The Fiance Who Wanted My Brothers Gone

Earl Tibbs stood up first. Seventy-some years old, my daddy’s best friend, and he put his big hand flat on the table and he stood and he looked at Garrett and he said, “Son, you need to get your coat.” Just that. And then Brother Dean stood, and Glenda, and then Darlene from the diner was on her feet with her arms crossed, and then it was Ruth, and Donna, and the Hendricks, and one by one and then all at once about sixty people in that basement got to their feet, not saying much, not making a scene, just standing, the way a congregation stands when the preacher calls them to, a whole room rising up around me and those two boys like a wall going up, and Garrett Pruitt and his mother in her good coat stood alone in the middle of it, the only two people in the room still sitting down, and they understood, finally, where they were.

They left. Patricia said something ugly about all of us that I will not repeat and does not deserve to be remembered. Garrett did not say anything. He picked up the ring off the tablecloth, which told me everything I ever needed to know about him and which also, I will admit, made about forty church ladies gasp, and he walked up those basement stairs and out into the October dark and I have not spoken to him since.

Jesse, still hiccuping, looked up at me from where I had him against my side and he said, “Did I do something bad?” And before I could answer, old Earl Tibbs got down, seventy-some years old and his knees surely worse than mine, got all the way down on that church floor so he was eye to eye with my brother, and he said, “No sir. You did not do one thing but be a boy. He is the one who did something bad, and he is gone now, and he is not coming back.” And Jesse looked at him and believed him, the way children believe old men who get down on the floor to tell them the truth.

Then Caleb, who had been standing frozen by the cake table this whole time taking it all in with his loud mouth for once shut, said into the quiet, “So we still live with June?” and the whole room, sixty people, laughed and about half of them cried, and Glenda Ames said, “Baby, you are going to live with June till the cows come home,” and that was the end of my engagement and the beginning of everything else.

Here is the part about who shows up, because the standing up in the basement was only the first of it.