The Baptism Bill She Refused To Pay

The Morning Of The Baptism

I decided, sometime in that first week after Glenda’s call, that I was not going to make a scene. Scenes are for people who want to be talked out of something. I did not want to be talked out of anything. I wanted to be finished.

So I planned the way I plan everything, quietly, and I let the baptism happen exactly as Sheldon wanted it to happen.

He wanted the big banquet hall out past the highway, the one with the chandelier that always needs dusting and a kitchen big enough to cater for a hundred and twenty. He wanted his coworkers there, and his boss, and every cousin on both sides who could make the drive. He wanted, more than he wanted almost anything else that spring, to stand up in a room full of people who respected him and be seen as exactly the kind of husband and father everyone already assumed he was.

I did not fight him on any of it. I picked out a dress the color of a ripe plum, did my hair the way I like it, best, and got our daughter into the little white gown my own mother had kept folded in tissue paper since I wore it myself. I smiled at the photographer. I smiled at Sheldon’s coworkers. I smiled at his mother when she cried during the blessing at the church, a small stone building with a cracked bell tower that has stood in this parish longer than any of our families have lived in it.

I was not performing happiness I did not feel. That is worth saying plainly. I was proud of our daughter, and glad for the morning, and none of what I knew about that account changed the fact that watching her in the priest’s arms at the font was one of the finest half hours of my life.

But I was also, the whole time, a woman holding a fact that nobody else in that church knew I was holding.

By the time we got to the banquet hall that afternoon, the sky had cleared into the kind of hard blue you only get in southern Louisiana after a spring storm passes through, and the parking lot was full of trucks and church-lot cars three rows deep.