The light came through those tall windows flat and clear, the way it does on a cold clear fall afternoon, and in the middle of the room, in a wheelchair, sat Ardella Hartwick in a gray cardigan with her hands in her lap. There were eleven residents, I counted, and two women in bathrobes at the back who looked as though they had wandered in and decided to stay. A girl in blue scrubs stood against the wall. Pastor Ellen stood beside the wheelchair holding a small brass cup.
And on one knee on the linoleum in front of Ardella, with a round loaf in her two hands, was Orva Ketterling.
She had her sleeve pushed up. I saw it. I had been afraid of seeing it for eight weeks. It was pink and shiny, the size of a playing card, healed over clean and flat, and as she lifted the loaf I watched the light run along the skin. I do not think I will ever forget how well it had healed. And nobody in that room was looking at it. They were looking at the bread.
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She broke the loaf. She did it with both hands, the way she had done it every first Sunday of my life, and she handed a piece to the pastor and a piece to the nearest woman, and she bent down to Ardella with a piece the size of a walnut. Ardella took it with her fingers. She put it in her mouth. And the room was so quiet I could hear the furnace.
Then I looked up and Orva was looking straight at me over the old woman’s shoulder. It was the first time she had looked at me in forty-seven days. She did not nod. She did not frown. She just looked, with the loaf in her hands, a small woman on one knee with a calm face. I had turned my cap into a rope. I stood there for about as long as it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer, and I said it, not out loud.
And then I did the worst thing I have done all fall. I turned around and walked back down the hall and out to my truck, because I could not stand to be seen by her, and I sat in the cab with both hands on the wheel in the empty lot, with the heater off, until the dash clock said four and the real time was three.