The Woman He Called No Fun

So Maddie did something. She went to the fire chief, Ron Castetter, who runs the harvest supper, and she asked if the music at this year’s supper could be me. Just me, back where I used to be. And Ron, who had asked me to sing every October for twenty years and been told no for the last six, said yes before she finished asking.

And then my daughter did the thing that undid me. She did not tell me. She told everybody else.

She called Tammy, who was already practicing with me and had kept the secret like a saint. She called my mother. She called Carol Furnish, who had not laughed in her own kitchen that night in August, and Carol called her sisters, and it went out the way things go out in a town like Cardwell, through the prayer chain and the beauty shop and the line at the IGA, quiet and fast. Dana Tolliver is singing at the harvest supper. Dana is coming back.

I did not know any of this. I thought I was just going to get up and do two numbers with Tammy for the fire fund, the way I used to, and I was nervous about that much.

The night of the supper I put on the red dress. It fit different than it did at eighteen. I had six children’s worth of a body under it and I had earned every inch and I put it on anyway, and I did my hair, and Lucy sat on the bed and watched me like I was a movie. Greg came in to change his shirt and he stopped in the doorway and looked at me in that dress and I watched something move across his face that I had not seen in years. He did not know yet. He thought we were just going to supper.

“You look,” he started, and then he could not finish it, because there wasn’t a word in him big enough and he knew it, and I did not help him find one. I picked up my baby and I went down the stairs.

The fire barn was full when we got there. Fuller than I had seen it in years. I thought there must be a good auction item. We found a place at the end of a long table and I got the kids their plates and I did not notice, at first, how many people came by to touch my shoulder. Carol Furnish squeezed my hand hard and did not say anything. Old Mr. Dillard from the hardware store, who taught my Sunday school class forty years ago, stopped by and said, “We are glad you’re back, young lady,” and I thought he meant back at the supper and I said thank you and thought no more of it.