Just As I Am

They pass the Lord's Supper down the pews at Sardis Baptist in a brass tray, and you take your little cup out of it, and then you hold it. You do not drink. Everybody drinks together at the end, when Vernon says to, so there is a long minute where a whole church sits in silence holding grape juice and thinking about the Lord.

I have spent that minute, first Sunday of the month, every month since we came here, thinking about having a man's cock in my mouth.

Not a particular man, most months. It moves around. That September it was Kyle Ledford, who runs the sound in the booth at the back, and there was nothing soft about it. No candle and no conversation. I was sitting in the second pew in a navy dress with my knees together and my husband's voice coming over the top of me, and I was working out, in order, exactly what I would do to that man if somebody handed him to me in a room with a lock on the door.

So I am going to tell on myself. I am going to use the words, because there is no reason to sit down and tell this at all if I am going to tell it in the voice I use at the door.

I wanted his cock in my mouth. I wanted to be down on a floor somewhere with my dress shoved up and his hand in my hair and I wanted him to say out loud what I am. That is what was going through me while the brass tray came down the row. That is what has been going through me, in one arrangement or another, since I was thirteen years old.

And I have never said one of those words out loud in my life. Not one. Not once, not to anybody, not to my husband in the dark in all our married life. In here, all day long, every day since I was a girl. Out there, not one time.

Most people cannot hold a thing like that and a life like mine at the same time, and that is not my problem.

Vernon read the words he reads. He has read them the same way since before we ever came here and he does not look at the page.

"For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you."

I thought about how long it had been since I had put anything in my mouth that I actually wanted.

"That the Lord Jesus, the same night in which he was betrayed, took bread."

I thought about the weight of it. I have wanted that specific thing since I was thirteen years old and I could not have told you where the idea came from.

"And when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, Take, eat."

Take, eat.

I was not fighting this. People get that wrong about a woman like me and I have had a long time to watch them do it. They think there is a war going on. They think the church lady in the second pew is white knuckling it, praying it down, wrestling with the devil in her good navy dress.

There has never been a war. There has never been one minute of a war. I hold the little cup and I think about swallowing and I feel exactly as guilty as you feel when you are hungry.

Then Vernon says let us drink together, and we do, and it tastes like grape juice out of a plastic cup, and I put mine in the rack on the back of the pew in front of me and I smooth my skirt over my knees and I sing.

That Sunday, while we were singing, I did a thing I had never done.

I looked up what Sardis was, the year we came. There is a letter to that church in the back of the Bible and it is not a kind one. I have never mentioned it to Vernon and I have never mentioned it to anybody, and I could not tell you why I looked it up in the first place.

The booth at Sardis is a window in the wall above the last row, with the glass tilted so it does not throw the light back at you. You cannot see much in there. You can see a shape, and you can see the light off the board on his face and his hands.

I had known Kyle Ledford was looking at me for years. That is not vanity and it is not a guess. A woman knows the difference between a man's eyes on her and a man's eyes on the room, the way you know somebody is standing behind you in a kitchen.

All that time he had looked, and I had never once looked back, because I did not need to. What I did instead is I used it. On a hard night, when Vernon was asleep and the house was quiet, I would put myself back in that pew and I would put him back in that booth and I would let the whole hour play out with him watching me and no one else knowing, and I would think the filthiest words I have got about a man I had hardly spoken to, and that was usually all it took.

So the man had been doing a job for me for the better part of a decade without being informed.

That Sunday I turned around during the second verse and I looked at the glass.

The shape behind it went still, and not the way a person goes still when they get caught. Stiller than that. The way a deer does it.

I held it for about as long as it takes to breathe in, and then I turned back around and sang the rest of the hymn.

Nothing showed on me. Nothing has ever showed on me. I could not tell you why I was handed that and other women were not, but I have had the use of it my whole life and it has not failed me yet.

* * *

I stand at the door after the service. I have stood at that door since we came, and I could do it in my sleep, and I am good at it.

"Rebecca, that was a word this morning."

"Wasn't it. He worked on that one all week, I heard every draft of it in the kitchen."

"How is Presley liking school?"

"She loves it and she calls me twice a week and I would like it to be more, but I'm told that means we did it right."

That is the job. Names, children, surgeries, the shut-in list, who has a mother failing in Cookeville. I keep all of it in my head without writing any of it down, and people tell each other that Brother Vernon's wife is the sweetest thing you will ever meet, and they are not being fooled, and people are always surprised to hear me say so. I am not running a con on those people. I love them. I have sat up all night in a hospital room with Wanda Sowell's dying sister and I would do it again tomorrow.

You can be two things. Nobody tells you that. They tell you that you are either the woman at the door or you are the other kind, and the whole business of my life has been finding out that there is no rule anywhere that says you cannot be both at the same time, in the same body, in the same navy dress.

Patsy Threadgill came through ahead of the Culpeppers and did not ask me about anything.

"You didn't sleep," she said.

"I slept."

"All right." She patted my arm and went on by, and then she stopped and turned around. "The rolls were dry. That was not you, that was the oven, and I have told Harold."

"I know it."

"I know you know it. I am telling you so you quit thinking about it."

Patsy has been my friend since about a week after we came and she is the only person in that building who talks to me like I am a person instead of an office. Everybody else at that door gets the good version of me. She gets whatever is left, and she has never once asked for the good one.

