Move That One Up A Hand
By eight the square was full, and the mayor stood up on the courthouse steps with the committee behind him to cut the ribbon and start the festival, the way he does every year.
He is a kind, loud man, and he thanked the committee, and he said he did not know when the square had ever looked finer.
He said that whoever was responsible for the lampposts had outdone themselves and the town owed them a hand.
And the crowd on the square turned and looked up and down Main at the posts and they clapped, a real clap, two hundred people in barn coats clapping at cornstalks.
I stood at the back by the depot where I had ended up, too tired to hide anymore.
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Rochelle was up on the steps with the committee. I watched her stand in the clapping with her clipboard and I did not know what she would do.
She could have taken that clap. All she had to do was smile and nod and let the town hand it to the committee, to her.
The map in the window said it was hers to take. I had left her the whole opening to take it.
I had done it in the dark on purpose so there would be no scene, and the cost of no scene was that she could have it.
She stepped up next to the mayor, and he gave her the microphone to say the committee’s welcome.
And my sister looked out over the square, and found me at the back, and held my eyes.
“The committee did not do the lampposts,” she said into the microphone. Her voice was not bright and not committee.
“My sister Patty did. By herself. Last night. All of it.” She stopped and the square was quiet.
“I left her off the list and I should not have, and I do not have a good reason, and there it all is anyway, the whole street, because that is who she is and I have always known it.”
I have replayed that a hundred times. She did not have to say the part about leaving me off. The town would never have known.
She said it with two hundred people and the mayor and the clock all looking at her, which is a harder thing than tying cornstalks in the dark.
I have carried water for my sister ever since for the fact that she said it.
The square clapped again, and this time half of them turned to look at me, and I lifted a hand I could barely feel.