Blest Be the Tie

Miss Vada Sizemore, bless her, died on a Tuesday morning and I had the food organized before her boy got off the interstate.

That is not coldness. That is the job, and I am the best there is at it in this county, because I start before anybody thinks to ask me.

By noon I had nine women on a list and every one of them had a dish assigned, because you cannot let them pick. If you let them pick you get nine banana puddings and no meat. By one o'clock I had the hams coming from the place in town that does them. I had Patsy Threadgill in that fellowship hall kitchen with the good pans down off the top shelf. By two I had the tables up in the long room with the paper covers on them. And the flowers in from the sanctuary, which you are allowed to do for a funeral and not for anything else.

I loved that woman.

She gave me a jar of her pickles every summer I knew her, and I never ate one. They are in my pantry in a row with the dates on the lids in her handwriting, oldest in the back. She knew I did not eat them. She brought them anyway, and I took every one like it was a ruby.

I ate one that Tuesday night, standing at my own counter with the light off.

They are terrible. She always did put too much dill in them. I stood there in the dark and ate a whole pickle out of a jar dated the summer before last and cried, and that was real, and nothing else I did that fall takes one thing away from it.

* * *

Glenhaven was in September, with Kyle Ledford in his truck in a dead mall parking lot. He runs the sound booth at the back of my husband's church, and he has watched me out of it for eleven years. Between that and the middle of October I had him four more times.

Twice in that same truck. Once in a motel out by the interstate where the girl at the desk is not from here and does not look up. Once on the top floor of the hospital garage in Cookeville with the windows down.

The motel was the last week of September, and what I found out there is that I am loud.

Forty five years old and I had never had a room where I could make noise. I had him in one with the curtain pulled and the air unit going, and I made it. I said every word I have got out loud in that room until my throat was sore.

He had me on my knees on a bedspread the color of a bruise, and I told him what to do and he did it.

"Pull my hair."

He pulled it.

"Harder than that. Now tell me what I am."

"Rebecca."

"Tell me."

"You're a whore," he said, like a man reading it off a card at a funeral.

"You do not believe that."

"I don't."

"Then say it like you do, honey, or don't say it to me at all."

The next time he said it he meant it. I came so hard on a hotel bedspread with my face in my own arms that I lost about four seconds of it.

I have wanted that said to me since I was thirteen, and I had to teach a grown man how.

Then I rolled over and told him to fuck me in the ass.

Out loud, in those words, at two in the afternoon with a truck idling somewhere in the lot. I heard my own voice say it, and I liked it.

I had been building that one since before I was married and never had any idea whether I would like it. It hurt worse than I had ever made it hurt in my head. It took longer. There was a bad minute in the middle where I had to hold still and breathe with my face in that bedspread.

Nothing I ever made up in the dark had one thing in it about having to breathe.

Then the hurt turned into the other thing.

It quit being something done to me and started being something I was doing. It came up through me from a place I have no name for, and I understood right then why women do not talk about it.

He never came out of me and I never asked him to. He had a fistful of my hair and one hand flat on the small of my back, all the way up in my ass, and I was shouting into that bedspread over and over like a woman at an altar call. He finished in me there. I lay under him afterward with him still on top of me and laughed out loud at the ceiling.

He said he had never done that before either. I said, "Well, neither one of us is getting any younger."

The garage was the first week of October. It was better, and it took me the rest of the month to work out why.

Top floor, four o'clock on a Thursday. I had genuinely spent an hour in that hospital first, seeing about Wanda's cousin. There were six cars up there and none of them near us, and he had the windows down because it was warm.

The windows down is the whole thing.

I got in his lap in the front seat of that truck in broad daylight with my skirt up around my waist. The concrete was throwing the heat back at us and there was no radio. I had my knees on either side of him on the bench seat and my hands flat on the roof of the cab, and I went slow on purpose. Slow is what you do when you are not hiding, and it did not take me long to see that I was not hiding.

I opened my blouse one button at a time with him watching me do it. I pushed my bra down under so they came up over the top of it, and I made him look. Then I put a hand in the back of his hair and pulled his face into me and held him there.

He put his mouth on one and then the other and then down between them, with his breath going hot on my skin. I kept my fingers locked in his hair and moved him where I wanted him, and I rode him slow on a concrete deck in the daylight.

You can hear a car coming up a parking deck a long way off. The tires make a sound on the turns. I heard two while we were up there. I did not stop either time and I did not get down. Both times I felt him go rigid under me, and I went right on.

"Rebecca. Somebody's coming up."

"I know it, honey."

Anybody who came around that last turn would have had the whole of it from thirty yards. A woman with her blouse open down the front and her hair down, going up and down slow in the front seat of a work truck at four in the afternoon.

I never closed my eyes. I will testify to that. I watched that ramp.

