"What happened in Sunday School?" Dad quizzed over a plate of Sunday's pot roast. 

I replayed the morning, unsure of what I'd done.

"I'm sorry for whatever I did, but I don't know"

"Not you," reassured my father, "with Candy" [or Poppy or Ginger or some other vaguely food-related name, I forget].

"I don't know," I replied, still lost.

"Her Mom said she was upset because of what happened."

Still lost, Dad. Still lost.

"Well," I tried, hoping to divert attention back to my plate "we played this game where the lady gave us a Bible verse and we had to find it and the first one to read it got a point."

"Go on,' he offered.  This may have not been what he was looking for, but at least we were not talking about me. I think.

"The lady said Psalm twenty one and I found Psalm chapter 20, verse 1 and Pepper found Psalm chapter 21, but she got it wrong and I got it right."

"What happened next?"

"The Sunday School lady asked us to find Habakkuk, but nobody knows where that is."

'That's not it,' he noted.  'There was something else.'

'Can I have more potatoes now?"  

One of the things I understood as a child is that Psalms is in the middle and comes before Proverbs.  What I didn't understand is that there are often layers of stories at play.  There's the action of the transaction, but underneath are often motivations and intentions mixed with overtures of family dynamics and community tensions.  

I still don't know what did or did not happen with Olive. Whatever it was warranted a discussion with her Mom, my Dad and the Sunday School lady. Clementine's Mom didn't like where that discussion ended up because Clementine didn't come back for a while. 

I learned that day that my parents were watching some kind of invisible forces I could not see; some movement of energy between and among people.  They were dialed into a frequency I was not, keen to support an invisible dance. 

They call the dance relationships. 

Between any two people is a third thing: the relationship between them.  Add Sherry's mom to the mix and now we have relationships between Sherry, her Mom and the Sunday School lady.  Because this took place in the context of church, Dad was inherently involved because he stood as the proxy for the organization as its Pastor.  The number of relationships here is math I can't do, but math that my parents were trying to sort out as I pushed peas around my plate.  They were counting dutifully, assessing the relative health of each relationship and triangulating the changes brought about by a Bible Drill mishap.  The ability to assess (and manage) relationships is called Social Intelligence.  Over the years, I've watch grand dramas play out, forming a narrative only to calibrate that story on the way home. 

I'm grateful to Madeline for showing me the invisible force of relationships and to my parents for teaching me that relationships are worth trying to untangle.