Sunday School

Sunday School

Leandra looked up at her mother with dreary eyes when the glass of chocolate milk splattered onto the floor. It didn’t break, but rolled beneath the island that covered the cracked tile in the center of the kitchen. Leandra knelt down, knees in the brown puddle, to grab the glass with her tiny hand. Sophie’s mouth curled and tensed as she watched her daughter and tried to remember if chocolate milk stained white dresses like the one Leandra wore. She finally grabbed hold of the glass and set it aside. One knee went down, then the other, in the middle of the puddle, making Sophie flinch. ‘What are you doing? You’re going to ruin that dress!’ Leandra, hands clasped together, opened one eye and pointed it at her mother. She closed it again, inhaled down to her chest, and said ‘I have to pray for forgiveness’.

She knelt on the dirty floor a beat longer, muttering a prayer, presumably, but Sophie couldn’t tell which. On Sundays Leandra usually got like this– focused on praying and crosses and sins– perhaps in preparation for Sunday School where she was taken every Sunday for half the year since she was seven. When Sophie decided to raise Leandra as a Christian, it was only in honor of Peter after he passed away. She didn’t feel much spiritual connection, but had a loose and somewhat vague cultural association with Christinaity. Leandra had never seemed all that interested, but recently had been asking to go an hour early on Sundays, so that she could sit in the chapel before class started.

When she finished her prayer, she stood up and smiled, the droplets of milk falling down toward her shoes. She looked down and seemed to notice the spill for the first time. She knelt again and began to sop up the mess with her already damaged dress. 

‘Leandra! Stop, please. Go change while I clean up’. Leandra smiled and skipped away without looking back at her, and Sophie wiped up the mess with paper towels. She couldn't remember yelling at her for thighs like spilling a drink, but she was tense in anticipation of Laura Hatley’s arrival. Laura would be pulling up to the house any minute now, and Sophie thought just maybe she’d stay for coffee and small gossip while the girls played. Her daughter, Clare, was good friends with Leandra. 

Sophie walked into the small living room and did a last minute inspection. She had finally saved up enough to trade the nasty old carpeting for wood floors. She was proud of how she’d decorated in the last few years. Lots of antique furniture she’d inherited from her parents, but all organized and ornamented with modern touches: the velvet setée with geometric cushions, a foggy old mirror that was flanked by candles with wax shaped like mermaids that had never and never would be lit. All centered around a shag rug from Target that mostly served as a repository for Leandra’s crumbs, but she made sure to vacuum that twice this morning. The room may not have been traditionally ‘tasteful’, but it gave her a sense of freedom.

She glanced in the corner, where Peter’s ashes sat in a metal box on a corner parquet table, which had nothing else on it but a picture of him in a hospital gown, holding Leandra up when she was three, maybe four minutes old. Peter looked tired and sick, as his disease had already started to take hold, but Sophie thought that his eyes had never looked younger. 

The doorbell rang. With no time to get to the bathroom, Sophie rushed over to the foggy mirror to freshen herself up. In the glass, she looked half-formed, like a ghost partly in this world and partly in another. She had a seed in her teeth, but she couldn’t see it through the cloud-like smears. She smoothed out her blonde ponytail and Leandra came rushing by her feet toward the front door. When it was opened, Sophie turned to smile and found only Clare standing there, squat and smiling and arms outstretched for a hug. Out on the street, Laura honked from her sedan, waved, and blew a kiss to Clare. When Sohpie began to wave she was already driving away. 

Dutifully, Clare spoke to Laura. ‘She wanted me to tell you thank you and that she’s sorry she couldn’t say hello. She needed to get to lunch’. Sophie could have sworn that, when they made the plans, she’d mentioned staying for at least a quick coffee. Maybe she was running behind? She unlocked her phone– right on time. Her stomach dropped and she felt her face flush, but she shook her head and told Clare thank you. 

‘Let’s go to my room’ Leandra shouted, seeming to still be out of breath from running. ‘There’s way more stuff in there’. 

Sophie decided to continue cleaning up the house, in case Laura came in when she picked Clare up. There was a wrinkled basket of clothes that she stuffed away in the back closet. She took it to the living room and spent an hour ironing them, trying to stop herself from wondering what Laura might be up to. When she finished, she headed to the back hallway where the bedrooms were, and where Clare and Leandra had been playing. The walls were blank apart from two photos of Sophie’s parents and a silver crucifix that was placed on Peter’s coffin during the funeral. Thinking the girls might be hungry, she inched toward Leandra’s door, but didn’t hear any voices despite the fact that it was slightly ajar. She balanced the laundry basket on her hip and pushed the door open to peek in.

Through the crack, Sophie saw Leandra standing above Clare, who knelt as Leandra began to squeeze water out of a bottle and onto Clare’s head.

‘Girls!’ Sophie shouted and rushed in, dropping the newly pressed clothes to the floor. ‘What in the world are you doing Leandra? That is not how we treat our guests!’ Clare stood up, moving each limb one by one as though she’d forgotten how to use them. Her eyes were red and watery and her head was dripping. 

