“I believe that boy right there knows something.”
Betty Shears was standing straight up at her table near the front of the fellowship hall. She’s seventy-nine years old. She’s buried two husbands. She’s played the organ at Mount Hope Community Church since before I was born.
And she was pointing her cane straight across the room at my grandson.
Every head at every table turned.
Wyatt’s ears went the exact color of the cranberry relish on the table in front of him.
I need to back up a little. Because you can’t understand what happened in that hall without understanding the two minutes before it.
It was the Wednesday supper before Thanksgiving. The fellowship hall was so full that night that Pastor Ward had to send the Hendricks boys to carry in extra folding chairs from the Sunday school rooms. Even then, my husband Dale and I ended up at the very end of a table jammed up against the dessert line. I could smell the cinnamon on somebody’s apple crisp the whole supper long.
Wyatt sat between us.
He’s twelve. My son Curtis’s boy. He’d been picking at the same plate of scalloped potatoes for ten minutes without eating one bite.
And I remember thinking, the way you sometimes think a small true thing right before a big one, that my grandson had been acting strange for two months. And I still didn’t know why.
Then Pastor Ward stood up at the front of the hall with his coffee cup in his hand. He said he had one announcement before the pie got cut.
Dana Dermot stood up beside him. Her husband Roy stood up too, and their boy Micah.
The whole hall went quiet. That particular kind of quiet when everybody already half knows what’s coming and wants to hear it said out loud anyway.
“Some of you know our family had a hard fall,” Dana said.
Her voice caught on the word hard.
“The furnace went in September, and we lost near everything upstairs. And so many of you fed us and gave us clothes and prayed for us. I’m never going to stop being grateful to this church.”
She stopped. She pressed her lips together. Roy put his hand flat on her back.
“But something happened a few weeks ago that I have to say in front of everybody. Because I don’t know how else to find out who did it.”
Beside me, Wyatt went very still.
Not fidgeting anymore. Still the way a rabbit goes still when a hawk’s shadow crosses the yard.