Roberta Dilbeck came through last, because she always comes through last. She is past ninety and she has sat on the front pew left side since before I was born, and she goes down the aisle at about the speed of a season changing. I have never in my life seen that woman turn her head in that room.

She took my wrist. Her hand is like paper over sticks.

"Rebecca."

"Yes ma'am."

"You looked at the back of the room."

I laughed. It came out of me easy, because it was a funny thing to say, and because I had already decided it was nothing.

"I was checking on the sound, Miss Roberta. It was popping in the second hymn."

"No it wasn't," she said.

She patted my wrist twice, the way you settle a dog, and she went on out into the sun, and Harold Culpepper took her elbow at the step and said something about the heat. He comes up there every Saturday night of his life to set the water in that tank and check the thermostats, and he has told me the number he sets it to every single time, as though I had asked.

I stood there and greeted whoever else came.

* * *

Vernon takes a nap on Sunday afternoon and he is not sorry about it. He preaches twice and he teaches a class in between and by the middle of the afternoon he is done, and he lies down on top of the covers with his shoes off and his socks on and he is out before I can get my own shoes off.

I like him asleep. That is not a complaint. There's something in his face when he is asleep that is a good deal younger than the rest of him and I have never told him about it.

I need to say something about my husband before we go any further.

Vernon Edgewood is good.

I do not mean good the way people say it at a funeral. Good in the ordinary daily way that nobody writes stories about. He has never raised his voice at me. He has never made me small in front of anybody. When my mother was dying he drove to Jackson every Thursday for more than a year and he never described that as a sacrifice, to me or to anyone, and I know he did not describe it to anyone because I would have heard.

He is not a hypocrite. I have looked. A woman married to a preacher as long as I have been has looked, believe me, and there is nothing there. No bottle, no phone, no girl in the church who gets a warmer handshake. He turned down a church in Murfreesboro that would have paid him twice as much as Sardis pays, and I found out about it from the search committee's wife at a funeral, and when I asked him about it in the car he said he did not want to talk about it in a way that meant he had already decided and it had cost him something.

There is one thing wrong with my husband, and it is small, and it took me years to see it clearly enough to name it.

He does not know I am in here.

He loves me. I am not being clever. He loves the woman at the door, and the woman in the kitchen, and the mother of those two children, and he is not wrong about any of them, they are all me. But it has never occurred to him, in all this time, that there might be a room in me he has not been in. He wonders about people. He wonders about them all day long. It is most of his job and he is good at it. He has never once wondered about that, because in the world Vernon grew up in there are good women and there are the other kind, and a good woman is one who takes what she is given in the dark and does not ask for anything of her own. He would tell you he does not believe that. He has even preached against it. But it is what he does, and what a man does every day of his life is what he believes.

So he has never asked me what I think about.

That is it. That is the whole complaint I have got against my husband, and I have had a long time to come up with a better one. He is a decent man. He has never once asked his wife a question. And I have carried the answer around all this time like a woman carrying a covered dish to a house where nobody comes to the door.

He woke up in time for supper and we had chicken and I sent Colton to the store for ice. Colton is our youngest, sixteen, and he plays baseball badly and does not care, and as far as I can tell he was put on this earth to be sent to the store.

* * *

We had each other Sunday night, because we generally do.

You are expecting me to tell you it was cold. It was not cold.

He wanted me. He reached over and put his hand flat on my stomach, which is what he does, and he said my name in the voice he only uses in that room, and I turned toward him and he was already there. He is not a bad man in a bed. He kisses me. He has always kissed me. He says things in my ear that would embarrass him at any other hour of the day.

It was good. I finished, or I finished enough, and afterward he lay on his back with his arm out and I put my head on it and he was asleep before I had settled and I lay there in the dark looking at the ceiling fan.

And then later on I moved his arm off me and turned on my side and put my hand between my legs and finished the job properly, quiet, the way I have always done it, with my husband breathing beside me.

I thought about a shape behind glass. I thought about his cock. I used the word, in here, where I keep it, and I came with my mouth shut and my face in the pillow, and then I went to sleep.

I was not thinking about my husband.

I was thinking about a booth at the back of a room, and a shape going still behind the glass.

* * *

The week went how a week does.

Monday I did the meal train spreadsheet and took a casserole to the Batsons because she had her gallbladder out, and Patsy met me at the fellowship hall with the key because she is always there before I am. Tuesday was the shut-in list and Miss Vada gave me a jar of pickles I will never eat, and I took them like they were rubies.

I went to the Kroger on Tuesday afternoon and there was a man in the produce aisle in a company polo with his sleeves cut off, and he had good forearms and a bad haircut, bless him, and I looked at his hands a beat too long while I was picking through the peaches.

A beat is longer than people think. In that much time I had him in the stockroom with my dress up and my face against a shelf, and I had the word for it too, and it stayed where it lives, and then I said excuse me and reached past him for a bag.

Then I went and got my flour and my sugar and I thought about him the whole time.

That is not an event in my life. That is Tuesday. That has been every Tuesday since I was a girl. I have done it at the bank. I have done it at the tire place. I did it at Aunt Carol's funeral, standing at the graveside in the wind, about a man from the funeral home in a gray suit, and I never did learn his name, and I have never lost one hour of sleep over it.

Wednesday I sat in the booster meeting at the high school and did not hear one word about the concession stand.

Thursday I went by the church office to drop off the nursery rotation and Wanda Sowell told me more than I needed about her son-in-law.