‘Mama!’ Leandra shouted ‘I was just helping her!’ Sophie’s eyes rolled upward in crazed defeat and she snapped at her daughter ‘I don’t know why you would think that, but you are going to apologize to her immediately and get to the backyard where I can see you.’

Leandra looked up at her mother, only with her eyes and keeping her head straight. The look was unfamiliar, distancing, like she had a deeper understanding of the world that just could not be communicated. Sophie, looking at her daughter from above, felt pitied. 

Leandra marched out of the room, leading Clare behind her with a loose hand. Sophie picked up the laundry basket and started to place the clothes on Leandra’s white, four post bed. She noticed that Leandra had been rearranging things in her room: Her toys never seemed to leave the blue crate where they were left, she kept hand sanitizer by her night stand, and the full mirror that hung in front of her closet door had been flipped around because, Leandra reported, it scared her at night. When all the clothes lay in a crisp stack on the bed, Sophie left and shut the door behind her. 

Things seemed to improve between Leandra and Clare as they rolled in the grass outside. Sophie never heard an apology, so she’d have to talk to Leandra later. In the past she felt that she hadn’t offered much guidance on deciding between right and wrong, as she didn’t feel sure herself. The next few years, though, were critical to instilling a sense of direction. 

Sophie stuck her head out the sliding glass door in the kitchen and called the girls in for a snack. This way she wouldn’t be sending Clare home without feeding her. When the girls came inside, Clare sat at the kitchen table right away, and Leandra first went to the sink to wash up. Sophie placed a plastic dish of chopped vegetables and ranch dip at the center of the table, a healthy choice for growing girls. Clare and Sophie sat at the round table in silence for a few moments, before Sophie asked ‘so, how is your mother?’ Clare started on the broccoli and without looking at her responded ‘she’s ok.’

‘She really must be so busy these days’ she smiled. 

‘Hm, not really. I mostly see her sitting around.’

Sophie drew back. Laura had nearly stopped replying to her messages, except for one when she’d asked Laura if she wanted to help with the classroom bake sale, to which she replied a day later that she had too much on her plate but best of luck. 

‘Oh, well, I guess I’m glad to hear that.’ She smiled again, this time with her mouth closed. 

‘She says she doesn’t like me to talk about her.’ a carrot snapped like a breaking tree branch in between her crooked teeth, and Leandra ran to the table and sat beside her. 

‘Where were you?’ Clare asked, almost betrayed. 

‘My hands weren’t clean enough to eat’ Leandra stated, firm in her conviction and unwilling to explain further. ‘Thanks for the food, Mom.’ The two of them ate their snack in silence and Sophie wondered if they’d made up.

Twenty five minutes had passed and Clare’s older brother Vincent came to get her instead of Laura. Sophie thought this would be a good time to lecture Leandra on her awful manners, but they had to leave for Sunday School in six minutes, and in that moment she wasn’t even sure that her manners were any better. 

In the living room, Leandra was at the corner table, standing near her father’s ashes. Sophie walked in with her keys jingling and saw Leandra whispering to the tin box on the table. She thought she even heard a small giggle. For a moment her heart stopped. She wanted to correct the behavior, to say that no one could hear her, but since they were alone in the house she decided it wasn’t bothering anyone. 

‘What are you laughing at, dear? It’s time to go.’

‘I wasn’t laughing. I was speaking to Daddy’s body.’

‘That’s . . . ’ she hesitated. ‘That’s not his body, Leandra.’

‘Well, what is it?’ 

‘Come on’ she swallowed ‘you won’t have time to sit in the chapel today.’ 

Sophie sat in the parking lot as she waited for Leandra to get out of class. She took the same spot every week, outside the entrance to the parish hall but still where she could watch the pine tree lined highway. She gazed up at the bell tower on the steeple and remembered the time she spent inside thinking about Peter and waiting for someone to tell her what had happened. Her heart sank to her stomach, and she couldn’t decide whether she wished she’d listened to the words back then. Her eyes just started to glaze over when a drumbeat began in her pocket. Her phone was ringing. 

She dug the phone out of her fraying jeans and looked at the screen. It was Laura.

‘Hi! Laura! How are you? Sorry we didn’t get to say hello.’

‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ her voice was trembling, like she could hardly breathe. 

‘Sorry?’

‘How dare you do this to someone else’s child. How dare you let this happen to your child.’

‘Is Clare alright? I’m not sure. . .’

‘A baptism? Fuck you. Clare is not going back there, she will not be speaking to Leandra. This is violating and wrong. My daughter is in tears. How do you think children understand this?’

‘Laura, no, I mean. I’m so sorry. Leandra . . .  I don’t know why she does these things.’

‘Figure it out.’ 

Three beeps from the other end signaled the end of the call. The doors to the parish hall opened and a herd of children rushed out, all in different sizes and colors. Dawdling in peace at the end of the crowd, Leandra stepped into the light and shielded her eyes from the sun. 

‘How was it?’ Sophie asked, holding back tears and grasping her daughter’s hand. She recoiled when she touched it, and then saw that it was dry and cracked, like scales. 

‘I loved it. We learned a lot.’