Another Sunday

ANOTHER SUNDAY.

A holy day for most people, our family typically included, though on a morning like this you just might doubt it, judging by the way we slept late (until almost ten!), drove about aimlessly spending money (eating brunch at the French bakery in Reston, reading the papers, and squirreling away the last stalks of the spring asparagus and the dregs of the chicory at the farmers’ market down in Dale City). Later we will put up a new batch of lost-and-found signs the children made on the Mac (with the iconic paw prints and broken hearts and falling tears), and then fritter away the remainder of our weekend at the club at Hollow Rock.

We managed to avoid St. Aidan’s like the plague, though in all fairness the evasive action was probably overkill. We’ve known Father Reynolds and his wife Linda for years: she and Anne play tennis together once a week (even though Anne is a 4.0 and Linda is at best a 2); he and I have been known to hunt ducks together down in Ocracoke, drink gin and argue (Anne and Linda call it “playfighting”) over the global economy, the war, gays in the Anglican church, and John Courtney Murray. Reynolds, like many Episcopalians, is an ex-Catholic and studied Murray at Weston (before meeting Linda in Cambridge and falling in love with her). I guess that’s what gives him the right, as much as anything else.

I took an elective many years ago, went to business school, and so I am allowed to fake it, and I do so fairly well, especially after a few gimlets. Reynolds is older than the both of us, by ten years at least, and maybe that much or more older than Linda who is of indeterminate age owing to pilates and an expert colorist. But Reynolds loves his wife and his parish, he shoots straight and well, and with respect to most things, I believe, he has his priorities sewed on straight, with the sole exception of a mean streak when it comes to same-sex marriages.

Of course Reynolds knows our children too (he baptized them both) and he knows our wagon and our coupe (the aging three-series convertible Anne still calls her “ride”). And though he, like any good rector worth his salt, wouldn’t give a flip one way or the other if we were in attendance, I still drove us several blocks north out of our way and then doubled back down 628 to get us heading south on 1, figuring on a clean getaway. When we got to Riverside, however, close enough to the church we could see it and its flock of seekers corralled under the sycamores down a narrow side street, Anne reached across—here I was overcome by the smell of her shampoo in her newly-washed, still damp, fair-and-not-yet-graying hair, and her perfume, a French name with two accents, one of each, ague and grave, and several “e’s”—and honked the horn, throwing our too-cool-for-school Kate into a full-on, rolling fit of hysterics.