And under all of it, all week, was that sermon.

Vernon had preached it a while back. Matthew five. He works through a book at a time and he does not skip the hard ones, and when he got to it he did not soften it, because that is not what he does.

Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

He said it more than once from that pulpit. He said, and I remember this exactly, that our Lord was not raising the standard to scare us but to close a door we like to leave open, the door where a man tells himself he is clean because he never touched anybody. He made sure to point out that it applied to us ladies too.

Already committed adultery, he said. It is finished. It is done and there is no taking it back.

I sat in the second pew with my hands in my lap and I made myself look straight at it.

I committed it every day since I was thirteen, and most days more than once, and I am not going to sit here and count them for you because there is no number. The man in the produce aisle. The funeral home man in the gray suit. My husband's own friend from seminary who stayed in our guest room a week one summer. The plumber. The plumber's son. Kyle Ledford, from a pew, while my husband preached.

By the standard my husband preached from his own pulpit, I have been an adulteress since Kurt Cobain died. Thousands of times over. It is finished, it is complete, it is already written down and there is not one thing I can do about any of it.

And I sat there and I felt what I always feel, which is nothing, and I thought:

Well. Then it is already done and it has been done for years, and the only thing left in front of me is for my body to go and do what the rest of me has been doing since I was a girl.

That is not a conclusion I came to that week. I came to it back then in that pew and I put it down and I picked it up again about once a month the way you pick up a rock you keep in a drawer.

But that week I picked it up and it was warm.

* * *

Thursday night Vernon sat at the kitchen table with his books out and his reading glasses down his nose and he read me a sentence out loud because he thought it was good, which he does, and it was good, and I told him so.

Then he said, "You've been quiet."

"I've been busy."

"That's not the same thing."

And I looked at that man across my own kitchen table, and that was the closest he ever came. That was the door standing open. If he had said one more sentence. If he had said Rebecca, what do you think about.

He said, "Well, you'll tell me if it's something."

"I will."

He went back to his book.

Friday morning I called the church office and asked Wanda whether anybody had gotten the nursery closet cleaned out, and she said no, and I said I would come do it Wednesday afternoon.

I did not need to know when Kyle Ledford ran his cable.

I already knew. He does it Wednesday afternoons before service, alone, and he has since the day we came.

* * *

Sunday came and went and I never turned around, and it about killed me.

Wednesday I did the nursery closet, and I did it properly, because I am not going to be the kind of woman who lies about a closet.

Then I came out into the hall with a garbage bag in each hand and stood there and listened to the building.

An empty church in the afternoon has a particular sound. The air handler, and something ticking in the ceiling, and that is all, and it makes the room feel like it is waiting on you. I put the bags by the side door and I went up the hall past the offices, which were dark because Wanda goes home in the afternoon, and I pushed open the door into the back of the sanctuary.

He was on the floor in the aisle with a spool of cable and a knife.

He looked up and did what he always does, which is get to his feet too fast.

"Mrs. Edgewood."

All those years. All those years of that man saying Mrs. Edgewood to me at the back of that room, in that voice, while his wife sang in the choir at the front of the room, and it had never occurred to him to try anything else.

"Kyle."

"Sorry, I've got this all over the aisle here, let me get it out of your way."

"You're fine."

He is not a big man. He is my height and thin through the shoulders and he has one of those faces that never quite settles. He was down on one knee again already, working, because working meant he did not have to look at me, and I understood then that he had been doing that just as long.

I walked down the aisle and sat down in the end of a pew about halfway up, and I put my purse beside me, and I did not say anything.

He got a little cable dressed and then he could not stand it.

"Everything all right?"

"Yes."

More cable.

"Miss Roberta doing all right? I saw Harold had to help her out."

"She's past ninety."

"Yes ma'am."

I have a key to every door in that building. I have had them since the week we came and nobody has ever once asked me what I do with them, because I am the one who unlocks the place for the women and locks it after them.

I let it get quiet again, and I looked at the ceiling of that room, at the fans and the beams and the little brown camera in the corner over the baptistry.

I was not afraid. My face was hot and my hands were cold and my heart was going, and any woman reading this knows the difference. I was not afraid of what I was about to do. I was only afraid that he might make it impossible, and that I would have to go home and be the woman at the door of the church for the rest of my life.

"Kyle."

"Ma'am."

"Look at me a minute."

He looked up. He had the knife in his hand.

"You watch me," I said.

His face did a thing I will remember when I am Roberta Dilbeck's age. It did not go guilty. It went blank first, all the way blank, like a screen cutting out, and the guilt came in behind it about a half second later, and in that half second I saw the actual man, and the actual man was not sorry at all.

"I don't know what you mean."

"Yes you do."

"Mrs. Edgewood, I run the cameras, I have to look at the whole room."

"You do have to look at the whole room," I said. "And you look at me."

He put the knife down on the carpet. It made a small sound.

"I'm going to say the next part once," I said, "and then I'm going to leave, and if you want to go home tonight and decide I lost my mind, you can, and I will never bring it up again and I will be exactly the same to you and to Charlene for the rest of my life. I mean that. Do you believe me?"

He did not say anything.

"I have known you were looking at me for years," I said. "And I have let you. And I have gone home and gotten in my bed next to my husband and thought about you looking at me, and used it. And used it. And used it. More times than you would believe if I told you."

