Let Us Break Bread Together

The first Sunday of December I held my little cup of grape juice in the second pew and looked at the table my husband was standing behind, and I thought: I am going to have that.

Not a man. The table.

That is the whole of this one.

* * *

December in a church is a thing you have to live through to believe. There is so much of it.

The hanging of the greens is the first Sunday night. The children's program is the second Wednesday and there are nineteen children in it and four of them will cry. The Lottie Moon offering runs the whole month and somebody has to keep the poster in the vestibule current, which is me, with a marker, on a stepladder, in heels. There are three shut-in trays a week instead of one, because people are alone worse in December than they are in July, bless every one of them. The choir does a cantata and the cantata needs a soloist and the soloist gets sick, bless her heart, and I am the one who calls the other one.

I did all of it. I did it the way I do everything, which is better than anybody else within forty miles, and I was not faking one minute of it, and my head the entire month was in one room.

Nobody has ever written down what a December is like inside a woman like me.

The hanging of the greens is a service where the congregation decorates the sanctuary while somebody reads. The women do the garland on the rail. The men do the tree, bless them, badly. There is a ladder involved and a man on it, and at Sardis that man was Shane Ammons, because he is forty and his back is good and nobody asked him, he just got the ladder.

I stood at the rail with a handful of cedar garland and watched a man go up a ladder in a sanctuary and I was somewhere else entirely inside of four seconds.

Not with him. Nobody gets that right about this. It was not that man on that ladder. It was the room. It was that I was standing at the rail of my husband's church in a good green dress with a piece of cedar in my hand and nine people around me, and every one of them thought I was thinking about garland.

What I was thinking about is that the rail is the right height.

That is all it took. A height. I had a whole thing built before the second verse of what Wanda was reading. Me bent over that rail with my dress up over my hips and my hands down in the greenery and somebody behind me, and the whole congregation in their coats on the other side of it hanging ornaments and talking about the weather and nobody able to see one single thing wrong, and Vernon fourteen feet away with the tree lights in his hands saying we need another strand.

I ran the whole of that standing at the rail with my face doing nothing, and then it went off the way a thing does when somebody says your name, and I was back in a green dress with a long piece of garland left to hang.

"Rebecca, is this enough on this end?"

"Two more and then stop, honey."

And I went and got the box.

That is what December is, and what every month is, and December is worse because there is more church in it.

The children's program is nineteen children in bathrobes and I was up under the stage in the dark with a shepherd who had lost his headpiece, on my knees on that plywood, tying it back on a seven year old, and the whole time I had something running that I am not going to put on the same page as a seven year old, and both of those things were happening in one woman at one time and neither one of them was a lie.

The cantata soloist got sick. I called Charlene Ledford at nine at night and asked her if she could take O Holy Night on four days and she said Rebecca I could not, and I said yes you can and you are going to, and she did it.

I lay in my bed that night next to my husband and thought about that woman's throat.

Not out of meanness. I have got nothing against her and I never have. That door I got open an inch on the lawn in October had not shut back. That woman has the best voice in that county and she does not know it, and what I had going in my head was her up on those risers in her blue robe with the gold down the front singing the big part of that thing with her eyes shut, and me underneath her with my hands up under it and my mouth on her, and her having to keep singing.

It is a stupid arrangement and it would not work in life and I ran it four nights running.

And in the daytime I picked up a tray from the Batsons and got the poster current and called about the hams.

Everything else in this comes out of that sanctuary.

Sardis Baptist has a communion table across the front of the sanctuary, below the pulpit and in front of the rail. Oak, six feet of it, with a skirt of carved trim down the front and the words cut into the face of it in letters deep enough to catch a fingernail.

This do in remembrance of me.

It has been there since 1951. It gets oiled every January whether it wants it or not, because Harold sees to it, and it holds the offering plates on a Sunday and the flowers at a funeral and a sheet cake at homecoming when the fellowship hall is full, and no one on this earth thinks one thing about it.

I am the one who wipes it down the rest of the year, with lemon oil and a soft rag, and I have been doing it since the week we moved here. I have knelt in front of it with a hymnal under my knees to get the low corner. I know where the finish has gone thin. I know the one place on the back edge where a deacon in 1974 set something hot down and nobody ever said who.

And on the first Sunday of every month there are four brass trays of little plastic cups on it, and my husband stands behind it with his hands on either side of the bread and says the words.

This is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.

Vernon has said that over that table every first Sunday since we came and I have heard every one of them.

And I have never once said a line of it out loud myself.

