We walked down the fence line together, me on the pasture side, her on the cemetery side, with the wire between us, until we were past the last of the cedar trees and nobody could hear.
The wind was dying down. The sky had started to break a little in the west.
“I came once,” Gwyn said. “The first Sunday after we got married. Do you remember?”
I did remember, now that she said it. I had not thought about it once in six years. My stomach went cold.
“I sat down in the third pew,” she said. “Right where Walter told me to sit, so I could see him in the loft. And you came in with Alan and the kids and you stopped at the end of the pew and you said, ‘That’s where Mom sat.'”
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I had said it. I could hear myself saying it. I had not meant it cruelly.
I had meant it the way you say a true thing out loud when it hits you.
But I had said it standing over her, in front of the whole congregation, and then I had sat down somewhere else.
“I moved,” Gwyn said. “I moved to the back. And during the first hymn I looked around, and every single person in that church knew Annette. They had all sung with her. There were pictures of her on the wall in the fellowship hall. I was the second wife in her pew.”
“Gwyn,” I said. “I didn’t…”
“I know you didn’t,” she said. “That’s almost worse. Nobody meant anything. I just never belonged there. So I stopped going. And every Thursday night for six years he put on his good shirt and went to that practice and came home humming, and I sat in that house by myself, and I thought, he has a whole life I’m not allowed in.”
She looked down at the hymnal in her arms. “When he died, I wanted one thing that was mine. One day. Just me and him at the end, without his church and without Annette’s daughter and without her choir. I know how it sounds. I know what I said to Mr. Purcell. I knew it was wrong while I was saying it.”
I stood there in Virgil Haney’s pasture with burrs on my good slacks and listened to my stepmother tell me what I had done to her, and I did not argue with one word of it, because it was all true.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Gwyn, I am so sorry. I was so busy keeping Mom’s place that I never once made you one. That’s on me. Not on him, and not on you.”
She nodded. She did not say it was all right. It was not all right, not yet, and we both knew that.
But she reached over the top wire, careful of the barbs, and put her hand on my arm, just for a second, the way Hattie had done to her.
“He wrote my name in his hymnal,” she said, like she still could not believe it. “Six years ago. He wanted them to sing for me.”
“Then let them,” I said. “They practice Thursday at seven. I’ll pick you up at a quarter till. You can sit in the back the first time if you want. Or in the van.”