Nine months
Nobody tells you what the waiting is like. It is not one long ache. It is a thousand small ones, and every time a car you do not know turns off the county road, you check the windshield.
Every Sunday at five o’clock his face came up on the tablet that Darla Pettigrew set up for me. Darla is my friend Vesta’s granddaughter, a bright seventeen-year-old with a nose ring and a heart like a pillow.
It was usually dark behind Teague. Sometimes he was in a tent, sometimes a truck, and once, I am almost sure, a bathroom with a tiled wall. He always said he was fine, and I always said I was fine, and we lied to each other beautifully for thirty-nine Sundays.
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Then, on the Sunday before that Saturday, the ninth of November, his face came up looking more tired than I had ever seen it.
“They’ve got us on a long tail, Granny. Maybe the twenty-second of December. Maybe January.”
“Well,” I said. “I will manage.”
“I know you will.” He looked down, and then at the camera, and his eyes were wet. I put it down to the lighting. “I love you. You know that.”
“I know it. Eat something.”
I have thought about that call a hundred times. He was lying to my face, as sweetly as a boy can, and I did not catch him. He learned to be careful from the best.
The strangest week
Nobody in Dunmore Springs would leave me alone that week.
On Monday, Orvis Ledbetter drove his tractor up my road and bush-hogged my front pasture, which did not need it in November. When I asked what in the world he was doing, he said, “Just being neighborly, Miss Immie,” and would not meet my eye. Orvis has met my eye every day since he wore short pants.
On Tuesday, our pastor, Brother Dub Colter, asked to see my water heater. Brother Dub does not know a water heater from a wheelbarrow. He stood in my utility closet nodding at the tank and saying “Hm” for two minutes.
On Thursday, Vesta drove me to the beauty shop in Calhoun City and would not let me pay. “It’s early, but it’s your birthday,” she said. My birthday is the eighteenth. It was only the thirteenth. I let her anyway.
On Friday, a nine-year-old in my Sunday school class named Katelyn Wix stood before me after prayer meeting like she was about to recite a poem. “Happy birthday, Mrs. Wofford,” she said, loud and clear.
“Thank you, honey. It’s not until Tuesday.”
Her eyes got big, and she looked over my shoulder. “I know, ma’am. I just wanted to practice.”
I thought they were being kind to a lonely old woman, and I will confess it stung. I drove home that night with my jaw set. It did not cross my mind that a child had been told to practice.