Jennifer picks me up at 8:47 AM on a Sunday, which is thirteen minutes early, which means she's nervous about something she's pretending not to be nervous about, which means I should be nervous too.

"You look great," she says before I've fully closed the car door, which is a lie because I'm wearing the same blue jeans I wore yesterday and an oversized sweater that has a coffee stain on the left cuff that I've decided is a design element. My hair is doing the thing where one side is curly and the other side has apparently given up on the entire concept of structure, and I didn't have time to fix it because I was making myself an espresso at 7:15 AM like someone who has her life together, except I knocked the portafilter against the drip tray and spent ten minutes picking grounds out of the baseboard.

"You're thirteen minutes early," I say.

"I wanted to make sure we had time."

"For what?"

Jennifer doesn't answer this, which is how I know the women's brunch at Grace Community is going to be worse than she originally described, which was already bad enough — she'd called it "low-key" and "just food and fellowship," two phrases that in church-lady vocabulary mean assigned seating and an icebreaker that will make me wish for the sweet release of the rapture.

The drive to Grace Community takes eleven minutes. Jennifer talks for nine of them. The brunch is a quarterly thing, she explains, organized by the women's ministry team, of which Jennifer is now co-chair because of course she is — Jennifer volunteers for things the way other people breathe, automatically and without apparent awareness that she's doing it. There will be forty women. There will be quiche. There will be a speaker.

"Who's the speaker?" I ask, because this matters.

"Debra Collins."

I don't know Debra Collins, but the way Jennifer says her name — bright, slightly too loud, the vocal equivalent of jazz hands — tells me everything I need to know. Debra Collins is going to ask me to share something.

"Jennifer."

"It's going to be great."

"Jennifer, what is she going to ask us to share."

"Just — okay, so she does this thing where everyone shares their joy story? Like, the moment you found joy? And it's really beautiful, Rena, honestly, last quarter Margie Peterson talked about her granddaughter and everyone cried —"

"I don't have a joy story."

"Everyone has a joy story."

"I have a story about finding coffee grounds in my sock drawer this morning and being only mildly surprised. Does that count?"

Jennifer reaches over and squeezes my hand, which she does when she thinks I'm being self-deprecating but I'm actually being completely literal. There were grounds in the sock drawer. I don't know how. I have theories, none of them comforting.

Grace Community Church is large enough to disappear in, which is the main reason I go there. Sunday mornings, I sit in the back where the lights don't reach and the fog machine creates a kind of holy anonymity, and I sing as loud as I want because nobody can see me and nobody cares and it's just me and God in the dark, which is the only way I know how to worship without apologizing for taking up space.

The women's brunch is in the fellowship hall, which offers none of these advantages. The fellowship hall is fluorescent-lit, aggressively cheerful, and has round tables with assigned seating cards written in Jennifer's handwriting — I recognize the loops on the J's, the way she dots her i's with tiny circles that she swears she's stopped doing but hasn't.

I find my name card between someone called Barb and someone called Kaitlyn. Barb is sixty-something with the energy of someone who has opinions about casserole lids. Kaitlyn is maybe twenty-two, has a nose ring, and looks exactly as terrified as I feel, which makes me like her immediately.

"Hi," I say to Kaitlyn. "Do you know what's happening?"

"My small group leader said there'd be pancakes," Kaitlyn whispers. "There are not pancakes."

There is quiche. Four kinds, fanned across a buffet table like an edible peacock. There are fruit cups in mason jars. There are pitchers of orange juice and — I take a breath — two industrial coffee urns, the kind that brew at approximately 900 degrees and taste like someone described coffee to a machine that had never experienced joy.

I pour myself a cup. It is exactly as terrible as anticipated — burnt, flat, with a finish that suggests the beans were roasted sometime during the previous administration. I drink it without complaint because I am at church and because I'm told that grace extends to all things, even grocery-store Folgers from a sixty-cup urn.[^1]

Jennifer is across the room, clipboard in hand — the clipboard has a purpose I can't discern from here, but knowing Jennifer, it has a checklist with sub-bullets that have their own sub-bullets. She catches my eye across the fellowship hall and gives me a thumbs up. I give her a thumbs up back, which I mean sincerely, because she worked hard on this and the quiche looks genuinely good, even if the seating cards are a war crime against introverts.

The icebreaker is worse than I imagined, and I imagined it vividly.

Debra Collins stands at the front — she's maybe fifty, blond highlights, the kind of warm confidence that comes from either deep faith or excellent therapy or both — and she asks each table to go around and share "one thing that brought you unexpected joy this year."

