by Brian Gifford
With his granddaughter Sister Golden Hair on the seat beside him, Ron smiled as he pulled his Porsche SUV into the shopping center parking lot.
His smile disappeared when he noticed the family standing on a knoll abutting the lot, a woman holding a boy’s hand, the man holding a sign that read “Lost job. Need to feed family. Please Help. God Bless.”
Ron cringed at the mention of God. He had grown up in church and was raised watching the crusades of the evangelist Billy Graham, whose altar call accompanied by the song Just As I Am always brought him and his mother to tears. But he was no longer the least bit interested in spiritual things.
Still, he remembered a verse he had learned as a child in Sunday School that had become one of his mottos: “Life is but a vapor.” Although it was intended as Saint James’s appeal to believers to seek eternal things, Ron took it as an admonishment to get all you can out of this life while it lasted.
Sister Golden Hair was four, and they were there for her first bicycle. In the bike shop, she chose a pink road bike, insisting she did not need training wheels, which made Ron proud. Ron took selfies of himself and Sister Golden Hair with her new bike and posted them on Facebook along with the other things that were important to him in life, illustrating his other motto: “He with the most toys wins.” He was very comfortable in his own skin.
As she rolled her bike to Ron’s SUV, Sister Golden Hair tugged at his hand. “Papa, the sign asks for help, let’s help them,” she said, pointing toward the knoll. Ron was proud that Sister Golden Hair could read the sign, but he had no intention of helping the family, who he could now see was probably Hispanic, a man and a woman with a boy about Sister Golden Hair’s age.
“Please papa,” Sister Golden Hair said, tugging at his hand, trying to pull him toward the knoll with one hand while guiding the bike with the other. She dropped the bike, scratching the pink paint, and she fell down on the pavement, scraping her knee.
Instinctively, the man on the knoll came to help. Ron had already lifted Sister Golden Hair back on her feet, so the man picked up the bike and rolled it away from oncoming cars over to the knoll, giving Ron no choice but to follow him. The man seemed to stand as straight and to be as proud as Ron.
The man called to his son, who came to stand beside him. Then the woman approached, and Ron saw that she was holding a colorfully painted porcelain figurine of Joseph, Mary and a Jesus who was about the age of Sister Golden Hair and the man’s son. It occurred to Ron that they could sell the figurine to help pay for food. Sister Golden Hair and the boy began playing a gentle version of king of the hill, speaking Spanglish to one another.
“May I pray for you?” the man asked, putting his hand on Ron’s shoulder.
Ron brushed it off, said “no,” then reached into his wallet and pulled out a $20, trying to hand it to the man.
But the man refused: “I not take your money unless for you I pray.”
Sister Golden Hair stopped playing for a moment and said, “Please, papa, let the man pray.”
“OK,” Ron said to the man reluctantly. “You may pray.”
The man crossed himself, placed his left hand on Ron’s shoulder, and with his right hand gestured the way Jesus was gesturing in the figurine. Then he began praying.
Ron only understood a few words— “Señor” (Lord) and “Dios” (God) and “ayuda los” (help them). Although he did not understand most of the Spanish, Ron could tell that the man prayed confidently, with a resonant voice, like he had done this before, like he was a Catholic Billy Graham.
As the man continued praying at length, there increased in Ron a longing, an epiphany, an ineffable sense that there was something missing in his life, something he could not yet identify, something that the man had that he did not. It was like a seed planted, but he wasn’t sure yet what to do about it.
Something in the prayer and in the look on Mary’s face in the figure led him, for reasons he did not yet fully understand, to fall prostrate before the woman and the figurine in her arms, crying for what he was just now beginning to realize he had lost.
Brian Gifford has previously published fiction and poetry in Agape Review and has short stories forthcoming in BULL and Does It Have Pockets?
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