The little girl said thank you to Shanna and ran back to her daddy, and Shanna stood up in my lights with her hands empty, and she was crying, finally, the way she had not let herself cry since she was a girl in pigtails stringing lights off the back of her mother’s truck.
“I took them off the sheet,” she said. “Mick and Jo. I reprinted it so I could take them off. That was me.”
“I know it was,” I said.
“I didn’t want it to be yours.” Her voice broke on it. “This night. I didn’t want one more thing that was Mom’s to turn into yours. You got the house and the pew and Dad, and I let all that go, I did, but this is the one night of the year I still get to be her kid.
And I looked at you out here with those two and I just.” She stopped. “I didn’t want to share it.”
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I had been right in that kitchen. I had known the reason, and hearing her say it out loud did not make me want to win.
It made me want to put my arms around a grown woman who was still eleven years old in the only place that counted.
“Shanna,” I said. “I have never once wanted to be your mother. Not for a day. I dust her picture every Wednesday and I have never moved it a quarter inch.
I did not come to this church to stand where Marie stood.”
“You’re standing where she stood right now,” she said, and she almost laughed through it. “Pastor Ray tell you about the cedar.”
“After I parked. I promise you, after.”