Nobody came. I came looking at an empty concrete ramp with a man's mouth still down between my breasts, and I told him it was the best thing yet. He was pleased. It had nothing to do with him.

And on the drive home I was bored.

I will tell on myself, because it is the truest thing about that fall. It had taken two weeks to get from finding out there was no floor under me to that. I wanted it. I have always wanted everything. But the thing I had gone and got was smaller than the thing I had built.

I had thought the trouble was that I could not have it.

I had it, and it was a Thursday.

* * *

The fellowship hall kitchen at Sardis is a long green room with two stoves and a warming cabinet that has not worked right since before we came. There is a window over the sink that looks out at the gravel and the propane tank.

The door on the hall side locks from the inside. I have turned that lock a hundred times to keep the youth out of a sheet cake.

That Tuesday afternoon Patsy had the foil going and I was cutting pans of cornbread into squares, and we did not talk for a while, which is the best thing about her.

Then she said, without turning around, "You've got your color back."

"I haven't been sick."

"I know it."

And she went right on with the foil.

She was not accusing me of a thing. She had looked at me across a pan of cornbread and seen that something in my life had gotten better, and she was glad, and she said so the only way she knows how to say anything.

I have never wanted to tell somebody something so badly.

I said, "The rolls will be dry if you put them in before the hams get here."

"Then Harold will tell me about it," she said. "He tells me everything twice."

Harold Culpepper came through at four with a clipboard, because Harold does not enter a room. He arrives on business.

"Rebecca. I set the water Saturday."

"I know you did."

"Ninety four is what I run. Ninety four on the dial, and it settles out around eighty five in the tank by Sunday morning because that room is cold. People think the tank is what's cold. The room is what's cold."

"I never knew that."

I have known it since the year we came. He has given me that exact speech in that exact order every single time. I could say it with him. Sometimes in my head I do.

"Well," he said. "Now you do."

And he went on down the hall to look at a thermostat.

* * *

Vernon came in around six with his sleeves rolled and asked me what needed carrying, which is what he always asks, and I put him on chairs.

The deacons met that night at seven, while I was still setting chairs. It was Patsy who told me what happened in there. Not him. He will bring home the parking lot. He will do Harold saying overflow until I have to put a dish towel over my face. But in twenty five years that man has never told me somebody came at him in that room, and I have never asked.

What happened is that Harold wanted Miss Vada's service moved to the chapel. The sanctuary would be near empty, he said, with her people all dead or too old to come. He said it in that way he has, where it is about chairs and heat and never about the thing it is about. And two men agreed with him, because two men always agree with Harold.

My husband said no.

Patsy had been outside the door with the key in her hand, and she said he never raised his voice. He said Vada Sizemore sat on the third row on the left for fifty one years, and she is going to be carried up that aisle and not around the side of the building. And if there are nine people in that room, then there will be nine people in that room, and we will all of us be able to hear each other sing.

Harold said something about the cost of running the air.

Vernon said, "Then I'll pay it."

That was the end of the meeting.

Patsy told me all that at my back door at nine o'clock with her coat half on, pleased about it in a hard way. After she left I stood in my own front room by myself, and I wanted him.

Not fondly. I have felt fond of that man ten thousand times. I wanted my husband the way I have wanted men in parking lots, all the way down. It came up out of nowhere, and it was about the fact that he had been the strongest person in a room full of men and had not needed anybody to know it.

We had each other that night and I did not have to go anywhere else in my head. That has happened maybe four times in my marriage.

* * *

They buried her Thursday.

The sanctuary was about a third full, which was more than Harold figured. The whole choir came, and the school sent a table of people because she ran that lunchroom until she was seventy.

I did not sit with Vernon. I never do at a funeral. I sit on the end of the second pew where I can get up and go do a thing without anybody noticing. For a fan. For a glass of water. For a woman about to go down in the vestibule.

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

That came up in me on the end of that pew, and I did not go looking for it.

Sardis Baptist Church is dying. Not in trouble. Dying. Three hundred on a Sunday and half of them past sixty, and three hundred more names in the roll book that nobody has seen since the flood took the old parsonage. We bury eight or nine a year and we baptize three or four. Everybody in that building knows it and nobody has ever said it out loud. Not my husband. Not me.

Vernon preached her twenty minutes and did not tell one story about himself, which is rarer in that line of work than anybody outside it knows.

Her boy sat on the front row with his hands between his knees and did not sing. He's fifty some years old, bless his heart. Lives in Georgia and came twice a year. He sat there in a suit he had clearly bought that week and looked at the floor. I watched the back of his head the whole service and worked out what I would say to him in the line.

What I said was that his mother gave me a jar of pickles every summer and I have every one of them.

He cried on me in front of the whole church. That is the job too.

They closed with Blest Be the Tie, because Vada picked it herself years ago and wrote it on a card that Wanda kept in her purse.

Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love.

I sang it with my hands on the pew in front of me and did not miss a word. I had been in that kitchen since seven that morning with the hams in the warming cabinet that does not work, propping the door with a spoon. The smell was in my hair and in the front of my good black dress, and it came up off me the whole time I was singing. I have not been able to hear that hymn since without it.

* * *

We fed them in the fellowship hall afterward, and I had Miss Vada's boy sat down with a plate before he knew he was hungry.

Roberta Dilbeck came through the line on Wanda's arm and took the hand of every woman behind that table. Patsy's hand. The Batson girl's hand. She takes hands. It is the whole of what she does now, and she has done it every Sunday since we came.

She went right past mine.

Eyes front, chin going the way it does, and she took the hand of the woman on the other side of me. I stood there with a serving spoon.

Patsy said, "She's deaf on that side and she's past ninety. She missed my mother clean at Easter and they'd been friends sixty years. It's not you, honey."

"I know it."

"Well, you had a look."

"I didn't have a look."

"All right," Patsy said.

And I went back to the line.

* * *

The week after we buried Vada, I found out something I had been walking past my whole life.

Nobody asks me anything.

I tested it. I carried a cardboard box out of the storage room behind the nursery on a Sunday morning, through the fellowship hall, past a dozen people drinking coffee. There was nothing in it. I had picked it up empty off a stack and carried it the length of that building for no reason on earth. Two people held doors for me and Wanda asked if I needed a hand with it.

I stepped over the rope on the balcony stairs, which have been closed since before we came, right in front of Wanda Sowell, and she said, "Watch that top step."

I let myself into the youth building at nine at night and turned the lights on and turned them off and locked it back. Harold drove past me in the lot and put two fingers up off the wheel.

I have carried the keys to that property since the week we came. Nobody has ever wondered out loud where I was going with them.

There is no line. That is what I understood by the end of that week. I had carried one around in my head my whole life, some wall I would come up against if I ever really moved, and the wall was going to be other people seeing me. There is no wall. I could walk out of that building naked and Wanda would tell me to watch my step.

That should have been the best news a woman like me ever got. I lay in bed that night and it sat on me like a rock.

That Wednesday after the evening service, Kyle caught me between the cars where he could not be seen from the road.

"Is there anybody else?"

"No."

"Rebecca."

"There is you and there is my husband, and that is all there is."

That was the truth and I said it plain. But he had not asked whether I had. He had asked whether there was anybody, which is a different question, and we both knew which one he meant.

Two things happened in me while he asked it. The first is that I liked it. I liked it in my stomach, the way you like a hand closing on your wrist. Somebody wanted to know where I was. Nobody has wanted to know where I was since my mother died, and I did not know until that minute in a gravel lot that I had missed it.

The second is that I did not like what it meant. A man who asks that once is going to ask it again, and the next time it will cost somebody something. I have been married twenty five years to a man who has never asked me where I had been. I had been on the other end of this a month and it was already at my door.

I put my hand flat on his chest the way I do at a bedside. "Go on home to your wife. I'll see you Sunday."

* * *

That Sunday I sat in the second pew and looked up at the ceiling.

The fans. The beams. The two lights out over the choir loft that Harold has been going to fix since spring. And the little brown camera in the corner over the baptistry.

There are two cameras in that sanctuary, and Kyle had told me about them in the truck in September. I heard it with my mouth full and my mind somewhere else. I heard it for the first time that Sunday, in a yellow dress, looking up.

The first one is up high on the back wall beside the booth glass. It looks down the length of the room at the backs of three hundred heads. That is the stream. Every service goes out on it to the shut-ins and the nursing home over in Sparta, and every service gets saved onto a drive in the booth. Kyle has kept every one going back to before we came. He is the only one with the login, and he has never deleted a minute of it.

So I am on that drive, every Sunday for years. But that camera is behind me. What it has of me is the back of my head, with my hair down my back the way I wear it. I am one woman out of three hundred, sitting still.

The second camera is the brown one over the baptistry, up front, about the size of a coffee cup. It turns. It is there for the water. When there is a baptism, Kyle tilts it down into the tank and puts it on the stream for those few minutes, so the shut-ins can watch somebody go under.

The rest of the hour, every Sunday, he points it at me.

Not at the pulpit. Not at the choir. At the second pew. He keeps it pulled in tight on me, up on a second screen beside his hand, for the whole service.

That camera has my face. It is the only thing in that building that has ever looked me in the face. It does not go out on the stream to anybody and it does not get saved. It is up on his screen while the service runs, and when the service is over it is gone. It has a little red light that comes on if he ever sets it to save on its own. He never has.

I am in the water with every one of them. So the only pieces of my face on that drive are a few minutes a year in a wet robe, handing a grown woman up out of the tank. Every hour I have sat in that pew with my face doing nothing and my head full to the top, he has looked at and let go.

