Casing the Joint

“Anything with the word explosion in it means their smiles are as fake as their hair pieces” I tell her. “Besides, who’s going to explode? The worship team? The vest the preacher wears? The congregation who has drunken too much free coffee and eaten too many donated donuts that could have gone to the homeless shelter?”

“They have teen programs with pudding!” My mother always ignores my voice of reason. She is an optimist. She always has been despite the fact that her life seems to pretty much suck. I tell her that I don’t like pudding anymore.

“Not to eat!” as though only a moron would want to eat pudding. “They put it on a Slip-N-Slide or something. You remember when you used to have a Slip-N-Slide? We’d set it up on the hill beside—” She notices my horrified expression.

“At a church?!”

“They all keep their bathing suits on,” she says defensively. I shake my head.

“You’re nuts mom,” I say with a smile. I can picture all these church people gathered around a strip of slippery yellow plastic covered in globs of chocolate pudding as my mother accidentally flashes the entire youth group while plowing through the brown gook on her stomach in her little red bikini. Okay, maybe not. We’d definitely get kicked out. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve been kicked out of a church. Mom was once accused by a Pentecostal preacher with too much hair gel of harboring the spirits of Rebellion, Animosity and Jezebel—harboring, like fugitives. Only we’re talking spirits and ghost of dead people and inanimate concepts. Talk about stuck in the past. I stepped out from behind my mother, jammed my knee right where it counts, and watched with a grin as he doubled over babbling in a high-pitched voice like he was speaking in tongues. My mother cried the whole way home, more from the disappointment of losing her newest “family” then from the five hundred dollars she had just put into the offering plate during morning service.