Nineteen Pickups Up the Gravel Lane

“You tell June we said hello,” I said. “Tell her the girls will come by and sing for her at Christmas, if she’d like that.”

He looked at me then. Straight at me, for the first time since that Sunday on the porch.

“Tess,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I know you are,” I said. “You told Cal four times.”

I put the key in his hand. He closed his fingers over it.

“We’ll see you Sunday,” I said, and I meant it, and I turned around and walked back to the porch to get Jo.

Cal didn’t come over. He told me afterward he’d decided it was mine to do, because I was the one Leland handed the letter to. When I came back, he opened my door for me, and I got in.

Pastor Ray walked to the front of the line and got in his old Chevy, and he pulled out onto the lane, and the rest of them followed.

Nineteen pickups and two trailers, going down a gravel lane in a line, at about fifteen miles an hour so nothing would shift. Then out onto the blacktop, and south four miles, in a line so long that a man coming the other way on his tractor pulled off onto the shoulder and took his cap off, I suppose because he thought it was a funeral.

Jo sat in the back seat between Maisie and the doorframe board and waved at him.

When we turned into Edie’s lane, I could see smoke coming out of the chimney.

The three women who’d driven off at ten had come straight here. Ione Voss had Edie’s spare key from the beauty shop. They’d lit the furnace, and opened the windows to air the place out and then shut them again, and swept the porch, and wiped down every cupboard in the kitchen.

And they’d made chili. Two big roasters full of it, plugged in on the kitchen counter, and a pan of cornbread on the stove, and a stack of bowls and spoons from the church kitchen.

Edie was there too. Somebody had driven into town and fetched her. She was sitting on the front porch in a kitchen chair with a quilt over her lap and her walker beside her, in the sun, and when Cal’s truck pulled in she lifted one hand off the quilt and waved it like a flag.

“Took you long enough,” she called.

Cal got out of the truck and went up the steps and knelt down beside her chair and put his face in her shoulder, and she patted the back of his head like he was six years old.

“There, now,” Edie said. “There, now. You’re home.”

They unloaded it all in an hour and a half. It goes faster going in, Virgil said, because you’re putting things where they belong instead of taking them from where they did.

Maisie stood in Edie’s kitchen with her map and her clipboard and told the men where the boxes went, and her map was right about everything except the downstairs bathroom, which she’d put on the wrong side of the hall.

When it was done, Pastor Ray stood in Edie’s front room with all of them crowded in around the walls and in the doorway and out onto the porch, men with their caps in their hands, women with their coats still on, and he bowed his head.

He didn’t preach. It was the shortest grace I ever heard him say.