This is fine. This is manageable. Unexpected joy. I can find something. I have things. I have a shop and a cat and a father who sends photos of biscuits and a friend who shows up thirteen minutes early because she cares too much, and I have —

Barb goes first. Barb's unexpected joy was her grandson's first steps. She shows a photo. There are tears. Appropriate, proportional, grandmother tears. The table applauds softly.

Kaitlyn goes second. Kaitlyn's unexpected joy was adopting a dog from a shelter. She also shows a photo. The dog is objectively adorable. More soft applause.

Then it's me, and this is where things go wrong, because as I lean forward to speak I catch my sleeve on the centerpiece — a mason jar arrangement of baby's breath and white carnations that Jennifer definitely assembled herself because the ribbon has the same tiny knot she uses on gift bags — and the jar tips, and the water goes across the table, and the baby's breath goes into my hair, and a carnation lands in Barb's quiche.

"I'm so sorry," I say, standing up, which makes it worse because my chair pushes back and hits the table behind me and a woman I don't know says "Oh!" in a tone that conveys both surprise and judgment simultaneously, which is a vocal skill I associate exclusively with church women and my mother.

"It's fine, it's fine," Barb says, fishing the carnation out of her quiche with the calm efficiency of someone who has raised multiple children and is unshockable.

Kaitlyn is handing me napkins. I'm mopping water and apologizing and there's baby's breath in my hair but I don't know this yet — this is information I'll receive later, in the car, at the worst possible moment.

"Okay," I say, sitting back down in a puddle I'm pretending isn't there. "Unexpected joy. Right. Okay."

Forty women are not looking at me. They're very carefully, very kindly not looking at me, which is somehow worse than if they were all staring.

"I don't — I don't really have a story," I start, and I can feel Jennifer's eyes from across the room, the particular quality of her attention when she's hoping I'll be okay. "I don't have a moment. I think joy is — for me it's not a moment? It's more like... fragments."

Nobody interrupts me. This is either grace or horror. I continue.

"Like, my cat sat on my lap for seven minutes last Tuesday. She's — Mabel doesn't do that. She hides under the bed mostly. But she sat on my lap and I didn't move for seven minutes because I was afraid she'd leave, and my leg fell asleep but she was purring and I thought — oh. That's it. That's the thing."

I'm doing the thing where I talk too much. I know I'm doing it. I can't stop.

"And my dad sends me photos of biscuits. Just — just biscuits. No words. And that's how Champion men say I love you, apparently, through baked goods and text message stoicism, and every time I get one I cry a little, which is embarrassing but also — that's joy? I think? It's weird and small and it doesn't have a testimony arc but it's mine."

I stop. The table is quiet. Barb is looking at me with an expression I can't read. Kaitlyn's eyes are shiny.

"Anyway," I say. "Sorry about the centerpiece."

"Honey," Barb says, and reaches across the wet table to squeeze my hand. "That's the best one I've heard all morning."

The woman next to Kaitlyn goes next — something about a garden, I think, tomatoes that grew despite the drought — but I'm not fully hearing it because my hands are shaking under the table and my heart is doing the thing it does when I've said something true in a room full of strangers, which is to say it's beating like it's trying to escape my chest and go somewhere less vulnerable. Kaitlyn passes me another napkin. I don't need it for the water anymore but I take it anyway, fold it into a tiny square, hold it like evidence that someone was paying attention.

The rest of the brunch dissolves into small talk and second helpings and at least one conversation where I talk too long about coffee beans to someone who didn't ask for a lecture, and then Jennifer appears at my elbow during the closing prayer — friendship as stealth operation — and whispers, "You have baby's breath in your hair."

"What?"

"Since the centerpiece. The whole time. There's a piece right — " she reaches over and plucks it out. "There."

"Jennifer. That was an hour ago."

"I was across the room!"

"Kaitlyn was right there. Barb was right there."

"Maybe they thought it was intentional? Like a hair accessory?"

"Nobody thought that, Jennifer."

She's trying not to laugh. I'm trying to be indignant. We're both failing.

The fight happens in the car, the way important fights do — not all at once but in layers, like sediment, one small thing pressing down on another until the weight of it shifts something.

It starts with Jennifer saying, "I'm really proud of you for sharing."

Which sounds kind. Which is kind. Except there's something underneath it — a relief that I performed correctly, that I didn't embarrass her, that the messy girl she brought to the nice brunch turned out to be presentable after all. Maybe I'm imagining this. Maybe I'm not.

"You sound surprised," I say.

"I'm not surprised. I just know it's hard for you."

"You know what was hard? The assigned seating."

"The seating was intentional — it mixes people who don't usually —"

"Jennifer, you put me between a grandmother and a twenty-two-year-old with a nose ring."

"Kaitlyn is in my small group! I thought you'd like her!"