I said it in my regular voice. I did not drop into anything. I said it the way I tell a woman on the phone that I will bring rolls.

He sat back on his heels in the middle of the aisle of Sardis Baptist Church and put his hand over his mouth.

"Oh God," he said.

"There's one thing I have wanted since before I was married," I said, "and I have never had it, not one time, and I am forty five years old. It is a small thing. It would not take long. And I would like it to be you, because you are the only man I know who has already been thinking about it as long as I have."

"You don't know that."

"Kyle."

"You don't know that," he said again, and his voice came apart in the middle of it, and that was the answer.

I picked up my purse.

"Glenhaven," I said. "The north end, up past the doors where that church meets. Tuesday at noon. Your truck, not my car."

He was shaking his head. He was shaking his head the whole time I was talking.

"I can't. Mrs. Edgewood. I can't, I've got Charlene, I've got, no. No ma'am."

"All right," I said.

"I'm serious."

"I know you are."

I stood up and smoothed my skirt and stepped over his cable, and I stopped beside him, and he was still down on the floor, which put his face about level with my hip, and neither one of us moved for a second.

"Noon," I said. "I'll wait until half past. If you're not there I'll drive on to Cookeville and see about my list, and that will be the end of it."

I walked up the aisle. At the back I put my hand on the door and I did look at the booth, because I could not help it, and the glass was dark and there was nobody behind it, and I thought: all those years you sat up there and never moved, and it took me one afternoon.

Then I got my garbage bags out of the hall and put them in the dumpster and drove to the high school to get Colton, and I was early.

* * *

Sunday was the longest day of my life and I got through it at a dead run.

He was in the booth. I know he was in the booth because the lights came up on the second service the way they always do and somebody has to do that.

I never looked, not one time, all morning. I sat in the second pew with my back to that man and I could feel the whole wall of the room behind me like a stove left on, and I sang, and I took notes on the sermon in the margin of the bulletin in my good handwriting, and I stood at the door afterward a good while and asked Belinda Teague about her knee.

He did not come through my line. There are two doors. He went out the other one, and Charlene came through mine.

"That was a good service," she said.

"Wasn't it."

"Rebecca." She had my hand and she did not let it go when the shake was over. "Would you pray for us?"

She did not say what for. That is how it is asked in that church, and you do not ask, and I have been on the other end of that question four hundred times and I have never once asked.

"Of course I will, honey," I said. "Of course I will."

She is a small blonde woman with a pretty voice and she has been kind to me since the day we came. Her hands were cold. They are always cold, in September, in the sun, and I know it because I have held them at that door every Sunday for eleven years.

What I felt was nothing at all. I liked her. I have always liked her. She stood there in the sun in the church door and I liked her and I did not feel one thing.

Monday I did the meal train and I ironed and I did not sleep well.

Tuesday I got up and made Vernon's eggs and got Colton out the door and took a shower and stood in my closet for a while.

I put on a gray dress with a little bit of give in it, and my church shoes, and I did my face the way I do it for a funeral, which is more than Sunday. I stood in front of the mirror over my own dresser in my own bedroom and I looked at a woman with a heavy chest and wide hips.

You have read the other kind of story and you are waiting for it. I did not have a moment. I did not search that face for the girl I used to be. I did not think, who are you.

I knew exactly who I was. I have known the whole time. It has never been a mystery to me.

I told Vernon I was going to Cookeville for the hospital list and I would have my phone.

He said drive careful.

* * *

Glenhaven Mall sits on the other side of town and it has been dying since before we moved here.

There is a nail place and a vape shop down the near end and the rest of it is dark stores with the signs taken down and the shadow of the letters still on the brick. The big anchor at the north end has a church in it now. Not a real one. One of those that meets in a rented room, with a banner zip tied to the rail and a cross made out of nails propped in the window.

I pulled in a little before noon and there were a few cars in that whole lot, all of them down by the nail place, and the north end was a long stretch of empty asphalt with the weeds coming up through it.

His truck was already there.

He had backed it into the corner by the loading dock, up against the wall, out of the sight line from the road, and I sat in my car in the middle of all that empty and looked at it and my hands were shaking hard enough that I could hear my keys.

It was not nerves. There is a feeling that comes up under your ribs when a thing you have carried your whole life is about to get set down, and I did not have a name for it then and I am not sure I have one now.

I took my purse and I got out and I walked across that lot in my church shoes in the heat, and the heat came up off the asphalt and went under my dress, and partway there I started laughing. Out loud. By myself, in an empty parking lot, in the middle of a Tuesday.

It was relief. I know that now.

He had the passenger door unlocked. I got up in it and pulled the door shut. The air was running. It was an old truck with a bench seat and a rubber floor and nothing between us but the seat belt buckle, and it smelled like a work truck, cardboard and cut grass and something chemical. He had both hands on the wheel at ten and two, staring out through the windshield at a brick wall like a boy taking his driving test.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

The fan blew. Out past the glass there was the dock and the wall and one stripe of that terrible white sky.

"I've been sitting here a good while," he said.

"I know it."

"I've drove out of this lot twice and come back."

"I know."

He turned and looked at me and his eyes were red and he had not slept either.

"I don't know what I'm doing," he said.

"Nobody does, honey. Nobody has ever known what they were doing. They just get told what it was called afterward."

I reached over and took his right hand off the wheel and held it in both of mine in my lap, the way I do at the hospital, and I could feel the whole man going in that hand.

