The Spelling Bee Josie Almost Missed
Her eyes went to the window.
“Piper’s a strong speller. And she, well.” She stopped. “She presents well. The finals are the school’s face to the community, Mrs. Haskell. There’s a write-up in the Calder Courier. I thought Mr. Wendt would be proud to see his daughter up there.”
There it was, plain as a fence post.
“Did he ask you to?”
“No. He’d never. I just thought it would make things easier for everybody.”
“Miss Lanier, did you ask Josie?”
The room was very quiet.
“I didn’t want to put her on the spot,” she said finally.
“I believe you thought it was kind,” I said. “Hear this the way it’s meant, which is gently. You put her on the spot every day she’s in your room. You just don’t see it, because she’s quiet about it. Every time the whole room waits for her to finish a sentence, she is being asked something. She answers every time, as best she can. She answered you in January in front of twenty-two children. And she won.”
Miss Lanier wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist.
“The programs are already printed,” she whispered. “And Piper would find out she was only there because.” She stopped. “She’d be so embarrassed.”
“I am not here to take anything from Piper. She is a good girl and none of this is her doing. I’m not asking you to change the program. All I’m asking is that you don’t tell Josie she shouldn’t come.”
“Of course she can come.”
“And I’m asking you to keep your eyes open.”
“For what?”
“Just open,” I said.
I left the pound cake. I have never regretted that.
The counter
On Wednesday evening I stopped at Dottie’s for a cup of coffee I did not need.
It was the dead hour. Four men at the counter, ball caps on the hooks beside them: Orville Tate, eighty-three and slow as molasses, who had sat at the end every day since the Eisenhower administration, and beside him Lyle Pruitt, Bud Henley, and young Roy from the feed store, who is only sixty-four.
Walt’s coffee crowd.
“How’s the girl?” Orville said.
I put my hands around the cup.
I did not tell them about the card. I did not say a word against Miss Lanier or anyone else. I have watched what that does to a woman in this town. It makes her small, and then it makes her wrong, and then it follows her to church.
What I said was this:
“Josie’s spelling on Thursday night. The school finals. Seven o’clock in the gym. If any of you are free.”
“She win her room?” said Bud.
“She did.”
“Well, I’ll be,” said Bud.
Dottie stopped wiping the counter.
Orville Tate set down his fork. He is an enormous slow man with hands like fence posts and a face the weather has been working on since 1943. He turned on his stool all the way toward me, the way those three farmers had turned toward Walt thirty years before.
“Does the girl do it the way Walt did?”
“With her hand,” I said. “Yes.”
Orville looked at the pie case for a while.
“I’ll be there,” he said.
“We’ll all be there,” said Lyle.
I paid for my coffee and left, and I did not ask for anything. I do not know what you call it when a town hears the right sentence and understands the rest. It is the reason I have never wanted to live anywhere else.