The Sunday Meal the City Tried to Stop

She sat down on the grass between Opal and an old man in overalls, in her white sundress, and she ate pinto beans with a plastic fork. Her fiance sat down on her other side. After a minute, her grandmother came down the steps with her cane, and after her the aunts, and then the cousins in their heels and pressed trousers, and every last one of them ended up on a quilt on the lawn.

At a hundred and ninety-one, Jonah did what he had come to do.

The mayor, a soft-spoken man named Ellery who runs the hardware store, had come through the line in his church clothes. He had taken his plate and nodded to me and said nothing, the way a man does who is not sure whose side he is on. Jonah walked up to him with the clipboards in a stack against his chest, sixteen years old and shaking like a leaf.

“Mr. Mayor, sir. This is three hundred signatures. All city addresses, in ink. We did not want to wait until Monday for you to see it.”

The mayor set down his plate. He took the stack and looked at the first page, and the second, and I watched his lips move. Carl. Opal. Wanda’s husband. Verlie’s name at the very top in trembling blue.

“I will read the rest of these in the morning,” Mayor Ellery said. His voice was not quite steady. “First thing on the agenda. And Jonah, tell your grandmother I will bring the permit paper to the church on Monday myself.”

At a hundred and ninety-nine, I looked up from the counter, and the line was gone.

I mean there was nobody left in it. The last of the families had been served and had found a patch of grass or a bench. The lawn in front of the pavilion looked like the biggest church picnic the county had ever seen, two hundred people on blankets and lawn chairs, in the sun, eating, with the creek going by behind them.

I had one plate left on the table. It was a good plate, with a thick slice of pork on it, a spoon of green beans, and the last square of cornbread, still warm.

I looked up, and Prentiss was standing in front of me.

He had come across the grass by himself. He stood there with his hands at his sides, like a man waiting outside the principal’s office, and the quarter zip with the town seal seemed too small on him.

“Mrs. Spangler,” he said, and stopped. “I was at the top of the steps for the whole prayer,” he said. “I heard you say my name. Nobody has said my name like that since my mother.” He cleared his throat. “I came over to tell you I was wrong. I do not know what comes next. I only know I owe you that.”

“I know you do,” I said. “But I do not think I am the one.”

He frowned. I turned my head.

Verlie was on her bench, across the walk, with her hands folded and a plate on her knees that she had not touched. She had been sitting there the whole time. She was looking at him with her cafeteria eyes, the ones that could see through a child’s coat to the lunch money he did not have.

“Prentiss,” she said.

He went across the walk like a boy, and I heard every word from my table.