One thing in my husband's church looks at me. And every Sunday at noon it throws me away.

I sat there next to a widow, with my husband preaching Nehemiah twelve feet away, and that got me worse than the man ever had.

I did not have one idea what to do about it yet.

* * *

Saturday night that building had three people in it, and every one of us had a reason to be there.

I had the long room to set for the dinner on the grounds. Kyle had the stream to sort out, because the feed had been dropping the last two Sundays and he had been hearing about it from Harold. And Harold was there because Harold is there every Saturday night of his life, setting the water in that tank and going around to the thermostats one at a time with a flashlight he does not need.

Not one of us was lying about why we were in that building.

I had the long room done by eight. Tables out, covers on, the coffee urns filled and set. I had my hair pinned up off my neck for the work. I turned the hall lights off behind me as I came, because that is how you leave a building.

The kitchen light was on. I went in for my keys and Kyle was standing in there with his back to the sink.

He had come down from the booth to find me, and he had been standing there working himself up to it.

"I can't keep doing this."

"All right."

"I mean it. Charlene's got the doctor Thursday and I sat at that table last night and could not look at her."

"I know it, honey."

"And I'm not going to quit you. That's what I came down here to say. I can't keep doing this and I'm going to keep doing it anyway."

"I know that too."

That was the whole of it. It has been the same conversation in one form or another since the truck.

Then I walked past him and turned the lock on the door. That lock makes a small hard sound in that room.

Let all things be done decently and in order.

That is Paul, about how to run a church service. It came up in me with my hand still on that lock.

I put my back against the counter and told him what was going to happen.

"Not on the floor. Not anywhere we have to move a thing, and not anywhere that will look wrong tomorrow. Right here, standing up. My dress stays on and everything I have on stays on."

"Rebecca."

"And you are going to keep your hand over my mouth the entire time. You are not going to take it off for anything. And if I put my hand on your wrist, you do not let go. And you can be as rough as you like."

"Why the mouth."

"Because I am about to make a noise in my husband's church and I am not going to hear it."

That was the truth, and it was not the whole truth, and I knew it standing there.

He came across that kitchen at me and had me against the counter. That was new. Every other time I had started it and he had caught up. This time he did not wait to be told, and I found out with my back against the cabinets that I had been waiting all month for exactly that.

He got his mouth on my throat and his hand up under my dress and two fingers in me while I was still talking. Whatever I had been about to say went right out of my head.

I had my hands in his hair and my knee up around him. I was standing in the fellowship hall kitchen of Sardis Baptist Church getting worked by the sound man, with the tables set for tomorrow's dinner down the hall. Every single thing in my head was filth. Not one syllable of it came out of my mouth.

That is the difference between that room and a motel out by the interstate.

In the motel I found out I am loud, and I loved it, and my throat was sore for two days. In that kitchen I had every Sunday morning of my married life holding my jaw shut, and all of it went inward and stayed there and built up behind my teeth with nowhere in the world to go.

He got my dress up. I helped him, because it was a good dress and I was not going to have it torn in a building where I would have to explain a thread. It came up over my hips and stayed there. He got my underwear down and off one foot and left it hanging on the other ankle, which never once occurred to me in all my years of making it up.

Then he turned me around and put me face down over that counter with one hand between my shoulder blades, the way a man sets down something he is finished carrying. And I went.

And then he stopped.

He stood there behind me with his belt already open and did not do one thing. I worked out after a moment that he was looking at me. A forty five year old woman bent over a church counter in a good dress, with her underwear around one ankle and her cheek on the Formica. He had been looking at my face on a screen in a dark room since our second Sunday at Sardis. He had never once had me bent over and ready inside that same church's kitchen.

"Kyle."

"I know."

"Then do it."

I came close to going the other way in those few seconds. I could have stood up. He would have let me. There was a version of that night where I straightened my dress and said something kind and went home, and I have never been able to find the woman in me who would have done it.

He got his hand over my mouth from behind, and he got in me.

The first thing was that it was not what I had built. I have been putting men in that kitchen in my head since the week we came, and in my head it goes smooth and it goes hard and nothing in it is ever inconvenient. The real one was too much at first. It took a second. It was not tidy. His belt buckle was against the back of my thigh and it stayed cold a long while and then it did not. The drink cooler by the back door was humming. I could hear it the whole time.

He fucked me over my own counter in my husband's church, with my wedding ring flat on the Formica under my own hand and my mouth full of his palm.

I said every filthy word I have got, in there, where I keep them. Behind that hand, in my own voice, this is what ran the whole time.

