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I’d been here before, with the same nightmare, as if I’d been sucked into a time warp, to relive it all over.

The scene was the same. The church was in mid-procession, the railings empty, the crowd all below, and the most important part, the person I desperately longed to meet, was nowhere to be seen. I was alone again on the balcony of this great stone castle, the church’s great pinnacle itself. Despite being a place of what appeared to be worship, I’d never stayed for a single service, and now I never would.

I’d been out of town when my former Sunday school teacher first saw the notice, and when I returned, it was too late. It was all over.

She ran towards me, panicky, red in the face. “Dave!” she shouted. “I know this is all I’ve ever asked of you, but please, please, please!” and then she was in my face, her eyes pleading, her voice a whisper now. “Just try to think of the kids.”

I remembered the kids, and despite my better judgment, agreed.

It was Christmas, and I certainly had nothing better to do. So after all the other buildings were closed for the day, when the church was the only place in town that had electricity, I went over to the church.

My former Sunday school teacher was waiting inside.

“It all looks the same,” she said, her voice almost breaking up.

The room was huge, a cavernous space with high vaulted ceilings and dim ceiling lights that made the place appear like a gray, dank dungeon.

“It hasn't been served for years,” I said, “and it’s going to be terribly cold in here.”

“You don’t have to do this,” she whispered, sounding frantic. “I’ll pay you.”

“What else can you pay me with?” I asked with a smile as bright as the moon.

“Dinner tomorrow?”

I thought it was the cheapest offer I would ever get in my life, but I couldn’t refuse. We went to a 24-hour diner just outside of town.

The old, wooden building was just like any other, you could have found one of these in any town in America. The outside was a faded pink color, and so was the inside, the tabletop matching with the pinkish linoleum tiles on the ground.

“So,” my teacher started, “I thought I’d get us the largest, most expensive burger they have.”

I looked at her and smiled. I thanked her, noticing for the first time how hard she was trying, how much effort she was putting into making this work.

We ate, and the whole time she talked, she really knew how to spin a story. She told me about the kids she’d taught years ago and about the families she knew around town, all the families with which she was still in contact.

When we finished, she said to me, “So are you game now? Are you ready to start tomorrow?”

“I don’t think I’ll be able to do this,” I said.

“But I’m offering you free food!”

“That’s okay, I’ll find somewhere else to eat.”

She started to cry. “Please please please,” she begged and sobbed. “Just tell me I wouldn’t be in this position if I hadn’t sent you to Sunday school. I’ll get a new job, just tell me you’ll help out.”

I didn’t say anything, but my face had to betray how torn I was, how wildly around the wind she’d blown me. I knew that things like this weren’t part of life, that it was all a myth.

After what I had to admit was an incredibly emotional meal, we went back home.

My former Sunday school teacher was now living with her parents again. Not that she couldn’t support herself—she was a successful lawyer—but she wanted to do something good with her life. She wanted to save people. She wanted to drive for less than an hour from the big city to the next church, to apply for an opening. I saw two things in her eyes that day: they were calm and confident, and they were full of intractable fear.

She was the first to come out when the service started. I had a hard time believing she was still the same person who, when I was in her class many years ago, told her students that if they went to hell, they’d never be able to buy their way out.

I started going into the church in the morning. I met her there, and we would walk the pathway and make the rounds of the church, getting to know everything we could about the church and the people within.

I was on the sidewalk outside the church one day when I saw her. I was going on with my day, my hands in my pockets, and I felt her pull up beside me, right in front of those big black gates that closed and locked the church.

“Dave!” my former Sunday school teacher called out. But my eyes were always on the gates and the little courtyard that surrounded it.

“Mom,” the woman whispered, “get down. I don’t want to be seen with you.”

I have to admit, my old Sunday school teacher cried, she cried like I never knew she could. “Please. Please, please, please,” she said, she said it over and over again, and all I could do was rub her hair.

“Please,” she said, and she grabbed the gate with a death-grip. “Please don’t let me be wrong.”

There was an incredible man who worked for my former Sunday school teacher, a wonderful man. My teacher loved to tell me about all his good deeds and how his kind and compassionate ways made people flock to him like a magnet. I guess it was them, all of them: the family, the parishioners, the parishoners’ parents, husbands, wives, their kids above all. He knew more about everyone than was publicized in the newspapers.

He gave the church a face-lift. He would go into the studio, lock the door, and dream up the greatest ideas, the most interesting plans, the best of the best. He had a large window facing the street in front of the church, and he painted it and took care of it so the window would always look like new. He did things with the guttering, with the ivy, with the light fixtures, the windowpanes, the grass, and the path that was in front of the building.

I discovered a painting of a beautiful woman resting her face on a pillow of lilies. It was an old painting. The woman looked peaceful, her face slightly turned to the side.

“You’re bored,” I said. “You don’t want me to leave.”

“It’s so deep in you that you don’t realize it’s in others, too. This thing…it’s devoured me.”

“I can make things easier for you,” I said.

“I don’t want you to touch me.”

“Things are a matter of opinion.”

“Your opinion.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“Oh, I can,” she said. “I can mean anything.”

The new paint job brought in the crowd. People came by the busload whenever there was a service, crowds so thick that the police had to keep the streets clear for fire trucks and ambulances.

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