"I'm going to tell you what happens now," I said, "and then you can say no, and I will drive on to Cookeville and see about Miss Arlene's hip, and Sunday I will be exactly the same to you and to her. That is true and you know by now that I don't lie about small things."

"Yes ma'am."

"You're going to unbuckle your belt."

He made a sound.

"Then you're going to put your hands somewhere and leave them, and I'll do the rest, and you are not going to help me and you are not going to get up under this dress. Not today. Not one time. Do you understand me?"

"Why."

It was a real question, and out of everything that came out of that man that day it is the one that got me, because nobody had asked me why about anything since I was a girl.

"Because I have wanted this since before I knew what it was called," I said, "and I am not having it turned into something being done to me. It's mine. I have carried it a long way. Today I would like to get it out where I can see it."

He unbuckled his belt.

I got him out of his jeans and there he was.

And I sat with my hand around him and did not move for a second, because for my whole adult life there had been a shape in my head that I had built out of nothing, and now there was a real one in my hand, warm, heavier than the one I had made, with a pulse going in it, and not near as tidy. It was better. Everything real is better and nobody ever tells you that.

He said, "Mrs. Edgewood."

Mrs. Edgewood.

He had said that to me at the back of that church more times than either one of us could count. He said it in that truck with my hand on him and it went through me like a wire, because that is the name of the woman at the door. The meal train woman. Brother Vernon's wife. And she was the one holding his cock in a parking lot.

"Say it again."

"Mrs. Edgewood."

"That's right," I said, and I put my mouth on him.

Take, eat.

That arrived on its own. I did not go looking for it. It came up in me the second I had him in my mouth, in my husband's voice, the voice he uses over the brass tray on the first Sunday of the month, and I let it come.

It is not hard to work out why. That minute in the pew holding the little cup, waiting, is the only minute of my week that has ever been about wanting a thing and not being allowed to have it yet. It is a held breath and they hold it on purpose. They built the whole service that way. And I had been sitting in the middle of it month after month with my hands in my lap.

So of course that phrase came to mind. It had been sitting in there the whole time with nowhere to go, waiting on a day like this one.

He was already gone. He put his head back against the glass and his hands came up off the seat toward my hair and stopped in the air and went back down flat, and I liked that better than anything else he could have done with them.

And I was good.

A woman my age who has never done it should be bad at it. Timid. She should have to be shown.

I had been practicing my whole adult life.

Not in a mirror. In my head, in the dark, in a pew, in a car in the pickup line, in a hospital chair in the middle of the night. I had run it thousands of times in enormous detail and in the same order every time, because I had nothing else to do with any of it, and so when it finally came it was not a first time at all. It was a performance I had rehearsed since before I was married and never once been let on stage for.

I knew when to go slow. I knew to come up off him and use my hand and look at him while I did it. My other hand went flat on his stomach without my telling it to, so I would feel it before he did. I did not have to think about one single thing.

I have never been that good at anything else in my life, and I have been good at plenty of things, and every one of the others was handed to me by somebody.

So I slowed down.

That is not what you expect out of a woman who has waited that long. I had been in a hurry my whole life and it had gotten me exactly nowhere, and now I was in a truck with the doors locked and an hour nobody was going to ask me about and not one person in the state of Tennessee knew where I was.

I sat up and looked at what I had in my hand.

I felt what that did to him before I heard it.

"Be still."

"Mrs. Edgewood."

"Hands."

He put them back.

I took my time and looked at it in the daylight, wet from my mouth, and I turned it and put my thumb where I wanted it and watched what that did to his stomach. There is a thing that happens in a man's face when he is being looked at and cannot do anything about it, and I had never in my life been on this end of that, and I could have stayed there all afternoon.

So I got my other hand up under my dress.

I hauled it up over my thighs in a truck seat in the middle of the day and got my hand down inside my underwear. I was so wet I made a sound when I touched myself. He heard it and looked down and saw what I was doing and said, "Oh. Oh my God," in a completely different voice.

I had two fingers in my cunt in the front seat of a truck at noon on a Tuesday with a church in the window across the lot, and I was not in any hurry about it.

"When did it start," I said.

"Rebecca."

"When."

His hand came up off the seat toward my thigh.

"No."

It went back down.

He put his head back on the glass. "The second Sunday."

"The second Sunday of what."

"Y'all's second Sunday. The one where the power went out in the middle of it and Brother Vernon preached in the dark."

I remember that morning. I have remembered it my whole life for a different reason. Presley sat on my lap the entire hour and went to sleep on me.

So it was not the years I thought it was. It was from the very start. He had never once known me as anything else.

I put my mouth back on him for about as long as it takes to say it and then came off again, and he made a sound out of the middle of his chest that was not a word.

"What do you think about."

"I can't."

"You can."

"Mrs. Edgewood, I can't say that to you."

"I have got you in my hand," I said. "There is not one thing left you cannot say to me. It is the only good part of a day like this one. Have it."

And he told me.

He told me about the invitation, because that is the only stretch of the hour where the room is dark and the piano is going and every head in the house is down, and he told me what he does with that. He told me about a July when the air went out and I had on a yellow dress. He told me about the baptistry, which he has a camera pointed straight down into, and about the fact that I am the one who takes the women in. That is the job nobody thinks about. I get them into the robe and walk them down the steps and stand in that water with them in my own robe and hand them up out of it afterward, soaked through, in front of the whole church, and I have done it every fifth Sunday since the day we came, and he has had a camera on every one.

