The Woman He Called No Fun

Then Ron Castetter got up on the plywood stage with the microphone and did the auction, and when the last of the quilts and the gift baskets had been bid up for the fire fund, he did not sit down.

He said, “Folks, we’ve got music tonight, like always. But this year is a little special.” He looked right at me. “Some of you have been coming to this supper long enough to remember a certain young lady who used to stand right here and make the hair stand up on your arms. Who sang the anthem at every ball game. Who we have missed for a long while. Dana, honey, your town has been waiting on you. Come on up here.”

I did not move. I could not. My face went hot the same way it had in Carol’s kitchen, but it was not the same heat. Tammy’s hand was under my arm, lifting me. Maddie was crying. And then the whole fire barn, three hundred people, stood up.

They stood up for me. Farmers in their good shirts and old women from the choir and kids I had taught in the church nursery grown up now with their own babies, and the volunteer firemen in the back, all of them on their feet, clapping, and some of them calling my name, and my mother at the front table with both hands pressed over her mouth and her eyes streaming.

I walked up to that plywood stage on legs I could not feel. Tammy came with me. And before I sang a note, Ron handed me the microphone, and because I did not know what else to do, I said thank you, and then the words just came.

I said, “I didn’t know. I’m sorry, I’m a mess. I haven’t done this in a long time. I didn’t think anybody would want to hear me anymore.”

And from the floor, from the tables, people started to answer me. Not all at once, not organized, just a town that loves you answering back. Carol Furnish called out, “You sang at my mother’s funeral and it was the only thing that helped.” A man I did not even know stood up and said I had brought a casserole to his family every day for two weeks the winter his wife had the cancer, and he had never forgotten it. Old Mr. Dillard said, “You were the best voice this county ever grew and you still are.” One of the young mothers from the nursery said I was the reason she kept coming to church when she wanted to quit.