The Quiet Rescue Down The Road

So Rosalyn built one. She is a retired schoolteacher, and thirty one years in a classroom teaches a woman how to organize anything, including a town. She got the Baptist church’s ladies’ circle to take mornings. She got two women from the Methodist church across the road, the same two churches that had spent forty years glaring at each other over one stoplight, to put aside whatever it is churches put aside over and finally cook together in the same kitchen. She got the VFW post to send a couple of the younger veterans over on weekends to split wood and fix what needed fixing around that place before winter got serious about coming. And she got Dwaine, my own son, roped into calling Mrs. Tackett’s boy up in Ohio, man to man, and telling him plainly that his mother had fallen and was scared and lonely and that money sent on a Sunday was not the same as a voice she could reach out and touch.

That was where the propane bill came from. The delivery ticket taped to the tank was six hundred and twelve dollars, money Mrs. Tackett did not have sitting loose and was too proud to ask her son for directly. Rosalyn had not paid it herself, though I would not have blamed her if she had. She had gotten on the phone with that son in Ohio and told him the number, not as a guilt trip, just as a fact a man needed to hear plainly, and by the next afternoon the bill was paid and stamped and taped back up on that tank like a small flag somebody had planted.