The Room Behind My Son’s House
The Town Finds Out The Way Small Towns Do
I did not tell anyone what happened at that party. I did not need to. A town this size does not require help spreading a story once half the church and three sets of neighbors have already watched it happen with their own eyes.
By the following Wednesday potluck, everyone in the fellowship hall had heard some version of it. Mrs. Alsop from two doors down squeezed my hand at the coffee urn and said, “Nancy, I am just glad somebody finally said it,” and moved on without waiting for a reply, the way people do here when words would only make a hard thing harder.
Brian stopped coming to the hardware store counter where the men used to sit and talk football on Saturday mornings. I understood why. A man does not much want to sit across from neighbors who watched his own nine year old shame him in front of the pastor’s wife over a sheet cake.
The diner on Main Street runs the same six farmers and retirees at the same corner table every morning, and I am told, secondhand, that the story made the rounds there within about two days, embellished a little more each time it changed hands the way small town stories do, though the core of it never needed embellishing to land hard. By the time it reached the Sunday service two weeks later, our own pastor worked a line into his sermon about children sometimes being sent by the Lord to say what grown adults have grown too comfortable to say themselves. He did not use any names. He did not need to. Half the congregation looked at our pew anyway.
I will admit I did not love being the subject of that much attention. I have never been a woman who enjoyed being talked about, even when the talk was kind. But I noticed something else underneath the discomfort, something I had been missing for two years without realizing it. People were finally looking at me the way you look at someone you believe, instead of the polite, careful way you look at someone whose situation you have decided not to ask too many questions about.