The Boy in the Church Parking Lot

And some people did not come over.

Don, who chaired the trustees, caught me at the literature rack. Don is not an unkind man.

“I hear we’ve had somebody living in the lot,” he said, “and I hear he’s been in the building.”

“In the kitchen and the youth room shower. With two adults present, every time.”

“That’s something. But Sandy, I’ve got to think about this. We’re not set up to be a shelter. If one car is welcome back there, I can’t say no to the next five, and the next five might not be a nice boy with a job. And if something happens on our ground, it’s the church that carries it.” He shook his head. “I’m not against the boy. I’m against not knowing.”

I had no good answer. Four days earlier I had made the same speech to myself.

Marlene was sharper. She had run the women’s circle longer than I had run the office, and her granddaughter was in the youth group.

“You don’t know what he’s running from,” she said to me in the kitchen, with the dish towel still in her hands. “You don’t know one thing about that family. Our children are in that youth room every Wednesday night.”

“He’s not running from anything. He was put out.”

“So he says.” She folded the towel. “And as I understand it, you didn’t think so much of him yourself on Wednesday. You’re the one who called the sheriff.”

There were five other women in that kitchen. Every one of them stopped moving.

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

Don brought it to the trustees that Tuesday night, properly, the way Pastor Ray had said. I was asked to come. There were nine people around the table in the fellowship hall, and Marlene sat in as head of the circle.

Pastor Ray laid out the plain facts. Then he turned to me.

I did not make a speech. I am not a speaker. I had written four sentences on the back of an offering envelope, and I read them.

“I am the one who called the sheriff. I saw an old car and a young man and I was afraid, and I never walked out to ask if he was cold. He chose our parking lot because he believed church people would let him be, and because he could hear our bells. I do not think any of you are worse than I am for being worried, because I was worried first and I was wrong.”

Then I sat down. My hands were shaking and I put them under the table.

Nobody said anything for a bit. Don looked at the envelope in front of me.

“He picked us for the bells?” he said.

“So he would not be late for school.”

Don took off his glasses and cleaned them on his shirt.

It was not a clean ending. The trustees voted that nobody would sleep in the building or the lot, which I had expected and which was right. They also voted, six to three, that Eli was welcome in the kitchen and at Wednesday night supper like any other young person in town. Three people voted no. One of those families sat on the other side of the sanctuary from me for the rest of that winter, and I let them. I had no stone to throw.

Marlene did not say one word to me for three weeks.