Tabbs

Chapter 3

Hope Baptist Church's parking lot was only filled to a quarter of its capacity when Tabbs arrived. Not that it mattered though, she knew what cars to look out for and it looked like it was going to be a full house in every other sense of the saying. She parked her struggling Saturn Ion in the shade of a spanning oak and walked under the steeple. She only remembered being here a handful of times. Mostly when Dad was still around when she was a kid. Not that he, or her mom for that mater, were particularly religious. It just wouldn't do in a small town for a budding family to not be going to Hope or Grace Baptist Church across the road. The gossip alone would have torn her mother's fragile ego to ribbons. For one reason or another, after her father had left, her mother seemed to care less what others thought and dropped church entirely. Despite being a dedicated member to the hospitality and coffee team, she never brought up the church again. Almost as if it, and Dad, had never really existed.

Tabbs palmed the sturdy handle of the glass door and spotted several angry, red splotches on the webbing between her forefinger and thumb. Stress rash, she was sure of it. She got them all the time in college. All the overtime she'd been having to pull at the cafe probably didn't help her sensitive skin much either. As her manager, Keith, pointed out, Sunshine Cafe doesn't promise its employee's paid bereavement time. However, he was willing to work with her to get her hours and she ended up working four twelve-hour days in a row to have the funeral day off.

She drew in a fresh breath of the muggy summer heat and threw open the glass door. She was greeted by an arctic wind of A/C that blasted past her face and kicked up the loose ends of her hair. Before her was a hallway-like foyer stretching from her left to her right. Hung on the bare brick wall before her was a spanning cork-board of various church events and pictures, all hung on loose push pins over a handful of shabby child drawings of crosses. The board was buffered on either side by various artistic interpretations of Jesus hanging on far less cute wood-and-nail crosses. She checked her watch, still half an hour early to the service.

She walked the length of the foyer, her father's hand-me-down camo backpack bouncing off her lower back with every stride. She listened at doors and asked for help through various echoing, cheaply-carpeted hallways till she ended up back at the entrance. Grasping for straws, she examined the cork-board with a little more interest this time and found a portrait of her grandmother. A sweet, old woman looked back at her with vibrant, brown eyes over round cheeks with a touch too much blush. She found her hand unconsciously gravitating towards the laser print-out of her grandmother's face and snapped it back to her side. Forcing her eyes downward, she saw the information on the day's funeral and noticed the time she had been given in the form of an email was scratched out and rewritten in chicken scratch pencil for an hour earlier. A sudden chill ran though veins as she swiped the phone from her pocket and searched through her texts, but found nothing.

In a panic, she pressed her ear to one of the solid looking wooden doors standing on either side of the paintings and heard a droning voice. She cursed under her breath, then suddenly became all too aware of the portrait of a baby Jesus glaring daggers at her from the other side of the foyer. She stared back. "Like you never did," she spat, then pulled the door open a crack. Sure enough, she found a sparely-filled room of pews all facing a fragile-looking old man in a black robe. The door suddenly parted further without her making it and a tall, slender man she'd never met before greeted her with a smile.

"You must be Tabbitha," he said in a friendly whisper.

"Sorry, no one told me about the time. I swear I-"

He pressed a pamphlet into her hand and took her gently, but firmly, by the shoulder and into the room. "That's just fine." He bent his slender frame till they were cheek to cheek, then pointed in the direction of the front-most pew filled with only people she recognized. "The front is reserved for family. You're seated between your mother and sister."