The Woodshop She Sold Before The Funeral

Nobody clapped. It was not that kind of room. But I heard, from three or four tables around that hall, the particular sound a church fellowship hall makes when seventy people let a breath out at the same time, and I saw old Mrs. Pemberton, who had taught Sunday school in that building for forty years, wipe under her eye with a paper napkin, and I saw Gary Odell, who had worked the parts counter next to my father for a decade, nod once, slow, the way men nod when they mean it more than words would carry.

I looked at Charlene.

She had stood up by then, at the end of her table, her hand pressed against her mouth, and when I met her eyes across that room she did not look away from me, which I will give her credit for until the day I die. She came across the floor, slow, every eye in that fellowship hall on her whether she wanted them or not, and she knelt down next to Dana and put her hand, for just a second, on the edge of that cradle, and then she looked up at me.

“I didn’t know, Russ,” she said, and her voice had nothing left of the hard, decided thing it had carried on the phone two days before. “I swear to you I didn’t know what it was. I saw a half built box with legs in a shop full of half built things and I didn’t ask. I should have asked. I should have walked out there one time in eleven years and asked your daddy what he was building, instead of just watching him go out there every night and coming back in tired, and resenting that shop because it was the one place I never followed him. That’s the truth of it, Russ. I didn’t sell it because I didn’t love him. I sold it because some part of me never stopped being a little bit jealous of a building, and I am ashamed to say that in front of all these people but it is the truth and you have a right to it.”

She reached into the pocket of her black dress and took out a plain white envelope, and I understood before she even said it that it held the rest of the eleven hundred dollars, the seven hundred Denny had not already given back.

“I don’t want this,” she said. “I want you to put it toward whatever that baby needs that your daddy didn’t get to finish building. I can’t fix what I did. I know that. But I am not going to stand here and keep money for something I had no right to sell in the first place.”