The Reception the Whole Town Gave

“I’ve never had anybody set a table for me,” Harvey said. “When Grandma was alive she’d put a plate out, but it was always just the two of us. I never had a whole room of people do something on my account.” His voice caught. “I keep waiting for somebody to say it’s a mistake.”

“It’s no mistake,” Lindy said. “The man at the Grange has never been right about a thing that mattered.”

I stood there and did what I should have done on Thursday. I stopped praying at God and prayed to Him. I said, “Thank You.” Then I said, “And if it’s not too much, I would like to pray for Roone.”

It was a short, cracked, reluctant prayer. I have since learned those are the kind that count.

At one in the morning the rain began. I lay awake listening to it on the roof. At two, Dolores called. She had the two o’clock shift.

“I know,” she said, before I spoke. “I can hear it too. Go to sleep, Verda. Forty-one women are praying about this rain. You don’t need to be the forty-second.”

I slept.

I woke at six on Saturday to a flat, bright light through the curtains. Outside, the pavement was dry. The sky over Pell Crossing was so clear a blue it looked scrubbed.

Arlie stood in the kitchen with his coffee. “It quit at four,” he said. “Like somebody turned a faucet.”

I do not say it was a miracle. I am a plain woman, careful with that word. I say the rain began at one and quit at four, that the forecaster said a system had slid south faster than anyone expected, and that forty-one women had been on their knees in their kitchens all night while I was not one of them.

At eleven the sanctuary was full, eighty seats and a hundred ten people, with the double doors propped open for the rest on the steps. Lindy came down the aisle on Arlie’s arm, and I watched a man who had never cried at anything walk his only daughter up the center of that church with his jaw working like a boy trying not to be caught.

Harvey stood at the front in his Army green service uniform, the jacket pressed sharp enough to cut yourself on, with a row of ribbons I could not have read from the pew and Ben at his shoulder. When Lindy reached him, he said something I did not catch, and she laughed once and pressed her lips together hard.

Pastor Wade said the old words. Then Specialist Harvey and Lindy walked back up the aisle together and out into the sun.

I came out behind them and stood on the top step and looked down at the churchyard.

The serving line steamed under foil along the iron fence, eleven hams carved into pink slices. The string lights swayed in the daylight like a joke only Earl understood. A three-tier lemon cake sat under the biggest maple with Vesta standing guard beside it like a sentry.

And the people. They were in the folding chairs and on the grass and along the fence: the women of my church and the women of Saint Mark’s, the men from the veterans hall in their caps, farmers from the co-op in clean overalls, the clinic’s veterinarian and her whole family, and the woman with the three-legged beagle, who had driven in from the next county and brought the beagle.

Cecil stood at the flagpole by the fence, which had been bare that morning. He ran a folded flag up the line, slow, with two old veterans at attention beside him. They saluted it as it climbed.