I wonder what faithfulness smells like.

I wonder what faithfulness smells like. Does it smell like the worn cedar of a pulpit pockmarked by forty-nine years of preaching? A half-century of being assaulted by the wedding ring this preacher has worn since back when vows meant something. Or maybe it has the acrid smell of forty-two new garbage can liners that this janitor unfurls every weekday at 4AM, excluding holidays, for the last twenty-five years—one for each of the thirty-six cubicles, two for the conference room, one in the corner office, and three in the copy room that everyone uses to smoke in.

No. Today, I think faithfulness smells like apple turnovers from Hardee’s. The ones you can get two for $1 plus tax. The kind that this elderly couple with matching silver hair sat down to eat after sharing a 6-piece chicken tender meal.
They had shared a similar meal seven children, twenty-five grandchildren, and fourteen great-grandchildren ago. (Sometime between then and now laid a lot of happiness. Her smile wrinkles told me so.) Back then, this place was called Jimmy’s. Sometimes when the sun shines just right, you can see the velvet burgundy peeking through from behind the clinical white walls that characterized this Hardee’s and the others like it strewn across the area like acorns around an oak tree. Back then, you couldn’t you drive three miles down to the road to another Jimmy’s if the waitress looked at you cross. First, because there were no other Jimmy’s. Second, because the road ended two miles away at Clark road; which was more of a gravel trail than it was a road. There was no Bright Meadow Estates or Whispering Willow Plantation to speak of.
A plate of chicken tenders used to cost $2.25 including tax. Back then, he had pretended not to like the chicken tenders here. Instead he ate ketchup sandwiches that he made with saltine crackers. Ketchup and saltine crackers were free.
Jimmy’s mom used to make all the apple pies from scratch. She’d make them from the golden apples she’d pick from the row of apple trees behind the restaurant. Some years they wouldn’t have any if the harvest was particularly bad. They never did get any dessert back then anyway. They’d cut down the trees to make room for more parking spaces when they put in the Hardee’s.

But today, the faithfulness raising from those apple pies hugged two pairs of arthritic hands that seemed like they were going to fall apart if they weren’t being held together by two well-worn wedding bands.