Look at the preacher's wife. Look at her. Bent over her own counter with her dress up on her back and her rings on the Formica and the sound man's cock in her to the hilt, with her mouth full of his hand. Fuck her. Fuck her right there where she ices the cakes for the deacons. She has wanted a cock in her in this building since the day she walked into it, and here it is, and she is wet to the knees for it. In the morning she will be at that door in her good green dress shaking every hand that comes through it and asking after everybody's mother. Go on. Use her. Fuck the pastor's wife in her husband's church and call her what she is. Say it in the same voice this building says the blessing in.

That ran for half an hour with my jaw shut. None of it got out into the air.

I put my hands flat on that counter and I let him.

That is the part I would keep if I could only keep one. I have spent my life being the one who decides what happens. I set the terms with my back against that counter, and then I put my hands on a counter and gave the rest of it away on purpose, to a man who was frightened of me, in a room I have a key to.

He was rough. I had told him he could be, and he did not believe me until about the third time. Once he did, he did not go back.

It got bad enough at one point that I put my hand on his wrist, which was the sign I had given him. He did not let go. I had told him not to let go for anything, and I had meant anything. So I took my hand off his wrist and put it back on the counter where it belonged and let him finish what he was doing to me.

I gave a man an instruction that took away my own way of stopping him, and then I tested it, and he held. What I felt when he held was the safest I have been in my adult life.

He kept one hand flat between my shoulder blades and the other on my mouth, and from there he quit asking me anything with his body and started telling me.

I could see the window over the sink from where he had my head. The gravel lot and the propane tank and the one light on the pole, and a moth going at it, and my own breath fogging that counter in a little patch that grew and shrank and grew.

There is a scorch mark on the left end of that counter from a girl who set a pan down wrong. My hand was flat beside it. I had iced a sheet cake on that exact spot the week before for the Musgrave girl's shower and written Congratulations Kaylee on it in blue.

About halfway through he got a fistful of my hair and pulled my head back off the counter. The pins went. I heard them hit the Formica, and it came down all around my face. I heard myself make a sound into his hand that did not come from anywhere I had ever been.

And then he said it.

"Whore," he said, low, right at my ear. Not asking.

He had said it to me before, in a rented room, because I knelt on a bedspread and told him to, and then made him say it like he meant it. This time nobody made him. He said it into my ear on his own, in my husband's church, the way a man says a plain fact about the weather.

For thirty two years I sat in the dark putting that word in the mouths of men who were not there, and I never got one of them to say it without my telling him to, because there was nobody in those rooms but me. He said it in that kitchen and I had not said a word.

It went through me like a struck match. It lit me up and left me there.

And then a hand came down on the door handle in the hall.

It turned and stopped. A locked door makes a short particular sound when it does not open, and I know that one, because I am the one who locks it.

Kyle stopped dead. Everything in him went to stone. His hand came half off my mouth, and I reached up and pushed it back down where I had told him to keep it.

He did not move. He did not come out of me. He did not have one idea in the world what to do.

The handle went again. Then a knock, two knuckles, the way an old man knocks when he already knows a room is empty.

"Rebecca? That you in there?"

Harold Culpepper.

I took Kyle's hand off my mouth with both of mine and held it against my collarbone. I turned my face toward the door and made my voice level.

"Yes sir, it's me. I've got the cakes out and I locked it so the pans don't walk off."

"Well, I couldn't tell if the light was left on."

"No sir, that's me. I'll get it when I go."

And Harold did not go. Harold never goes.

I have known that man since the week we came and he has never ended a conversation, and I stood there bent over a counter with the sound man's cock in me and remembered it.

"I set the water this evening."

Kyle made a sound. Not loud. A sound down in his chest like a door shutting in another part of a house. I reached back and got a handful of his shirt and held on, and he understood, and went still.

There is an inch and a half of hollow door in that wall. That is all there is. I could hear Harold breathing through it. I could hear his flashlight knock against the frame when he shifted his weight.

My dress was up over my hips. My underwear was hanging off one ankle. My hair was down around my face with the pins all over that counter. There was a man's hand held flat against my collarbone and a man's belt buckle against my thigh and a man's body still in mine. And I had my cheek off the Formica and my chin up, and my voice came out of me in the voice I use for the meal train, pleasant and a little bit busy.

"Ninety four?"

"Ninety four on the dial. It'll settle out around eighty five by morning, because that room does not hold heat. People think it's the tank."

I came on that. On ninety four, with my chin up off the Formica and my knees going and Kyle's arm coming around my middle to hold me up.

"The room," I said. "You've told me."

"The room. Every time."

"I know it."

"Now if it gets away from you in the morning, the reset's behind the little panel, and you have got to hold it in a good ten seconds. Folks push it and let go and think it's broke."

"I'll remember."

"Ten seconds. Count it out."

"I will count it out, Brother Harold."

"All right, then. Don't let me hold you."

His steps went off down the hall toward the sanctuary. A door at the far end opened and shut. The building was quiet again except for the drink cooler by the back door kicking on.