Not one, in forty five years. Verses come up in me all day long and they stay where they come up. I have never quoted one at a person to settle an argument and I have never said one over myself for comfort, which is what other people do with them. I do not use them. I hear them wrong. There is a difference and it is the whole of me.

I did not hear it as a woman hears a thing she has heard more times than she can count. I heard it the way you hear your own name in a room where nobody knows you are standing there.

* * *

By December it had gotten away from what it was in the fall.

In the fall it was a man. By December it was not.

I quit calling it an affair somewhere around the second week of November. There was no day I could put a finger on. An affair is two people sneaking off. An affair has a hotel in it and a phone you keep somewhere and a fear of the other person's wife. What I have got is a building, and a set of keys I have carried since the week we came, and a man in the sound booth who does what I tell him, and the entire month of December to myself between four o'clock and six while a whole town is at ball practice.

A woman with keys isn't having an affair. A woman with keys is doing something else, and there is not a word for it that I know of, and there is not going to be.

That is the thing that changed and it changed everything under it.

* * *

Kyle had gotten worse.

To be fair to the man, he did not do one thing in November that a reasonable man would call wrong. He did not show up at my house. He did not call Vernon. He did not leave anything anywhere for anybody to find.

What he did was ask.

All November. He asked where I was going to be. He asked whether I had thought about him. He asked one afternoon in the booth, with his hand still in me, whether there was anybody else, and I said no, and it was true, and I watched what the answer did to his face and I understood that the answer was not the point.

He wanted the asking. He wanted a place where he was allowed to ask.

I liked being asked. I will put that down because it is true and because it is the only warm thing I have got to say about that month. Twenty five years of a man who never asks me anything, and then a man who cannot stop, and my body went right toward it like a hand toward a stove.

And then I looked at what it would cost and I put it away.

Because a man who asks where you are going to be on a Tuesday is a man who is four months from asking why you are not there, and then the thing I have built stops being mine and starts being ours, and I have spent my whole life keeping one thing that is mine.

So I made a decision about Kyle Ledford in the first week of December, standing in my own kitchen with a marker in my hand and a Lottie Moon poster on the table, and it is the coldest thing I have ever decided about another human being.

I decided I was going to keep what that man could get me and quit giving him the part of me he had started expecting.

* * *

Vernon was the happiest I have seen him since Presley was small.

I am not going to keep apologizing for that through the rest of this. The apologizing is what makes a woman like me unbearable.

My husband had the best fall of his ministry. The giving was up. There were two families that came back that had not been in that building since before we came. He preached a series through Advent that he built himself out of the minor prophets, which nobody does, and it worked, and he knew it worked, and he came home on a Wednesday night in December and stood in the kitchen doorway with his coat still on and said, "I have got it. Rebecca. I have got a hold of it this year."

And I said, "I know it. I have been watching you take a hold of it."

And he came across that kitchen and kissed me like a man twenty years younger and we did not get upstairs.

He got me up on my own kitchen counter with the Lottie Moon poster still on the table and a marker rolling off onto the floor, and he got my skirt up and my hose down and off, and he was in a hurry, which that man has not been in a hurry in fifteen years.

I have not skipped anything else, so I am not skipping this.

Vernon Edgewood makes love the way he preaches, which is that he starts where he starts and he goes all the way through it and he does not skip a part because somebody looks bored. He got my blouse open and put his mouth on me the way he has since we were young. He got a hand between my legs and he knows exactly what he is doing in there, he has always known, and there is nothing wrong with that man in a bed and there never has been.

He got into me standing up between my knees on my own kitchen counter with his good slacks down around his shoes, and I got my heels locked behind him and my hands in the back of his hair, and he said my name about four times into my neck.

And I said, "Come on."

And that is the whole of what I said, because that is the whole of what I am allowed to say in this house.

I have never let a filthy word out of my mouth on church ground either. Not one, not ever, not since the day we came. Not in that kitchen in October with a man's hand over my mouth and Harold Culpepper on the other side of a locked door. Ten thousand of them a day in my head since I was thirteen years old and not one syllable has ever gotten out of me on that property, and that is not modesty and it never was.

It is the only discipline I have ever had and I was as proud of it as another woman is of a clean house.

In my head I was saying every filthy thing I have got, in his voice, about his own wife, the way I have since our wedding night. I was telling him what I am. I was asking him for things in words that man has never heard out of a woman in his life and would not know where to put. All of it, at full volume, behind my face, while I said come on out loud in the voice I use to tell somebody the rolls are in the oven.

He finished in me on that counter and put his forehead down on my shoulder and laughed, actually laughed, out of breath, fifty two years old.

