By Sarah Wheeler Hedborn

I opened my mother’s purse as the priest’s homily droned and dug my hand through the alligator infested swamp of its contents. Alligators swirled around me, snapping, biting, boring me with words and songs and rituals that meant nothing to me but a wasted Sunday morning. My fingers groped through the sludge and weeds, retreating at something damp, fighting something sticky. 

And then I pulled my hand from the swamp in one quick motion. A glasses case. Sometimes my mother wore glasses at mass, because here she needed to see things that otherwise she could see with ease the rest of the week. The navy case was plush under my fingertips and I slid the glasses out, resting them on the end of my nose, the way she did. I turned my head back down into the muddiness of the purse. Everything was magnified, the wad of tissues, silver lipstick tube, car keys, battered package of Doublemint gum whose sweet, minty scent infused the purse. The faux leather, black cloth lining, dollar bills, checks in the checkbook, all smelled of her favorite gum. 

Once more, glasses still on the end of my nose, I dove into the bag, this time finding a familiar, silky red pouch, frayed at the edges, with a loose black snap. It did not make noise as I pulled it open, but I glanced up anyway, into the hushed masses, all at mass, and saw no one watching me. My mother was on the altar, song leader. My father the lector. My brother altar boy. My sister hid in the bathroom because our parents were not here to make her stay with me. I was alone with the swamp, and the pouch.

I tipped it into my hands and out poured the black beaded rosary my mother had received from her parents on her first communion. Always she used this rosary, fingering it in times of trouble, times of need, of worry. It was an artifact she never let us handle, no matter our trouble or need or worry.

Somehow, absorbed in dripping beads like water snakes through my fingers, her glasses dropped off my nose and clattered to the pew beside me. I grabbed for them and the rosary spilled from my hand like pebbles onto the sandy church floor, far away from their swampy home. Slumping down in my seat, I nudged the pebbles with my toes, the gritty carpet rough under my feet, knowing I would not be able to pull the pebble rosary to me. But if I timed it right, no one would notice me slipping under the waves, scouting the coarse ocean floor, scooping up the rosary like treasure and returning to the surface triumphant. 

The priest’s eyes stared nowhere into the crowd, but the crowd focused intently on him and his frothy words, mouths open, heads nodding. Taking a deep breath, I dropped down, my chest and stomach hugging the cold rock of the kneeler, and searched the floor with my fingers. Finally, my fist closed around my prize and I swam for the surface, breaking the waves and inhaling deeply, sliding back onto the wooden pew, ignoring the glance of the old man at the other end. He’d come late, sat alone and did not wear his Sunday best and so his eyes did not chastise me. Had it been my mother’s eyes, catching me with her prize, then I would have had a problem.

Opening my fist, I took a watery look at the rosary. Shiny, but not beautiful, just ordinary plastic. But still it was nice and it was old, and I liked old things with their memories, like the red silk pouch on my lap which I now realized contained a piece of yellowed paper, folded into a tiny square. Drawn in faded blue ink on its top was a heart. I opened the paper, one fold at a time, and at each fold there was another heart, and inside each heart were the letters: P+T. My mother was P, but I could only guess at who T was. I thought with pity, this is ancient, from another time, from a girl who was once young and drew hearts on pieces of paper she hid away, but now she sits on the altar listening to the relentless sermon on the shore. I knew her peevish glare when I stirred with boredom, the reverent focus of the face tilted to the priest, the deep concentration and stillness as she recited every word, sang every song, enacted every ritual that meant nothing to me and everything to her.

Inside the very last fold of paper was an even smaller piece of paper with a tiny green ink scrawl. I held it to my mother’s glasses and read: “I don’t believe in God.”

I held that paper and raised slow eyes to my mother in her chair on the altar. She was not looking at the priest, but was gazing down at her hands, which she slowly folded and refolded, one on top of the other, over and over, her fingers locking and unlocking, clenching and unclenching. Once and only once, her eyes closed and she gave a small sigh.

  I dropped my eyes to my own fingers, gently folded the note back into tiny squares, each heart disappearing, one into another, then I slid the paper back into the bottom of the silky red pouch. The beads of the rosary fell like black water droplets onto the page, burying it again under the depths.  

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For seventeen years Sarah Wheeler Hedborn taught First-Year Composition at Northern Illinois University. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Iowa State University. Her fiction is published in The /temz/ Review and Eunoia Review, and forthcoming in Spry. Currently she is raising twins in a small town outside of the Chicago suburbs.