Love this piece by Lisa Taddeo.

      Just as the Our Father gets under way, I try to make my eyes look reverent in case God happens to be watching this particular ceremony. My father beside me has the right look; I try to simulate it but I think mine comes out plaintive. I feel slotted in the phylum of the ungodly next generation that shelves sacrifice like a rusty can of Spam. For example, my friend Krista gave up toothpicks and Diet Pepsi for Lent. When I saw her with a can of soda at her house, she stuck out her tongue and flicked the can with her lemon-colored fingernail: Diet Coca-Cola.

     Amen, we all say, and then the people in the pews kneel. We’re standing because we got here late. My dad always has to park the car someplace very safe, preferably so that only one side is parallel to another car, and sometimes it takes a bit to find the right combination of good distance from another car and absence of low-hanging trees and their devious shit-beading birds.
     So while the rest of the tardy congregation and I stand straight and look worshipful, my father kneels right on the floor. It takes some time, because lately he’s very weak and his back is a jangle of criss-crossing bones, but he leans on the pew to his right and gets down on his bad leg. Then the old woman behind me with silver hair in a bouffant and her Downs Syndrome kid (who is the only girl wearing an Easter bonnet) - they kneel, too. A little kid in front of me jabs his nose-picking sister and whispers “kneel!” She removes her prying finger and the two of them thump to the ground on their knees. Their parents smile at my dad and then they kneel, too. Soon almost all the latecomers are kneeling on the bare floor. I am suddenly aware of the last Indiana Jones movie, when Indy reads from his father’s diary only the penitent man will pass over and over until he realizes that the penitent man kneels before God, and he gets on his knees before his head gets lopped off by an overhead blade. I can’t kneel now, though, because it’s too goddamn late.
     ”Let us offer each other a sign of Christ’s peace,” says the priest.
     Everybody rises. I shake the hand of the silver-haired woman, then that of her bonneted daughter, who smiles so deeply at me that I almost cry. I shake the little boy’s hand but am careful to just smile brightly at the little girl and then self-consciously pat her on the head. I turn to my father, who is still kneeling, and help him up. More often than not, he refuses my help, but in church sometimes it’s different. He kisses me and I feel the gravelly roughness of his cheek rasp against my skin. “Thank you for coming with me today,” he whispers.
     ”Daddy, it’s Easter.”
     ”I can’t force you to come to Church anymore.” I notice he says “come” instead of “go.” It’s silly, really, but he used to always say “go” in the past and he didn’t go so much himself. Christmas Eve, mostly, and even then we’d leave for the 5:30 mass at 5:30 and then we’d get there and he’d say, “Shit there’s no parking, say a prayer, baby,” and we’d turn around and head home and race the lobsters on the floor to see which got cooked last. Anyway, lately he goes to church Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. The closer one gets to death, I presume, the harder one prays. It bothers me a little because his newfound piety tramps my illusion of his machismo. He was once so strong that when one of his patients died, he’d say, “That’s life, you can’t mourn everything.” I always knew he felt it on the inside. But now he shows it outwardly and when I told him my friend’s father got stomach cancer he shook his head and said, “Goddamnit.”
     ”Listen, baby, I want you to wait here while I go for Communion.” My father doesn’t understand how to whisper, so the nose-picker’s mother pricks an ear in our direction.
     ”What? Why?”
     ”You haven’t been to confession in years, Lilli.”
     ”So?”
     ”So, you can’t receive the body if you haven’t confessed.” My father’s voice gets even louder. Still, though, in his tone there is a skepticism, the familiar not-entirely-commanding breath which I blame wholeheartedly for my lack of supreme religious conviction.
     ”So nobody knows,” I say.
     ”God knows,” he answers predictably.
     ”Daddy, I’m going to get Communion. I know way too many people here. They’ll wonder. They’ll think I’ve converted to Buddhism because it’s trendy.”
     He shakes his head at me. “Go if you want to,” he hisses, but I think he left out: you blaspheming little wretch.
     I wait in the wings, by the pillar, as lines upon lines of pastel women and their Savile Row men place their left hands over their right and accept the host. They look too modern with their baby slings and their imitation Burberry scarves to be pious. Most of the younger crowd are holiday Catholics; they come for the palms on Palm Sunday, the ashes on Ash Wednesday, and for the elegant greenery of Christmas and Easter. The older members of the congregation clasp their hands behind their backs, extend their chins, and open their mouths because they are from a more innocent time. They welcome the familiarity of the priests laying the host upon their tongues. They let it dissolve like rice paper in their mouths while the new Catholics chew loudly. My dad once said that as a child in Catholic school he remembers the kids getting paddled if they chewed the host. It was considered disrespectful then, he’d said, but I guess it doesn’t matter anymore.
     I watch when it’s my dad’s turn. He opens his mouth and his top denture gets loose and slides out a little. It’s absolutely horrifying so I turn my head. My gaze lands on the crucifix above me. “Dentures are cruel,” I whisper up to Jesus.
     My dad gets back to me, kneels again and says his closing prayers. The collection basket comes round on its long wicker pole. My dad puts in a twenty dollar bill loose. I’ve always admired that he doesn’t put it in the special name envelopes that get sent to the house. Loose, it’s an offering, but tethered to a name, it’s a plea for recognition.
     Then he grabs my hand and says, “Let’s go.” We always go now, after the Communion, as though the host has provided material evidence that we went to Church. He leaves sooner today also because we have to hasten to his car before the slam and bump holiday Catholics drive into things in their rush to the markets for lamb and bunny.
     Out in the lot, the sun is hot. It makes the rows of car metal look fiery. I see my dad’s light iris Dodge Stratus from a quarter of a mile away. This is because it’s so goddamn shiny. He waxes it every two or three days and curses whenever it gets rained on. Daddy, I’ve often said, it ain’t a Ferrari. No, he answers, but I guarantee it’s cleaner than one.
     Driving out, there’s a black 7-series Beamer and inside a prim couple with a daughter in the back. I used to envy people in cars like that; I thought everything in their lives was perfect, big kitchens with titanium refrigerators and tiled islands in the middle, catered food and holidays in Dubai. But now (and especially after church, communion or not), I see the rust on the undercarriage, like my father has all along. And I bet they use envelopes with their name during the collection, or wrap a ten spot around a wad of one dollar bills.

Published on Word Riot.