The Coffee Can My Aunt Took
Harper’s Fork Baptist came up through the windshield the way it always does, white clapboard, black shutters, the steeple a little crooked since the ice storm two winters back that nobody has gotten around to fixing. Carol’s gray Buick was already in the lot, three spaces down from where Mabel’s own car usually sits, parked, I noticed, a little farther from the door than Carol usually bothers to park.
“There’s her car,” Mabel said, not like a woman spoiling for a fight. Like a woman confirming a fact.
“You still want to do this?”
“I have wanted to do this for five weeks, Robin. Today I’m just finally doing it.”
I will not pretend I remember one word of Pastor Dale’s sermon that morning. I remember the fans turning slow overhead because the air conditioner has never worked right in September, and I remember Mabel singing the hymns in her clear, steady alto, the same as she has every Sunday of my whole life, and I remember Carol two rows up and across the aisle, not once turning her head, her shoulders set in a way that told me she had clocked exactly who had walked in twelve minutes after the service started.
After the benediction, everybody moved the way a country church always moves, slow and visiting, toward the fellowship hall out back where Ardell Pruitt had coffee going in the big urn and somebody’s sheet cake sitting out on the long table with a knife laid next to it. Mabel did not hurry. She let three or four people stop her and ask after her garden and her hip, and she answered every one of them like she had nowhere particular to be, and the whole time I watched her eyes track Carol across the room the way a hawk tracks a field without ever seeming to look down.
Carol was over by the coffee urn, a styrofoam cup in her hand she wasn’t drinking from, talking to Pastor Dale’s wife about the harvest festival. She had on a soft yellow blouse I remembered my mother giving her for a birthday years back, and she looked tired in a way that had nothing to do with church, tired around the eyes the way you get when you have not been sleeping right.
Mabel walked straight to her. Not fast. Not loud. She walked the way she walks up to the counter at the feed store to pay for chicken scratch, like a woman with ordinary business to finish.
“Carol.”
“Hey, Mama.” Carol’s voice came out bright and a half second too quick. “You want some coffee? Ardell made a good pot today.”
“I don’t want coffee. I want my can back.”