One Quiet Question Before the Pageant

He went and got his sandals, the plain leather ones he’d be wearing under his robe, and he set them side by side at the front door.

“In case,” he said.

I was standing at the sink, shaking, when the phone rang.

It was Roxanne Foley.

“Annette.” She sounded like she’d been crying, or very near it. “I just wanted to tell you, Ben won’t say it.”

“Won’t say what?”

“Dustin’s line. Ben came home and sat on his bed and said he wasn’t going to say it. He said, it’s Dustin’s.” She blew her nose. “He said Dustin’s been saying it in the Sunday school hallway since November, and Ben learned it just from standing next to him. ‘It’s not mine, Mom. I’m only borrowing it.'”

I put a hand on the counter.

“I’m not asking you to do anything, Roxanne.”

“I know you’re not.” She stopped. “I sat there with my glue gun, Annette. I knew it was wrong and I didn’t know what to say. You said it in about fourteen words.”

The second call came an hour later, from Connie Hoyt, who is thirty-six, works nights at the nursing home, and whom I had always thought of as the quiet one.

“My Dylan has an aide at school,” she said, without any hello. “Has since first grade. I have never once said that out loud at that church. I just tell people he’s shy. I heard Jeanette say ‘slow things down,’ and I thought, they’d say that about Dylan too, if they knew.”

“I’m starting to think they wouldn’t,” said Connie.

By nine that night five women had called. By Wednesday it was all nine. Jolene Baer, the loudest woman in the congregation, who runs the Methodist Women’s pie booth at the county fair, was silent on the line for ten seconds before she said, “I’ve been asking myself your question all night, and I don’t care for the answer I keep getting.”

I told every one of them the same thing, softly.

“I’m not asking you to do anything. I only asked a question.”

It was the truth, and it is the only reason it worked. If I had asked them to take a side, there would have been sides. I had asked a question that did not have a side. It only had an answer, and every woman at that table had to go home and give it in her own kitchen, in front of her own child.

Bob called at midnight that Sunday.

He was in the cab of a bucket truck outside Atlantic, heater fan roaring, sleet on the roof, sixteen hours into his shift, third day of the storm, running on four hours of sleep.

“What happened?” he said. “Galen’s wife told Galen, and Galen told the crew boss, and the crew boss told me. Somebody said my sister cut the boy.”