He told me he keeps a shot up on the second monitor that is nothing but the second pew. It is not the shot the stream is on. It never goes out to anybody. It sits up there for an hour every Sunday, right beside his hand.

And he told me the church keeps every service on a drive in that booth going back to before we came, and that he is the only one with the login, and that he has never deleted one minute of anything in his life.

He was crying by the end of it.

I sat there with him in my hand and let all of that land on me and I have never felt anything like it before or since.

Because I had been by myself in it. That is the only part of this I would call sad. All those years in the second pew running the filthiest picture show in the state and understanding myself to be the one broken thing in that building. The only one. Everybody else out there singing and meaning it, and me down in the middle of them with my hands folded.

And the whole time, at the back of the room, in the dark, a man was doing the same thing from his end.

We had been desecrating that place together for years and neither one of us knew it.

"Kyle."

"Ma'am."

"Do you know what we have been doing in that room."

"Yes ma'am."

He shook his head while he said it, and he was smiling, and it was the most awful smile I have ever seen on a person and I would not trade it for anything.

"You're going to do it again Sunday," I said. "You're going to sit up there with that picture on the second monitor and do it, and I am going to be down there in the second pew doing it with you, and there is going to be a full house of people in between."

"Oh God."

"That's right."

And I went back down on him and I quit being careful.

I got my hand under him and took his balls in it, and he came up off that seat, and I held on and did not let him go anywhere. I let my own spit run. It got on my hand and down my wrist and on the front of a gray dress I had chosen that morning in my own bedroom with my husband's shirts hanging behind me, and I did not care about the dress and I have never cared about it since.

I got a good rhythm and then I broke it on purpose to hear what he did. I came up and put my mouth on him sideways and looked at him while I did it, and his face came apart, and I put him back in and took him as far as he would go and held there until my eyes ran.

I reached up and got the front of my dress and pulled it and my bra down under my breasts and let them out in that truck in the daylight, because I wanted them out and because I wanted him to see the woman who stands at that door on a Sunday morning sitting in his truck with her tits out and her mouth full.

He said, "Oh my God. Oh my God."

I came off him long enough to say it out loud.

"Look at me."

He looked down.

"Look at what your pastor's wife is," I said.

And then I heard the rest of it come out of my mouth.

"I am a whore. I have been a whore in that pew for years with my knees together and my hands in my lap and my husband's voice coming over the top of me. I want your cock down my throat. I have wanted it since before you were out of high school. I have sat on that pew on the first Sunday of the month with the Lord's Supper in my hand and wanted it, and I have got it now and I am not giving it back."

I said every word of that in the voice I use to ask a woman whether she needs a ride to her treatment.

That is the part I was not ready for. The voice did not change. I had always supposed that if those words ever got out of me they would come out in some other woman's mouth, and they did not. The sweet one said them. The sweet one has been saying them in here my whole life and I had simply never let her out where the air could get at her.

All those years and I had never once put one of those words in a room.

And then I had, and the room did not do one thing about it. The fan kept going. There was still a brick wall out through that windshield with a rust stain running down it.

So I said it again to hear it.

"I want your hand on the back of my head and I want you to quit being polite about it."

And then the last of it, because there was nobody in that truck to stop me.

"I am going to drive home with the taste of you still on my tongue and put a chicken in the oven, and Sunday morning I am going to stand at that door and hold every hand that comes through it and know."

That is the moment the woman at the door and the woman in here quit being two people, and I have never gotten them apart again, and I have not tried.

Then he started saying things.

"Oh God. Rebecca."

He had my name in his mouth now and he could not put it down.

"Rebecca. Rebecca. You can't. I can't. What are you doing to me."

And underneath it, running like water under ice, my husband's voice from that pulpit, over and over, the way he says a thing when he does not want you to be able to get around it.

Already. Already in his heart. It is finished.

It was not the truck that did it for me and it was not the man sitting in it. It was that.

Because it was true. It was not a comfort I was telling myself in a bad moment. My husband stood up in front of his own church and told the truth, and the truth was that this had already happened, thousands of times over, and I had been hauling it around all those years like a thing I was still going to have to answer for, and in that truck I found out the answering was over and done with a long time ago and nobody had bothered to tell me.

There is no floor. That is what I learned that day in a dead mall parking lot with my mouth full. I had spent my whole life standing very carefully on something I believed would break, and there was never anything under it at all.

After that I said whatever I wanted and I did not have to go looking for any of it. It had been sitting right there the whole time.

He said, "I'm going to."

"I know."

"Mrs. Edgewood, I'm going to."

"I know you are, honey. Do it in my mouth."

And then it came up in me whole, the way it comes up in that room at the end of every service, while the pastor stands down front on the floor with the piano going under it softly.

Just as I am, without one plea.

Nobody was pleading. That is what I understood right then, with my hand between my legs and that man's hands flat on the seat beside him. All those years in that building and I had heard that hymn more times than I have heard my own name and I had never once heard what it said, which is that you do not have to be anything you aren't. You do not get fixed and then come. You come as the thing you actually are and you are received.

I had always thought it was about being forgiven.

It is about being wanted as is.

I went down on him all the way and I felt it start in the hand I had under him before it got anywhere else, and I did not move.

He said my name and it broke in the middle.

I stayed where I was and took all of it.

