Berniece did not say anything cruel back. That was the hardest thing. She looked at each of us down the table, one at a time, not angry, the way a teacher looks at a row of children who have done something she did not think they would do. Then she took her purse and the paper and left. The bell rang. Mrs. Ashcraft, standing very still with a bolt of flannel, said, “Well,” and put it down.
That night I told Orris all of it. Not the version where I had asked permission. The whole version. When I got to the part about the first drawing, the one in the cedar chest, he looked up.
“The one in the chest,” he said.
“You knew about that?”
“Thelda. I’ve been married to you forty-three years. I moved that chest when we put the new carpet in. There’s a note in it with a rusty pin.” He turned his cup a quarter turn. “I never asked. I figured it was yours to say.”
I put my face in my hands. That man had known about the envelope for years and let me keep it, the way he lets me keep most things, with his hand held out to catch me if I fell.
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“I’m going to have to give it back,” I said.
“You are.”
“She won’t want to see me.”
“Then you’ll hand it to Arvel,” Orris said. “But you’ll hand it to somebody.”
The Library Lot
I heard about the class from Ladonna, who had it from her daughter. Free. Saturday the seventeenth, ten o’clock, the library meeting room. Bring your scissors.
I did not go in. I want that on the record. On the seventeenth I parked across the road from the library in the Dollar General lot, engine off, and sat there for two hours.
I watched them go in. Farm wives with their sewing bags. A nurse in scrubs. A girl in a 4-H jacket, with her grandmother. And Zelma Burris, ninety-one, being helped up the library steps by her great-granddaughter, with her walker folded under one arm like a baby carriage. Jessamyn Hurley came late, with the baby asleep on her shoulder.
Through the tall windows, in the clear cold light, I could see Berniece. She was at the head of the long table, in her green cardigan, holding a block up in both hands. I couldn’t hear a word. She did not look like a woman who had been wronged. She looked the way she used to at the cafeteria door at eleven-forty, watching four hundred children come toward her, knowing every one would be fed.
Once, near noon, I saw her head go back in a laugh, and I put my forehead on the steering wheel, and the horn sounded, one short blat.
I started the truck and drove home.