suit right in front of the choir director. I have never wanted anything in my entire life the way I wanted to do that right then. Grace stirred against my chest, her little hand reaching up to grab a strand of my hair, smelling like the baby shampoo Denise had bought her.
I thought about what I actually wanted my daughter’s christening to be, and I realized I didn’t want her first memory of church to be a public circus.
The service dragged on through the final hymns and the final blessings. People stood up, stretching their legs and murmuring among themselves, casting sideways glances at Loretta as they filed out toward the fellowship hall for the reception. Loretta was already standing by the side aisle, waving Sue over and telling her exactly where to stand for the family photographs with the pastor. Aaron looked like he was about to be sick, his hands trembling as he tried to fold the church bulletins into squares. He looked down at me, his mouth opening and closing like he didn’t even know where to start explaining his mother’s behavior. I told him to go ahead to the hall and get some water.
I caught Denise’s eye over the top of the pews. She looked ready to murder someone, her jaw clenched tight. I shook my head slightly, told her to hold Grace for a minute, and walked down the empty aisle toward where Loretta was arranging the photo group. Loretta turned around with a triumphant little grin, smoothing her lapels. She looked ready to give me some speech about tradition and family wisdom. I didn’t let her get a single word out. I pulled my phone from my pocket, opened the photo gallery directly to the notarized agreement with Sue Farrow’s signature at the bottom, and held the screen six inches from her face. I asked her, very quietly, if she wanted to step back into the empty hallway before I decided just how public this was going to get.
Loretta’s smile didn’t vanish all at once; it just kind of cracked around the edges, like old paint in the sun. She looked at the small glowing screen, then up at my eyes, and for the first time since I met her, she looked genuinely small. She didn’t make an excuse or try to spin some lie about charity work. She just swallowed hard, her throat bobbing inside the high collar of her lavender blouse. She told me she would handle it right now. I watched her walk over to Sue Farrow, who was holding a paper cup of punch by the welcome table, and saw her lean in close with a desperate, frantic whisper.
Sue’s face went from polite confusion to absolute panic in about three seconds flat before she turned on her heel and practically jogged out the side doors into the parking lot without her purse. Loretta came back down the hallway toward me with her head down, her shoes clicking softly against the linoleum. She told the pastor she had made a terrible mistake in the paperwork and that Denise was the rightful godmother after all. We took the pictures with Denise standing right beside Aaron and me, her hand resting proudly on my shoulder, while Loretta sat alone on a folding chair by the coat rack and stared at her fingernails until the reception was over.
