House of Blues

someone's living room, which was what she'd
imagined.
    The neighborhood was one of tiny houses,
quiet-looking, not slummy at all, but there were no sidewalks.
Probably the families who lived here had been around for more than a
generation.
    The church was dim. After Skip's eyes had grown
accustomed, she saw that it had two altars, one in front and one in
back, each holding so many statues of saints she wondered how anyone
dusted them all. If there were copies of the original St. Expedite,
no doubt one was here.
    Though the service had started, there were only a few
people in the pews, fifteen or sixteen, she thought; mostly women. It
looked like a poor black neighborhood church in the nineties,
struggling to keep even a few old women in the congregation, not the
sort that Evie would ever even find, let alone be persuaded to join.
Skip thought of leaving, but didn't for two reasons.
    One was that a woman turned around, saw her, and
beamed.
    "Welcome," she whispered, and her face was
so warm, so gentle, that it would have been churlish to leave after
that.
    The other was that there were three white people in a
back pew, all young, and even though scrubbed-up for church, a little
on the scruffy side. The sort of people she could picture Evie
hanging with.
    In fact, the one woman among them might almost have
been Evie—she was blond and very pretty, but too thin, too pale, a
little druggy-looking. But she was younger than Evie by five or ten
years, Skip guessed.
    Still. Perhaps there was something here—some
ministry to addicts; free food after the service.
    Something.
    She sat down and looked around.
    She needn't have worried about getting the uniform
right. One woman—though not in the choir, which consisted of five
or six people in street clothes—wore what appeared to be a pink
choir robe.
    Others had on respectable dresses with nylons and
heels; generic church clothes. Two or three wore pantsuits.
    Another, an older woman with huge dark-rimmed
glasses, wore a long white robe and matching wrapped head garment.
She was tall and looked like some elegant African elder, perhaps
dressed for a party at the consulate of a struggling nation.
    The men wore carefully pressed shirts tucked into
clean dark pants, collars open; the building wasn't air-conditioned.
    The clergyman who delivered the sermon—Skip never
did catch his title—wore an elaborate robe, blue satin lined with
pink, and a hat like a bishop's miter. She thought of an essay she
had once read by Zora Neale Hurston praising black people, her own
people, for their exuberance, and Skip would have been happy to
praise the minister's outfit instead of the Lord.
    She wasn't sure what denomination she'd wandered
into, but she was pretty sure it wasn't Lutheran or Presbyterian.
Though the congregation was tiny, there was not only a pianist, but a
drummer, and the minuscule choir could rock out as if it were a
hundred strong.
    There was quite a lot of music and some readings,
done by different church members, and there were a number of small
rituals that Skip had never seen before. At one point the entire
congregation got up and walked in a circle. Why, she couldn't have
said.
    There were anointings, with perfume, apparently. Once
again she wasn't sure why.
    People were given an opportunity to testify about the
way their spiritual lives were shaping up. One woman got on a roll,
speaking in a kind of rhythmic way, about the unfortunate way her
husband had treated her and how Jesus had gotten her through it. She
started to sway as she talked, and Skip had a premonition about what
was going to happen: She's going to flip out in some way and they're
going to say she's "in the spirit" or some such.
    But she didn't. She cried through the last third of
her testimony, which sounded as if it had been written and rehearsed,
but she didn't flip out.
    Most of the other testimony was a great deal more
informal, involving thanks for simple things, mostly: good weather
and a good night's sleep; food; family.
    Skip wasn't too sure what moved people to get up and
talk, if they had nothing more important to impart than that—the
desire to participate, she thought, the need not to be left out.
    One of the white people spoke. He said he had a plant
that was growing well and he was enjoying the way God was tending it.
Marijuana was Skip's guess.
    At one point there was something called a "hand
blessing," in which people lined up to put a hand on the Bible,
it looked like, and say a