The Pan of Bars on Nicole’s Porch
She turned to me. “Amber, honey, you can come or you can go home. Either way is fine.”
“I’ll come,” I said.
I walked back to the end of the block first, to Jeff’s truck. He rolled down the window.
“Well?” he said.
“Go home, Jeffy,” I said. “I’m all right. Jean’s got it.”
He looked past me at Nicole’s front porch, where Jean was steering her daughter down the unshoveled steps by the elbow like she was nine years old.
“Jean’s got it,” he repeated. And he grinned for the first time in two weeks. “God help Shane.”
Pastor Dan’s office is in the back of the church, past the fellowship hall, and it smells like old hymnals and Folgers. He was eating a ham sandwich at his desk when the three of us came in.
He looked at Jean, and at Nicole’s face, and at me, and he put the sandwich down.
“Sit,” he said. “All of you.”
Nicole told it again. She told it slower this time, and he did not interrupt her once. When she was done he was quiet a long time.
“Nicole,” he said, “what do you want to do?”
“I want to take it back,” she said. “I want to tell the judge I lied.”
“Then that’s what we’ll do. You’ll write it down. I’ll witness that you wrote it freely. And then it goes to the people it needs to go to.”
He got her a yellow legal pad and his own pen. She wrote for forty minutes. I sat in the chair by the window and watched the snow finally start, little dry flakes going sideways across the parking lot.
When she was done, she handed it to me before anybody else. I read it. It was all there. The note. The shop. October. The grape juice at the supper club. She had even written, Amber Lutz is the best mother I know, and I knew it when I said otherwise.
She signed it. Pastor Dan signed under her that she had written it in his presence of her own free will. Jean signed too, just because she wanted to.
Jean called Shane from Pastor Dan’s desk phone. She did not ask him to come. She told him.
He came in twenty minutes, in his Sunday jeans and his Carhartt, and stood in the doorway of the office like a boy called to the principal. He saw me, and he saw Nicole, and he saw the legal pad on the desk.
“Shane,” Jean said. “Sit down.”
He sat.
Pastor Dan handed him the statement. Shane read it. I watched his face. I had been married to that face for twelve years, and I watched it go red at the neck first, the way it always did, and then pale.
“I never told her to lie,” he said.
“No,” Jean said. “You just sat in her kitchen and asked how the body shop was doing. Shame on you, Shane. I taught you better than that in the third grade.”