Kyle had held still through all of it, the reset and the ten seconds and don't let me hold you. When that door shut at the far end of the hall he could not hold it any longer, and he finished in me.

It was not the handle turning that did it. Fear has never been it, and I was not afraid at any point in that room.

It was ninety four.

The most boring man in that county, standing in the dark on the other side of a door with his flashlight, giving me for about the thousandth time a speech about a water heater, with another man inside my body.

He was right there. There was one hollow door between that man and the whole of my life, and he did not know it and was never going to know it, and he stood there and gave me the thermostat.

Then we stood there, the two of us, holding each other up against a counter with our clothes on.

He said, into the back of my hair, "I don't know who that was. That was not me."

I did not answer him. There was nothing to say that would not have made that room smaller than it already was.

I got my underwear up off my ankle and my dress down, and I picked my pins up off that counter one at a time and put them in my pocket. I set the cakes out on the pass-through so that what I had told Harold would be true, because I do not lie about small things. I turned the lock back and the light off, and we went out two different doors.

I sat in my car in the gravel lot a while before I started it.

Harold's flashlight was still going at the far end of the sanctuary. I watched it move across those windows one at a time. I thought about a man in there, bless him, checking thermostats in an empty building on a Saturday night. His wife has been dead six years and there is nowhere else for him to be.

I did not feel one thing about him. Not pity and not cruelty. What he gave me through that door he will go to his grave not knowing he gave.

I drove home with my hands at ten and two.

Vernon was up at the kitchen table with the bulletin and a pen. He looked over. "You get it all done?"

"I got it done."

"You're worth ten of me."

"I'm worth eleven of you, and you know it."

He laughed and went back to his bulletin. I stood at the end of my own counter with another man's fingerprints somewhere on my hip, looking at the back of my husband's head, and thought about how much I love him. I do, entirely, and it has never once gotten in the way of anything.

* * *

Kyle called me Sunday morning at six from his truck in his own driveway. He had never done that and was never supposed to.

"You wanted him to open it."

"Kyle."

"You did. I felt it. I was in you and I felt what happened when he said that number, and don't stand there and tell me I didn't."

He was not asking. He had been up all night with it and come out angry. It was the first time that man had ever been angry at me, and it did something to my stomach that I am not going to dress up as anything better than it was.

"I have to get to the church," I said. "We can talk about this Tuesday."

"Rebecca."

"Tuesday."

I hung up and stood in my own kitchen in my slip with the coffee going.

He called back inside of two minutes and I let it ring. Then he sent a message, which he had never done. I'm sorry. And about a minute later, Are you going to be there early?

There it was, in two lines, at ten past six on a Sunday morning.

Not the wanting. Being wanted is pleasant and it goes on a shelf. It was the checking. He had come out of that night needing to know where I was going to be.

I did not answer him. I stood in that kitchen and had a thought I had never had about him, which is that he had been a very useful man for a month and was turning into a fact I would have to manage.

Then I did what I did in that truck in September. I went looking for the thing that is supposed to be there when a man says something true about you that you did not want said out loud. Shame. Alarm. Something.

There was nothing behind it. There never has been.

But something did happen in me, just not where I was looking. It came up the backs of my legs and settled in my hips while I stood there with the phone in my hand. It was want, plain and ordinary. It came because he had said you wanted him to open it, and my body answered before I did.

He was right. If I had not thrown that lock, Harold would have seen the whole of me at once, with no way left on this earth for either one of us to pretend he had not.

Not caught. Seen.

Getting caught is a person finding out what I have done. Being seen is a person finding out what I am. The first one I have been afraid of, the way anybody is. The second one I have wanted since I was thirteen years old, and I got to be forty five before I understood they are not the same thing.

* * *

The last Sunday in October came up clear and about sixty eight degrees, which is the weather you pray for and never get.

We had two hundred and some on that lawn. Tables end to end under the pecan trees with the covers weighted down against the wind. Meat on three tables and the desserts on their own, because I will not have a pie next to a green bean. Tea in the coolers with ice I bought myself.

I ran it, all of it, all afternoon. I never sat down and I never stopped smiling and I was not faking a minute.

Since nobody has ever asked what running it is: you get there at seven with the coolers. You get the ice in before the sun is on the tables or you buy it twice. You put the meat in the middle and the vegetables at both ends, because a man will take four pieces of chicken and walk past every bean on that table if you let him. You put the rolls last, so his plate is already full when he gets there. You keep two women on the tea all day and you never let one of them be somebody's mother in law. You watch the deviled eggs in that heat and pull them at one o'clock whether anybody has touched them or not.

And you go down that line all afternoon with your hands full, and you say Rita that is the best thing on this table, and you say Brother Batson let me get you a chair out of the sun, and you get whoever came by himself a plate made before he has to stand in that line alone and feel it.