Nobody tells you what it is actually like, and I had built it wrong my whole life. I had it in my head as one thing arriving. It is not one thing. It comes in a series and you can feel every one of them, and the first is harder than you are ready for and goes further back in your throat than you have planned on, and the ones behind it are slower and there is more of it than there has any business being.

It is warm. That is what I never got right in all those years of building it in the dark, and it is the part I think about now. Warm, and thicker than you expect, and it moves on its own after it is in there, and it tastes like almost nothing and a little like the inside of a penny.

I did not gag and I did not pull off him. I had settled a long time ago what kind of woman I was going to be about this if I ever got the chance at it, and it turned out I had her right.

And then mine came, and it did not politely wait its turn behind his. It came up through me out of my own hand and it took my whole back with it and my knees came up off that bench seat and I made a noise into him that I have never made in my house.

And in my head, clear as a bell, in my husband's reading voice, at the end of that long minute where everybody sits there holding a little cup and nobody drinks:

Let us drink together.

So I did.

It went down slow and it went down warm and I felt the whole way of it, the way you feel the first swallow of coffee on a cold morning go all the way to the bottom of you. I have taken the Lord's Supper in that church every first Sunday since we came and I have never felt it go down. I felt this.

And then I did the thing that tells you what I am. I did not reach for the napkin. I sat there with my eyes shut and my hand still flat on his stomach and I kept the taste of him in my mouth a while before I let it go, because it was mine and I had waited for it since I was thirteen years old and I was not going to hurry it out of manners.

And then I stayed down there a while longer, after, when he was too far gone to stand it and his whole leg was going, and I cleaned him off with my mouth because I wanted to and because I was not finished looking at him, and he put his hand over his eyes and said please, and I did not stop until I felt like stopping.

Then it was quiet in that truck and the fan was still going and out through the windshield there was a brick wall with a rust stain running down it.

I sat back up on my side of the seat and got my breasts back into my bra and my dress down over my knees. I found a napkin in the door pocket and fixed my mouth as well as a person can with a fast food napkin and no mirror.

I had put the words back down somewhere in there and I did not notice doing it.

Kyle Ledford put both his hands over his face and started to come apart.

It was not loud. That is the thing about a man doing it. It comes out of them sideways. His shoulders went and he pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes and he said, "Oh God. Oh God," and then he said, "Charlene," and then he said it again with something in front of it I did not catch.

"I know," I said.

"You don't. You don't know."

"All right."

"She's got, she's, we've been trying since March." He took his hands down and his whole face was wet and open like a boy's. "You know that? Nobody knows that. We've been going to a doctor in Nashville since March."

I checked.

That is the honest word for it. I went and looked. I heard that man say the name of his wife, a woman who has been nothing but sweet to me since the day we came, a woman who is going to a doctor in Nashville, and I turned around inside myself and I went looking for the thing that was supposed to be there.

And there was nothing there.

Not numbness. Numbness is when a thing is there and you cannot feel it. There was no thing. It was like reaching into a drawer you have never opened and finding out the drawer was never cut. It is a false front. It has been a piece of trim your whole life and you only ever thought it was a drawer because your mother had one.

I have never felt guilt. I told you that already and you probably read past it. Not when I was a girl and I broke my grandmother's dish and let my cousin take the blame for it. Not later, when it was worse than a dish. Not once. I have felt embarrassment, plenty, and I have felt sorry for people until it kept me up, and I have felt afraid of getting caught, which people mix up with the other thing all the time.

But the thing itself, the thing my husband preaches about, the thing that is supposed to come up in you like water in a boat, I do not have it. And I had always assumed I did have it and that it was just running late.

That is what I found out in that truck. It was never a question of whether I could do it. It was that the guilt was not coming. Not that night, not the next Sunday, not ever. I do not have it in me. I never did, and I have quit standing around waiting on it.

So I reached over and I took his hand again, and I held it in both of mine in my lap, and I was as kind to him as I have ever been to anybody in my life. And I was not faking one bit of that either. That is the part that ought to frighten you, and it took me a long time to get around to being frightened by it myself.

"Listen to me," I said. "You have not lost anything. You are going to go home and she is going to ask you about your day and you are going to tell her about whatever went wrong at the supply house today, because something did. Something goes wrong out there every day of the world. And on Sunday you are going to sit in that booth and do your job. And that is all that is required of you."

"How do you do that."

"Do what, honey."

"Say it like that."

"Because it's true," I said.

He looked at me for a long time.

"You're not sorry," he said.

"No."

"Not even a little."

"No."

And he nodded slowly, and I watched something go out of his face, and what came in behind it was not hate and it was not disgust. I know what those look like. It was the exact look a man gets when he finds out the water is deeper than he thought and he has already let go of the side.

"Tuesday," he said. Not a question. He said it looking at the wall.

"I'll let you know," I said, which was the first lie I told that day, because I already knew.

* * *

I drove on to Cookeville with the windows down and the radio off, because that is where I had told my husband I was going and I do not lie about small things.

I sat with Miss Arlene better than an hour. I looked at every picture of her granddaughter's wedding and there were plenty of them, and I told her the truth about the dress, which is that it was too much. I held her hand when I left, the way I do.

Then I drove home.

I stopped at the Marathon on the highway and put in gas and bought a Coke and a pack of gum, and the girl at the register said have a blessed day, and I said you too sweetheart.

