One Quiet Question Before the Pageant

“Annette, he might slow things down.”

Jeanette said it with the whiteboard eraser still in her hand, and she said it the way you tell somebody the last of the pie is gone. Sorry, but it is just a fact.

Behind her, on the whiteboard in the fellowship hall of Bethel Methodist, the cast list ran down the page in her tidy teacher’s printing. Shepherd One. Shepherd Two. Shepherd Three. Shepherd Four. Next to Shepherd Two was a smear of gray where a name had been, and I could still read the ghost of it. S, T, I, N.

It was the second Sunday of December. The room smelled of Pine-Sol, burned coffee, and lemon bars somebody’s grandmother had cut into perfect squares. At the long folding table, nine mothers sat making halos out of coat hangers and tinsel, a glue gun going tick, tick, tick between them. Sixth graders by the piano were loudly murdering “Away in a Manger.”

And twenty feet from us, against the wall by the coat rack, stood my son.

Dustin is ten. He has autism, and he is also the most exact person I have ever met, which is a different thing and a more useful thing to know. When a room gets loud he stands by the exit with his headphones around his neck. He was standing there now, one finger tapping his leg, his lips moving.

I knew what he was saying. I could have said it with him.

“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass.”

That was the whole part. Sixteen words, the only line the shepherds got, straight out of Luke in the King James, the way Doris Albright had insisted on for forty-eight years. It went to the second shepherd. Dustin had asked for it himself.

“Jeanette,” I said. “He’s been working on that line since the sixteenth of November.”

“I know he has, hon. And that’s the problem.” She set the eraser in the tray. She was not smiling, and she was not being cruel. That made it worse. She was being reasonable. “If he stalls up there, everybody’s watching. And he’ll be the one who feels it. I’m trying to protect him.”

“From what?”

“From a bad night.” She lowered her voice, which did nothing. “Annette, last year’s pageant ran fifty-eight minutes. The Manor bus has to have those residents back for supper by six, or the aides go into overtime. I have a lot of moving pieces. I can’t have a part that might take thirty seconds, or three minutes. I gave the line to Ben Foley. He’s a quick study.”