One Quiet Question Before the Pageant

“Jeanette,” she said. “Before we start, Doris asked for a minute.”

Nobody moved. You could hear the radiator tick.

Jeanette looked at the clipboard, at the cast list in her own tidy writing, then at the smear. “I know what this is,” she said. “I was trying to keep it from going wrong.”

Doris rapped her walker once on the linoleum.

“I ran this pageant forty-eight years,” Doris said. “I let a boy take forty seconds on that line once, in this building. The bus still got home for supper.”

That was all she said. She folded her hands on the walker.

“Dustin has the line, Jeanette,” said Pastor Ken from the back, not unkindly. “Doris called me in Omaha, and I agree with her. He is a shepherd again as of tonight, and the program will say so.”

Jeanette set her clipboard on the table, carefully, the way you set down something that might break. She said she needed some air. She walked out the side door into the cold, and after a moment Pastor Ken went after her in his driving coat.

Nobody else said anything for a while. Then Doris said, “Kris. You and I are going to have to figure out how a pageant gets run.”

I walked out into the cold with Dustin’s robe, and I sat in the Buick with the engine off, and I shook for a good ten minutes.

I was not triumphant. I felt the opposite. I had not expected the whole table to be waiting for her, and I am sorry she was shown to herself in front of nine women she would see at the Casey’s all winter. I had only wished to protect my boy.

Bob got home at ten to midnight smelling of diesel and wet wool, and I told him the rest. At seven the next morning he drove to his sister’s house.

He didn’t tell me what he said. When he came back he laid his gloves on the table.

“She asked if she could come over tonight,” he said. “I told her to ask Dustin.”

I stared at him.

“I told her it wasn’t mine to say and it wasn’t yours. It was his. If you want to make it right, you go to the person you did it to, and you ask him, and you take the answer.” Bob rubbed his eyes. “She said she was afraid of him.”

“Jeanette said that?”

“For years, and she’d never said it out loud. That was the part she was ashamed of.” He shook his head. “I’m not excusing her. But it sounded true.”

Jeanette came at six that evening.

She stood on our porch in her good wool coat, no hat, holding a plate covered in foil, the kind of thing you carry when you’ve run out of anything better to hold.