I was standing at that pump in the sun with my hand on the nozzle and I thought: nobody can tell.

That is the drug, and I found it that afternoon at a gas pump out on the highway. There was not one person in that state who could look at me and know. One man could, and he was driving back to Marbury with his hands at ten and two. I had a mouth with a man still on it from an hour before and I had grape juice and years of casseroles and a spot on the second pew and a nursery rotation in my purse, and all of it was mine, all of it at once, and nobody was ever going to make me pick.

I got home and put a chicken in.

* * *

Vernon was lovely to me that night.

He came in and he had stopped and bought peaches, because I had said something about peaches the week before at the Kroger and he had remembered it, which is the kind of man he is. He put them on the counter and kissed the side of my head and asked me about Miss Arlene's hip.

I told him Miss Arlene's hip was coming along, and it was, because I had been and seen it.

We ate at the table with Colton, who talked about a truck he is not getting, and afterward Vernon washed and I dried and he told me about a man in the deacons' meeting who had an idea about the parking lot, and he did an impression of Harold Culpepper saying the word overflow, and I laughed until I had to put the dish towel over my face.

He is so funny. He's been so funny the whole time I have known him. Nobody in that church has any idea.

Then he went and sat down with his books and his glasses on the end of his nose, and after a while he looked up and found me watching him from the kitchen doorway.

"What," he said.

"Nothing. You look like yourself."

"Well. I'd hate to look like somebody else."

I was lit up. I was standing in my own kitchen doorway with my hands still smelling like dish soap and I was burning from the inside of my chest out to my fingers, and I had been all afternoon, and I was going to be for weeks.

And he did not see it.

You have been trained to want me to be angry about that.

I was not angry.

If he had looked up from that book at the right second and seen it, that would have been the end of everything, and not because he would have known what I had done. He would never have gotten there. But he would have seen that his wife was on fire in a doorway, and he would have asked, and I would have had to answer, and I have wanted him to ask me the whole time.

He did not ask. He has never asked. And that Thursday night at the kitchen table, when he said you'll tell me if it's something, he had put the whole thing in my hands and gone back to his book, and that is what he has always done, and I stood there in the doorway and I understood, finally, all the way down, that he was never going to.

So it is mine.

He told me himself that I would tell him if it was something. It is not something. It is the whole rest of me, and there is no word for that in the language he and I speak to each other.

That is not bitterness. Read it again. That is the best news I ever got.

* * *

I lay in bed beside him that night and I did not touch myself, because I did not need to.

What I did instead is I went through the county.

The church has a fellowship hall with a kitchen off the back of it and a door that locks from the inside, and the youth building has a hallway with no camera in it, and Wanda goes home at the same hour every day of her life and always has. There is a boat ramp out at the lake off the old road that nobody uses on a weekday. There is a Days Inn out by the interstate where the girl at the desk is not from here. Hospital parking garages, which I am in more than anybody I know, and the top floor of one is always empty. I could have given you a list off the top of my head and I had them all before I was anywhere near sleep.

And there are hours. That is what nobody understands about a woman in my position. I have more unwatched hours in a week than a traveling salesman. Nobody asks me where I have been, because everybody already knows where I have been, I have been doing the Lord's work, and the beautiful thing, the genuinely beautiful thing, is that most of the time I actually have been.

I lay there in the dark next to my husband and worked it out, hour by hour, building by building, like a woman planning a wedding.

I went through that whole county in the dark and it is a county of empty buildings. A mall with three cars in it. A church meeting in the shell of a department store. A downtown where the second floors have been dark my whole life.

Thou hast a name that thou livest, and art dead.

That is the letter to Sardis and it came up in me lying in my own bed next to my husband, and I did not put it on myself. I put it on the county. Every one of those buildings has a sign out front with a name on it and not one thing going on inside.

And I lay there in the middle of all of it, wide awake.

And in with the hours and the buildings was the rest of it, in the words. Whose cock, and in which room, and what I was going to be called while it happened. The kitchen off the fellowship hall with the door locked and me up on that counter with my dress shoved up, the same counter where I have iced sheet cakes for that church since the day we came. The top floor of the hospital garage with the window down. On my knees on the floor of the youth building in the hallway with no camera in it, which is down the hall from where my son sat through his Bible drills.

I lay in my own bed and went through it like that, in language that would empty that sanctuary, and my face never moved.

Vernon rolled over and put his hand on my hip in his sleep the way he always does.

And that was better than the truck.

What happened in that parking lot was the best thing that had ever happened to me and I would not give it back. But lying in that bed making the list was better, and it was not close, and that is when I knew that whatever this was, it was not going to be one man in a truck.

It is the two of me. That is what I want. Standing at that door on a Sunday morning holding Belinda Teague's hand and asking about her knee and meaning it, and knowing.

* * *

Sunday I sat in the second pew in the yellow dress.

Vernon was still in Nehemiah and it was a good one. We sang. Miss Roberta's chin went the way it does. Charlene Ledford stood up front in the second row of the choir in her blue robe and sang the alto line, and she has such a pretty voice, and I listened to it.

And at the end, while the piano was playing and Vernon was standing down front with his hands out and his coat open, I turned around and looked at the back of the room.

He was there behind the glass. I could see the shape of him, and the light off the board on his face.

He looked away.

And I turned back around and faced the front and put my hands together in my lap, and I found out something about myself in that second that I am still working on.

I liked that better than the parking lot.