The Bible I Bought Twice

Heidi did not answer. She stood where she was. I saw her hand close and open on nothing.

The fellowship hall smelled like fried chicken and coffee. Harlan Odom’s wife had set up the long tables with paper tablecloths, and half the church was filling plates.

Women kept stopping by to squeeze my arm and say nothing at all. A church can say a great deal that way.

I was standing in the hall by the coat rack, taking my sweater off, when Heidi came around the corner.

She had gotten some color back. She held her purse in front of her with both hands.

“Maxine,” she said. She kept her voice low. “Can I say something?”

“You can say what you like.”

“I wanted the one from my parents to be the one he kept.” She said it fast, like something she had rehearsed on the drive.

“They spent a lot on it. They wanted him to have something his whole life. I thought two would confuse him. I thought it would be simpler.”

I looked at her. She is a pretty woman with a good haircut and a way of standing like somebody is about to take her picture.

“And the ninety dollars?” I asked.

Her face colored again. “It’s, I put it toward the ham for today. For the lunch. I was going to tell you.”

“No,” I said. “You weren’t.”

She did not say anything.

I did not make it bigger than it was. I did not raise my voice. I have stood in front of four hundred hungry children, and I know that quiet carries farther than loud.

“He’s got a lap big enough for two Bibles, Heidi,” I said. “He never needed you to choose. He needed you not to tell him I forgot.”

She looked at the floor. She looked at the coat rack. Then she went back around the corner, and I heard her heels go down the hall and the fellowship hall door swing shut.

That is all of it between us. There was no apology and no reaching across anything. I did not expect one, and I did not wait around for one.

Some people are not built to say it, and you do not stand in a hallway forever.

Lowell Colburn found me by the dessert table a little later.

He is not a man who talks much, and he had his hat in his hand, though nobody wears a hat in a church kitchen. He stood next to me and looked at the pies.

“Mrs. Lathem,” he said, “Sherry and I bought that Bible in Birmingham before we left on our trip. We’d have bought him a dozen if it would help. I did not know my daughter had been telling him that.”

“Mr. Colburn, I think she believed it was kind.”

“I think she believed it was convenient.” He turned the hat over in his hands. He nodded.

He took out his wallet, took out a hundred-dollar bill, and laid it on the table beside the pecan pie.