"I did like her. That's not the point."

Jennifer is quiet for a moment, which is unusual enough to be alarming. The road between Grace Community and my town is flat and gray in February, fields on both sides still winter-dead, the sky the color of old dishwater. It's not a beautiful drive. It's an honest one.

"What's the point, then?" she asks, and her voice is careful in a way that tells me she actually wants to know, which makes it harder to say.

"The point is — " I press my forehead against the cold window. "You wanted me to have a joy story. A real one. With a beginning and middle and end and a verse reference. And I don't have that. I have fragments and biscuit photos and a cat who tolerates me, and I know that doesn't look like a testimony —"

"I never said it didn't —"

"You organized an event where people share their joy stories, Jennifer. The whole structure assumes joy looks a certain way. Big. Clear. Shareable. And mine isn't. Mine is weird and small and I knocked over the centerpiece and had flowers in my hair for an hour, and I'm always going to be the person who knocks over the centerpiece."

Jennifer signals left. We're turning onto Main Street. My town, my block, the steeple of St. Francis visible above the buildings like it's keeping watch.

"I didn't organize it so you'd perform," she says quietly. "I organized it because — because I wanted you to be there. With me. At the thing I care about."

Something catches in my chest.

"And your answer was beautiful, Rena. The biscuit thing — half the table was crying."

"Barb was crying because there was a carnation in her quiche."

"Barb was crying because you were honest."

Jennifer pulls into the alley behind The Hot Mess and puts the car in park. The engine ticks. Neither of us moves.

"I'm sorry about the seating cards," she says.

"Don't be. The loops on your J's are very consistent."

She laughs — the real one, not the church one. "You noticed that?"

"Jennifer, I notice everything. It's a problem."

We sit there for a minute. The alley is narrow and unremarkable — dumpster, fire escape, the back of Jamie's shop with the new cooler Todd installed humming against the wall. February light, thin and gray, doing nothing to make any of it pretty.

"I don't need your joy to look like — " Jennifer stops. Starts again. "Okay. I might have wanted it to look like mine a little. Like, maybe I had this picture where you'd share something and everyone would see what I see, and that's — that's not fair. I know that's not fair." She picks at the steering wheel. "I just need you to show up. Even if you knock things over when you get there."

"I showed up."

"You did." She pauses. "With baby's breath in your hair."

"For an hour, Jennifer."

"It was a look."

"It was not a look."

"It was a little bit of a look."

She leaves. I climb the stairs through the back room, past the deep freeze where I sometimes sit on the floor and breathe, up to the apartment where Mabel is on the cozy chair judging me with the specific disdain of a creature who has never attended a women's brunch and never will.

I change out of the sweater. I make myself a pour-over — Kenyan, the good one from Riverside, the beans Marcus roasted last week that smell like blackberries and something almost wine-like. I take my time with it. The kettle. The bloom. The slow pour. Concentric circles. This, I don't knock over. This, my hands know.[^2]

The cup is warm in my hands. The apartment is quiet. Through the window, St. Francis Memorial watches with its patient stone face, the same way it watches every afternoon, unimpressed and unchanging and somehow comforting because of it.

The joy of the Lord is your strength.

Nehemiah. I'd heard Debra Collins reference it during the closing, right after the prayer, right before the potluck-style goodbye that took thirty minutes because church women don't know how to leave a room without hugging everyone in it at least twice.

But I'd been thinking about it wrong, I think. I'd been hearing joy and thinking it meant the big feeling — the testimony, the crescendo, the moment you point to and say there, that's when everything changed.

Maybe it's not that.

Maybe the strength is in the staying. In the showing up to the brunch you didn't want to attend and knocking over the centerpiece and saying the honest, weird, fragmented thing anyway. In drinking terrible coffee without complaint. In sitting in a car with your best friend and fighting about what joy looks like and neither of you being right, but both of you being closer.

Mabel stretches on the chair. One paw extends toward me, then retracts. Her version of reaching out.

"I know," I tell her. "Fragments."

She blinks slowly, which in cat means either I love you or you're boring me. I choose to believe the first.

I drink the Kenyan. It's bright and berry-forward and exactly right — the kind of coffee that reminds you your tongue works, that the world has flavors, that someone thirty minutes north took the time to get this perfect without knowing who'd drink it or why they needed it.

That's joy.

Weird and small and mine.

[^1]: I have opinions about church coffee that would fill a separate essay and possibly end my membership. I'm exercising restraint. This is growth.

[^2]: There is a term for this in psychology — something about flow states and muscle memory and the way certain practiced actions bypass the part of your brain that makes you a disaster. I don't remember the term. I just know that coffee is the one place my hands and my brain agree to cooperate.