she was dying of cancer, he had asked her if she was okay, and she’d replied, smugly, “Yoga.”
“Look—that will be us someday,” Elizabeth continued, pointing at an old couple coming out of the health food store. She recognized them from the few times she had attended Rae’s church, which was nearby. They were raising their grandchild, who was one of Rae’s church-school kids. The child’s mother lived on the streets in San Rafael, between stints in county rehab. The grandmother sported what looked like goggles you’d wear on glaciers, through which she kept looking around like a little bird. Maybe you didn’t see well anymore, Elizabeth thought, but you wanted to see as much as you possibly could for as long as you could, and you wanted to be seen. The couple were dressed in flowing linen pants and shirts, down vests, and thin bright knit caps with ear flaps, like off-duty Sherpas.
“Go give them a hand,” said Elizabeth. The grandfather’s canvas bag was heavy with food, pulling his right shoulder several inches lower than the left. James got to his feet and walked toward them. Rae’s church was called Sixth Day Prez, although it was not Presbyterian. It was not anything in particular. Rae and the founding minister, the formerly Very Reverend Anthony Small, had liked the sound of it when they first considered the idea of breaking away from the old church, after he had had an awful rift with the governing board over, of all things, God’s omniscience. Anthony had begun to waffle on the precept after his scholarly young son was shot in a drive-by on New Year’s morning in San Francisco two years before. He was nineteen, no longer on Anthony’s family medical plan, and his care at County Hospital in Oakland had been barely passable, so that when he recovered, he had a severe limp and hearing loss.
The theme of the old church was that God had a perfect plan for everyone, but Anthony had come to believe that God was nowhere near done with the job of creation: this was why everything seemed so tragic and inadequate. He or She and we were still all on the sixth day, together. You weren’t going to understand much while on earth, except that God was present with us in the whole catastrophe. Anthony had not formulated this belief; it had been part of an ongoing rabbinical conversation for centuries. But he had added his own progressive convictions—that those who could must help take care of those flattened by the wheel of the System. The thing was, the church responded, this didn’t really work for them anymore.
Rae, on the other hand, old Berkeley activist that she was, heard the words “the System” and signed on as part-time office manager and lay minister at the cabin in a redwood grove that Anthony rented in the town next to Landsdale. She loved it, and the small salary and good benefits helped during lean times for her as a weaver.
The formerly Very Reverend Small was light brown, half Haitian, tall with funky teeth and a hat rack that he festooned with African caps and scarves, which he wore instead of ties. Rosie had gone to hear him preach several times, and while she did not exactly believe in God, she loved the scarves, the caps, and the fact that he did not make you call him Reverend Anthony. “Anthony” was fine, although Rosie called him Anferny, after a character in her favorite teenage movie. He told her she resembled his Black Irish mother, with her long black curls and cerulean eyes. She had worked beside him and Elizabeth to set up an organic community garden in the poorest part of San Rafael, and had gone with him and the four kids in the Sixth Day Prez youth group to help clean up after oil spills in San Francisco Bay, and after floods from the late-winter rains.
Rae was Rosie’s authority on all things spiritual, because her beliefs were so simple and kind. You were loved because God loves, period. God loved you, and everyone, not because you believed certain things, but