The Spelling Bee Josie Almost Missed

A girl at the library

On my way home I stopped at the Calder Public Library to return a book, and there at a table in the children’s corner, with a stack of word cards and a hot chocolate going cold, sat Piper Wendt.

She was by herself, with a face that had been crying a little and had stopped.

“Mrs. Haskell? Are you Josie’s grandma?”

“I am.”

She stood up very straight, like someone about to give a recitation, and it was the first time I understood she was frightened too.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t ask for it. I told Miss Lanier on Monday that Josie won. She said it was already decided.” Her chin trembled. “Josie spelled ‘conscience’ and I didn’t, and now I’m the one who gets to go.”

I could have said, “Then do something about it.” That would have made a ten-year-old girl responsible for a grown-up’s mistake.

I did not say it.

“Piper, you did not do anything wrong. Not one thing.”

“Does she still want to?” Piper asked. “Spell?”

“She does,” I said. “More than anything.”

Piper nodded. She picked up her pencil and put it down again.

“Okay,” she said.

I did not ask what she meant by it. I went home.

Thursday

Marcy traded every shift she had.

She and Tom and I drove into town together in his truck. Tom is a lineman for the rural electric co-op, and he had been up a pole outside Sheldon since noon fixing a line the sleet brought down. He came straight from the job in his orange reflective bibs. He is a big, quiet man, and he said nothing the whole drive in except once, at the stop sign on Elm Street.

“I should have been at that school on Tuesday.”

“You were on a pole, Tom.”

“I know,” he said. “It doesn’t help.”

Josie sat between her mother and me in the back seat, in her good green dress with the little white collar, her shoes polished by her father the night before. She was holding a folded index card with the words take your time on it, in Walt’s handwriting. I had found it that afternoon in the glove box of his pickup, and I had no idea how long it had been there.

“Grandma, I’m not on the program. What if they won’t let me?”

“Then you’ll have sat in a gym with your mother and your daddy and your grandma and a whole lot of people who came to see you,” I said. “And you’ll have worn the best dress in the building. I think that’s a good night either way.”

She looked out at the dark.

“Okay,” she said.

The Calder Elementary gym holds about a hundred and forty folding chairs when the bleachers are pushed back. By ten minutes to seven, there were no chairs left. The families of the six spellers took the first five rows. Behind them came the teachers, the aides from the care center, half the Methodist choir. Lyle and Bud sat in the fourth row in pressed shirts. Roy from the feed store had on a necktie.

And at the very back, standing against the wall under the basketball hoop with his cane in both hands, was Orville Tate.

At the long table on the stage sat Mrs. Arlene Brower, who taught seventh grade English in this building for thirty-four years and has pronounced the words at this bee for as long as I can remember. The principal’s chair beside her was empty.