The Eleven in the Pews at Bethel

On the steps

Afterward, outside, on the steps, in the cold, with everyone else gone and the gravel crunching under the last car, Lisa stood with her arms wrapped around herself.

“I said nobody,” she said. “For four years I said nobody, Kris. To her face.”

“I know,” I said. “I thought it too. I just never had the guts to say it out loud. I sent her grocery money and felt good about myself. That’s worse, maybe.”

“It’s not worse.” She shook her head. “We were both wrong. I was just louder.”

We stood there a while. Josh had taken Abby out to the truck to warm it up.

The hedge trees were black against the sky, and down past the church I could see the white stones of the little cemetery, and somewhere out there, Dad.

“I still need the money,” Lisa said quietly. “I’m sorry. I’m not saying it to be hard. Greg’s unemployment ends in November. The funeral home doesn’t care about any of this.”

“I know,” I said. “Josh and I talked.”

That was true. Josh had been the one to work it out, the night before, at our kitchen table with a calculator and a legal pad.

Mom’s house in town would sell for about ninety thousand once the estate went through. After the funeral home and the medicine bills, that left about eighty, forty for each of us.

“Take my half of the house,” I told her. “All of it. Pay your mortgage through the winter. In exchange, your half of Bethel comes to me. Not to Dale.”

Lisa stared at me. “Kris, that’s forty thousand dollars for my half of a thirty-five-thousand-dollar building. You can’t afford that.”

“I can’t afford to lock it,” I said. “And it’s not a building. Not anymore.”

The phone call

Lisa called Dale Weber herself the next morning. I was not there, but she told me about it afterward.

She told him the building wasn’t for sale. He was disappointed but decent about it; Dale is not a bad man, he just needed a shed. Then she told him why, and there was a long pause on the line.

“Art Lindgren is my wife’s uncle,” Dale said finally. “He told us he went to Bible study on Wednesdays. I figured it was at the Lutheran church in town.”

“It’s at Bethel,” Lisa told him. “It was always at Bethel.”

Dale did not buy a building for a machine shed that fall. He put up a pole barn on his own ground instead.

And the first Wednesday in November, the space heater ran a little easier, because somebody had come by in the daytime and caulked every window in the building. Nobody ever said who.

What it costs now

The co-op bill comes to me now. It runs about a hundred and forty a month, averaged out, same as it did for Mom.

I pay it out of our grocery money. I do not write anything in the memo line.

Abby eats fine, and so do I, and some months I think about Mom eating half a casserole and saving the rest so that Kayla’s baby could sleep, and I have to set my fork down.

The eleven tried to pay it. Hank started a coffee can by the door with a strip of masking tape on it that said “Lights.” I took it down. He put it back up. We have gone back and forth on that can for a year now and I think it is going to win.

Josh comes on the Wednesdays he is home. He sits in the back with Bill and they talk tires and tractors until the music starts, and then they are quiet.

He fixed the bell rope in the spring. He has not rung it yet. He says he is saving it.