The Choir Closet Incident

Calvin Ford had been mopping the fellowship hall floor of the First Community Church of Maple Hill for eleven years, and in all that time he had never once thought about the tile grout as much as he was thinking about it that Saturday afternoon. He was forty-four years old, his knees announced themselves when he stood up, and his back objected to the church's choice of floor wax. He worked in slow figure eights because that was how the bucket worked best, and because figure eights gave a man time to think.

What he was thinking about, mostly, was his wife.

He and Jolene had been married twenty years. He'd met her at a community theater potluck back when they were both twenty-two, and she'd brought a green bean casserole and told him straight to his face that his performance in the spring one-act was terrible and she loved him for it. They'd been married two years later. Twenty years of good marriage, solid marriage, the kind of marriage where you finish each other's sentences and know which grocery store the other one hates.

But somewhere in the last few years the spontaneity had gone the way of his hairline. Their Saturday nights were Chinese takeout and a documentary one of them fell asleep through. Their bedroom was comfortable and warm and predictable, like a good pair of slippers, and Calvin loved those slippers, he did, but lately a little voice in the back of his head kept whispering that slippers were not the same thing as dancing shoes.

For years the two of them had joked about the supply closet off the choir loft. It had started as one of those dumb married-couple bits, Calvin saying the most exciting place they'd ever fool around would be that cramped little room full of hymnbooks, and Jolene saying sure, right after she finished dusting the pews with her tongue. It was a joke. It had been a joke for a decade. Nobody actually did anything in church supply closets.

Still. A man could mop a floor and wonder.

The fellowship hall was empty. Heath Underwood, the head deacon, had come through around one, poked at the tables for tomorrow's bake sale, told Calvin the folding chairs needed three more inches between rows, and left. Sammi Jonathan, the new youth minister, had started a few weeks back, twenty-six years old and nervous as a cat in a room of rocking chairs, and Calvin had spent half an hour showing her where the extra trash bags lived. After that the building had gone quiet the way big buildings do on Saturdays, all that space and nobody in it.

The mop bucket water had gone gray. Calvin knelt down to wrestle the mop head off for a fresh one, and while he was down there, bent over the wringer as a man might pray to a machine, a hand grabbed him firmly on the butt.

He yelped. Then he stood up too fast, turned around, and in the general confusion of it all got a mouthful of mop bucket water, which is an experience he would recommend to nobody. He sputtered and spat and there was Jolene, forty-four years old, still in her florist apron, laughing so hard she had to hold onto the folding tables.

"Oh my God, your face," she said. "Calvin. Your face."

"You trying to kill me? I just drank baptistery water."

"You drank mop water, you big baby." She came over and put her hand flat on his chest like she was checking his heart. "Spit it all out. Good. You going to live?"

"Barely." He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. "What are you even doing here? I thought you were doing the flowers for tomorrow."

"I am doing the flowers. I've been up in the choir loft for an hour and you never came up to say hi, which is rude, by the way." She was smiling in a way he hadn't seen in a while, a specific way, and it took his slow janitor brain a second to catch up. "So I came down to say hi to you."

"Hi," he said.

"Hi." She stepped closer. "I had a thought up there, amongst the lilies. I thought maybe we should test the acoustics in that supply closet."

Calvin choked again, on nothing this time, just air. "The... you're serious?"

"Dead serious. Right now, before anybody comes back." She tilted her head toward the stairs. "Heath left, right? I saw his truck pull out. And the new girl is off doing youth minister things somewhere. It's just us and God, and God has seen worse."

Calvin stood there with a mop in his hand and his heart thumping like a jackhammer, if jackhammers could feel giddy. "Jolene. Twenty years I've been making that joke."

"And twenty years you've been too chicken to act on it." She was already pulling him by the hand. "So now it's my joke and I'm acting on it. Come on. Floor's not going anywhere."

The floor was not going anywhere, but it did need finishing, and Calvin told her so, and she told him the floor could wait and he could finish it after, and that settled the argument. He set the mop in the bucket like it was a flag going down on a play, wiped his hands on his work pants, and followed his wife up the back stairs like someone who had just remembered what dancing shoes felt like.

The choir loft smelled like dust and old fabric, that particular church smell, though he supposed there was a hint of lily floating down from the flowers. The supply closet door stood at the end of the little hallway past the robes. It was a narrow door with a squeaky hinge, and Jolene opened it with the confidence of a woman who had been planning something for a full hour and pulled him in after her.

The closet was exactly as advertised. Hymnbooks stacked in towers. Old choir robes on a rolling rack. A broken microphone stand leaning in the corner like a drunk at a wedding. There was maybe three feet of floor between the racks, and Jolene used all three feet by shoving Calvin back against the hymnbook stack and kissing him like the potluck had been last month instead of twenty-two years ago.

Calvin kissed her back, one hand full of apron and the other full of hip, and it was going great, it was going better than great, and then she reached back to slam the door with her foot and her elbow caught the tallest tower of hymnbooks.

The crash was enormous. It echoed through the empty halls the way only a church can make a sound echo, up and down the stairwell and probably out into the parking lot. Calvin broke the kiss and stood rigid, listening.

"Nobody heard that," Jolene whispered.

"That sounded like the building fell down."

"Nobody heard it," she said again, and kissed the corner of his jaw. "Even if somebody did, they'll think it's you dropping things. You drop things all the time. It's your whole brand."

Calvin had to admit this was true, but it didn't make his heart settle any. "Okay. Okay. But we're not doing this on bare tile with a hundred hymnbooks under us. Give me a second." He turned around and started pulling choir robes off the rolling rack to lay down as padding, and this is where he learned that a rolling rack in a closet three feet wide does not want to cooperate. The rack rolled. He grabbed it. The robes he'd already laid down slid off onto the broken microphone stand, which clanged. He stepped on a robe to steady himself and his foot went through a sleeve and now he was tangled in purple fabric, hopping on one leg, swearing under his breath in a building where he'd once been asked to say a few words.

Jolene was laughing so hard she had to sit down on a hymnbook stack, which creaked but held. "Oh my God. Come here, you disaster!"

"I'm helping," he managed, one arm through a sleeve now.

"You're a hostage situation." She stood up, took hold of his shoulders, and steadied him while he shook his foot loose. Then her hands went to the waistband of his work pants, and her smile came back, the specific one. "These have to go. Those are the ugliest pants in the county, Calvin, and I refuse to be intimate with a man dressed like a mop bucket."

"These pants have seen us through twenty years."

"The pants can wait outside the marriage. Lose them." She popped the button herself, and Calvin's heart did something young and stupid, and out in the empty church the last of the hymnbook echo finally died away.

* * *

Jolene smelled like lily stems and hand lotion, and Calvin had his arms around her and his back against the hymnbooks and not one single idea what had happened to the last twenty-two years. She was forty-four years old and she was kissing him like the night they met, and somewhere in the back of his head a small voice reminded him that he still had a floor to finish and that his knees were going to file a formal protest about all this standing and pivoting. He told the small voice to shut up. The small voice had never once been married.

Then she took his hand, his rough janitor hand with the mop-water wrinkles still in the knuckles, and she slid it up under the hem of her skirt, and Calvin Ford stopped having thoughts of any kind for a good four or five seconds.

"Oh," he said. Very articulate. Twenty years of marriage and that was the best material he had on file.

"You've done this before," Jolene murmured against his neck. "You'd better have done this before."

"I have no memory of anything before right now." But his hands remembered, that was the crucial part. His hands remembered her even if his brain had gone off to sit quietly in a corner. He fumbled a little at the waistband of her tights, because there was always something in the way, there had been something in the way on their honeymoon and now again, and she