I was standing behind her at the coffee urn when she said it, close enough that I could smell the hairspray, holding a paper cup I had not filled yet.
“It’s an eyesore,” my sister-in-law said. “Half the boards are peeling and the end posts lean like drunks. You can see it from the highway.”
There were five or six women around her, the ones who stay after service to wash up the cups and talk. They nodded the way you nod when you are not sure yet whether you agree.
“If Dean and I had our way, we’d just let it fall,” Sheree went on. “Let the whole thing go. Then maybe she’d finally see sense and sell that place before it kills her.”
She meant my mother. She meant the fence my daddy built along the road in 1979, the white board fence that people in our part of Tennessee give directions by.
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I did not say anything. I stood there with my empty cup until one of the women, Rosetta, looked past Sheree’s shoulder and saw me. Her face went red from the collar up.
Sheree turned around. For one second she looked caught. Then she smiled at me the way she smiles at the bank, where she works the drive-through window, and said, “Robyn. I didn’t see you there.”
“I know,” I said. That was all I said. I filled my cup, and I walked out the side door to where Mom was waiting by the car.
My mother is Bernice Hale. She is 81 years old. She taught the fourth and fifth grade Sunday school class at that church for 40 years, from the first fall we lived on the farm until her knees told her to quit.
She was standing in the parking lot that morning in her good navy dress, holding her Bible and a sack of leftover memory verse cards she still carries out of habit. She asked me what took so long.
“Coffee line,” I said. It was not a lie. It was just not the whole truth, and I have asked the Lord about that more than once since.
I drove her home the long way, down the county road, so I could look at the fence the way Sheree saw it.
I am ashamed to say it took me a mile to admit she was not all wrong.
Daddy built it the year we got the place. Three hundred feet along the road, both sides of the gate, four boards high on oak posts set eight feet apart.
He painted it every other spring with a roller on a pole and a brush for the edges.
He died in 2014. Mom kept painting it for a while, a section a year, until she could not get down on the bottom board anymore. After that, nobody did.