Nobody teaches you that. You learn it standing beside women who are dead now.

I love it. That is the part nobody will believe, and I would swear to it on any Bible you put in front of me. I love a long table with my people down both sides and everybody fed and the children running the fence line. I loved it that day.

And the whole time, under it, I was in that kitchen.

Forty feet to that counter. I could have walked over and put my hand flat on the spot.

People kept coming up the line. Belinda Teague about her knee. Shane Ammons in his Sunday tie, about his mother. Wanda Sowell about what the doctor said about her blood, at length, twice.

And under every one of those faces, on a loop: my dress up over my hips, my hands on the Formica, a hand over my mouth, and an old man on the other side of a hollow door saying a number.

Somewhere in the afternoon it quit being a memory and turned into the other thing.

All things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.

That is Hebrews, and it arrived on a church lawn between the tea and the rolls. It put me on one of those tables.

Out there in the sun, on the long table under the pecans, on my back in the middle of the food, with the paper cover sticking to my shoulders and a deviled egg plate turned over under my hip and my good dress shoved up under my arms. Harold Culpepper holds one of my ankles like a man steadying a ladder. Shane Ammons is in me with his tie still on and his big hands spread on my hips, and three more waiting their turn.

And nobody gets up.

That is the one I could not shut off. Two hundred people on that lawn with plates in their hands. Harold goes on about the thermostat with his mouth full. The Batson girl reaches across me for the rolls. Somebody's mother says this potato salad has too much mustard. A child runs the fence line hollering about a dog. Nobody stops. Nobody says one word.

They eat around me while it happens, all afternoon. One man finishes in me and steps back with his plate, and the next one steps up. I am flat on my back in the middle of that table getting fucked in front of every soul who ever shook my hand at that door. And the tea is running low at the far end and somebody really ought to see to it.

I did not fight it off. I stood there and served two hundred people and let it run, the way you let a radio play in another room. When Miss Ollie asked for my squash recipe I gave it to her from memory with my mind forty feet away.

Harold came through with his plate and I gave him my own chicken, and he stood there and told me about the thermostat in the youth building.

"Hot out here," he said. "You ought to get in the shade a minute."

"I will, Brother Harold."

He stood two feet from me and looked straight at my face and got the weather.

Charlene Ledford brought a squash casserole in my dish with the blue ring around it. It went home with her full from Miss Vada's funeral, and that night it went home with her again.

She came through the line to find me and took my hand across the end of the table, both of hers around it, and her hands were cold. Out in the sun with a hot dish just out of her arms, and they were cold.

"I wanted to say thank you," she said. "For praying."

"Every day, honey."

She said something after that and I could not tell you one word of it. I was standing there holding that woman's cold hands in the sun, thinking about what I had done Saturday night in that kitchen behind her, standing up, with her husband.

And about a half step behind that, brand new, her.

Not her being hurt. I have never once wanted to watch a woman cry. Her in that kitchen, bent over that counter where I was, in her good fall skirt, with her cold hands and her pretty voice and my hand where his had been, finding out what I found out. And me the one who put her there, and me the one telling her she could.

There is a door in me about that woman that I found in September and left shut. Standing on that lawn with a serving spoon, I got it open about an inch.

Then she let go of my hand and went on down between the tables, and I put chicken on the next plate.

Around two o'clock Kyle came through the line with his plate, because he had to. His wife was already sitting at the third table, and a man cannot leave a thing like that early without the whole church noticing.

He would not look at me. He held out his plate and looked at the middle of the table, and I put the chicken on it the same as a hundred plates, and said, "There you go, honey," in the voice I use at a hospital door.

And he flinched.

A grown man flinched at being called honey by a woman with a serving fork, in the sun, with his wife twenty feet away. I understood that I had broken something in him Saturday night that was not going to grow back.

And I served the next person.

If you want the worst thing I did that fall, it was not the counter and not the locked door. It was a serving fork and the word honey.

Vernon found me at the end, when the tables were down and the trash was bagged and there were a handful of people left picking up cups. He put his hand flat on my back the way he does.

"That was the best one we have had since we came," he said. "And everybody in this church knows who did it, and I want to say so where people can hear it."

"Oh, stop."

"I will not stop. Patsy. Come tell my wife what you told me."

Patsy came over. "I told him you could run the state of Tennessee if they'd let you," she said, and went back to her cups.

I stood there in the long light with my husband's hand on my back, and I was happy. That is not a lie.

* * *

That night I used it on him.

I have quit waiting on him. I quit at some point that fall and could not tell you the day. For twenty five years I lay next to that man waiting for him to ask me what I think about, and I do not wait any more.

It is worse than that. I have started using what I learn. Not telling him. Using it.

