In a church, time is hard to see. The decades flick by in tiny shifts and alterations, mostly bits and pieces breaking and falling off; occasionally something massive occurs, like the punch of a vaulted arch, a curtain of whitewash sweeping over the saffron and rose of a fresco. It happened here, I know: the fresco, of Saint Peter bearing keys, has been uncovered. The priests of this parish are listed at the door, and the total is sixteen. Sixteen names since 1389. We’d fit nicely into a minibus. What a journey that would be.

I go and sit in a pew. Glance up at the flowers, ready for the day after tomorrow. Suddenly think of Tom, how sometimes, at bedtime, he used to pull the blankets over his head. Then a hand would appear with an open palm: the signal for transmission. I would grasp this hand and, hidden beneath his blanket, in the darkness or semi-darkness, my son would disclose his fears and pains. Harry Hopkins stole my protractor. Mr. Bates says I’m too short to play Henry Vee. What will happen to me if you die as well as Mum? It was soft and warm, that small boy’s hand, and I held it many times as the fingers lengthened over the years and the palm grew stronger and the grip harder.

When I was called out in the evening a neighbor, a Mrs. Marshall, used to come and sit with Tom. She taught him to knit. I remember Tom at the kitchen table, working on a long, increasingly grubby scarf while Mrs. Marshall heated up his favorite tea of tinned ravioli; I remember looking at him and being seized with the certainty that nothing lay between him and the dolor of the world except a layer thin as eggshell or even thinner, thin as the white membrane that peels off the egg, and this layer was made out of Mrs. Marshall, a ball of wool, a tin of ravioli, my love and my fear, and chief among those was my fear, my irreducible, granular conviction that anything could happen to him. I close my eyes and give thanks for the fact that as time went on my fear dwindled away, that Tom flourished, that we lived together in peace. That we found each other good company.

I’m sorry I upset him about the little wooden chest. I responded instinctively. He was set back, puzzled, that I couldn’t let him have that tiny thing. But he seemed to recover. Perhaps it didn’t mean that much to him, after all.

I hope not.

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