I took my gown off over my head first, which I have not done in that room in years. I sat up on him where he could see me and I made him look. I put his hands where I wanted them and left them there. I went slow the way I went slow on that parking deck, and I watched his face the whole way, and when his breathing changed I knew it half a second before he did, because I have had my hand flat on a man's stomach in a truck and I know now what that half second feels like.

I did not let him finish when he wanted to. I stopped and made him wait, and did it again, twice. I have known how to do that since I was twenty and never had a reason.

Vernon said my name into my hair in a voice I have not heard out of him since our honeymoon.

Afterward he lay with his arm over his eyes. "I don't know what has gotten into you this fall."

"Nothing, sugar."

"Well. Whatever it is."

He went to sleep with his hand on my hip.

* * *

Wednesday I went up to the booth after everybody had gone.

Kyle had been ugly with me on the phone Sunday and quiet with me since. When I came through that door he stood up too fast, the way he did the very first day.

The booth is not much of a room. A chair, the board, a rack of equipment with a little amber light on it, and two screens. On the left one was the stream, the back wall shot, all those empty seats. The right one was black.

That is the one he keeps me on.

I did not go up there to settle him down. I went up to ask for a thing.

"I want you to do something for me, and I want you to think before you answer."

"Rebecca."

"That camera over the baptistry. The one you keep on me on that second screen."

He did not say anything.

"I want you to save it. Every Sunday. On the drive, with the stream, the same as you do the back wall."

I watched him understand it, the way I watched him understand me in the sanctuary in September.

"That one doesn't record," he said, fast, the way a man says the thing he hopes will end it. "It's just up there. It doesn't go anywhere unless there is a baptism. When the service is over it's gone."

"I know that."

"Then you know what I'd have to do."

"You would have to set it to save. The same as the other one."

"You don't know what you're asking me for."

"I know exactly what I am asking you for. I am asking you to put my face on a drive in a room in my husband's church and leave it there."

"And if I say no?"

"Then you say no, and I will be at that door Sunday the same as ever, and I will never bring it up again or hold it against you one day of your life."

He looked at me a long while.

"You would, too," he said. "That's the part of you I can't get past. You'd go right on being exactly the same to me."

"Yes."

"Like none of it ever happened."

"Like all of it happened," I said, "and none of it cost anything."

"If anybody ever."

"Nobody is ever. You have had me on that screen all these years and nobody has once asked you what was on it."

He sat down in his chair and put his hands over his face. After a while he said, "What do you want it for."

I told him the truth, because it was the first time I had said it out loud and I wanted to hear how it sounded in a room.

"Because that back camera has had me for years and all it has got is the back of my head. I am one of three hundred on it. You are the only one who ever looked at my face. Not one other living soul. And every week you let it go."

"Rebecca."

"I have got a husband. I am not going to tell him and I am never going to ask him to look. I have quit asking. But I would like there to be a place where the whole of me is kept, in case anybody ever wonders. And I would like it to be in his building."

He did not say yes. He did not say no.

I went down the stairs.

* * *

I went out into the sanctuary and turned off every light in it.

Three hundred empty seats, the exit sign over the side door, and the streetlight coming through the glass at the back the way it does.

I walked up the middle aisle in the dark and stood at the head of it, in front of the communion table, and did nothing at all. I did not touch myself and I did not take off one article of clothing. The only other soul in that building was up in the booth.

For nothing is secret, that shall not be made manifest.

I let that one come all the way up, and whoever wrote it down did not have the first idea what he was handing a woman like me.

I looked up into the corner over the baptistry.

I had always thought of that camera as being on the second pew, because that is where he keeps it. Standing under it in the dark, I worked out for the first time what else it has. Pulled in tight, it is the second pew. Pulled all the way back, from up on that ceiling, it has the whole front of that room in it: the pulpit and the steps up to it, the table, and the spot where I was standing. Kyle never told me that, and I do not think it ever crossed his mind that he would need to.

And the little red light on it came on.

He was up there in the dark behind that glass, and he had set it to save.

I stood in my husband's church and let a machine look at my face.

I did not move for a long while. I could feel it up there in the corner like a hand on the back of my neck. Everything I have got came up in me at once and went nowhere, because there was nothing in that room to do with it.

What ran while I stood there was not a man.

It was the file. A Tuesday years from now, a dark room, and somebody I have not met yet, sitting in that booth with the door shut and the building empty, going back through all of it. Years of the back of my head on the stream. A few minutes a year of my face in a wet robe.

And then, from this night on, the rest. The pastor's wife in the second pew, Sunday after Sunday, from the front, with her face doing absolutely nothing and all of it full to the top and none of it showing.

And at the very start of that, a woman standing alone in the dark at the front of an empty church, looking straight up into the lens.

Whoever that is, someday, is going to get to the end of it and understand that I knew. That I stood at the head of that aisle on purpose and looked right up into it and put myself on that drive with my own hands.

* * *

All characters in this story are eighteen years of age or older.