"What has got into you," he said.

"You did."

And he laughed again and went and got me a dish towel and kissed the top of my head like a man kissing his wife, which is what he was doing.

I have had better. I am not going to lie about it just because the lie would sit better. I have had better in a truck in a dead mall lot, and I have had better in a rented room with the air unit going.

And I have never once in twenty five years wanted that man off of me, and there are women in that congregation who cannot say that about a single night of their marriage.

Both true. Neither one of them cancels. I have quit waiting for one of them to.

All of that is true and it happened and it is not a setup for anything. We have been better in bed this fall than we were at thirty. He reaches for me more now. He put his hand flat on my stomach one night in the dark and said, "You are different," and I said, "I am the same," and he laughed and went to sleep with his hand right there, and I lay under it for about an hour with my eyes open.

He is not a fool and this is not a story about a fool. He is a good preacher having a good year with a wife who is better to him than she has ever been, and every word of that is true at the same time as the rest of it, and those two things do not fit and they are both still there.

* * *

Presley came home on the eighteenth.

I have to put the date down because the date is the whole shape of that month. My girl is nineteen and she is two hours away at a Christian college and she came home on the eighteenth of December and she was in that house until the third of January.

A woman like me does not get sixteen days of that without it costing her something.

A nineteen year old daughter does not go to bed. She is up at one in the morning making eggs. She wants to ride along to the Kroger. She sits on the counter while you ice a cake and she talks about a boy and she watches your face while she does it, because a nineteen year old girl is a professional at reading her mother and she has been studying me her whole life.

Presley is the only person in my own house who looks at me long enough to see anything.

She never has, though. My children do not know one thing and they are never going to and I would go in the ground before I let a piece of this touch either one of them. But she looks, and Colton does not look, and Vernon does not look, and for sixteen days in December there was a pair of eyes in my house that worked.

So I had until the eighteenth.

That was the clock on the whole thing. Not fear. Fear has never been what I have got. A scheduling problem, and it stopped me at six o'clock on the evening of the eighteenth of December and not a minute before.

* * *

The first Sunday of December, the communion Sunday, is where it came at me whole.

Vernon was behind the table. Harold Culpepper was at the near end with his hands folded, bless him, because Harold has passed the elements at that church since before I got here and he stands a certain way and the way he stands is the reason I know what a deacon looks like. Kyle was in the booth. Charlene was in the loft in the second row with her hymnal closed on her finger.

And Vernon put his hands on either side of the bread and said it.

I have heard that man say those words more times than I can count. I have taken the little square of bread off the tray every one of those times and held it in my fingers and waited, because at Sardis you do not eat until everybody has one and he says to.

There is a minute in there. A whole church holding bread and not eating it.

I have spent that minute doing what I do. It is how the whole of this started, in this pew, with a cup in my hand.

But that Sunday I was not in the pew in my head. I was on the table.

Not under a man. On it. By myself, up on the oak, on my back, with the trays moved off and my dress up and that carved sentence under me where my hips were, and three hundred seats full of people who could not see one single thing wrong because there was nothing to see, and I was holding a piece of bread in my fingers and waiting for my husband to tell me I could eat it.

It came up whole, the way they do when they are finished. I did not build that one. It was built.

I ate the bread when he said to. I drank the juice when he said to. I stood up for the invitation hymn and held on to the pew in front of me and sang every word of it.

And I stood at that door afterward for forty minutes and shook a hundred hands, and Belinda Teague told me about her knee again, bless her heart, and I said honey, we are going to get you to that man in Cookeville if I have to drive you myself.

* * *

That is the last Sunday that table was just a table.

* * *

The part people will want me to be sorry about goes out in front, before the good part, so nobody can say I hid it.

I used him.

Not the way a woman uses a man in a song. I mean I sat down at my own kitchen table on a Tuesday afternoon in December with a cup of coffee going cold and I worked out how to get a thing I wanted, and the way to get it ran through Kyle Ledford, and I went ahead.

What I wanted was that table, and I wanted more than one man on it, and I wanted it at night in that room with the lights off.

And I could not get it by myself.

I have got keys. I have got the hours. What I have not got is a second man, because a woman in my position cannot go and find one. There is no place I can look. Every man I know is in that congregation or married to somebody in it, and the ones who are not would talk, and talking is the one thing I cannot have.

Kyle could get one.

That is the whole reason. He is thirty eight years old and he is in the booth every Sunday and he knows every man in that building the way the sound man knows everybody, which is that they all come to him about the microphone and none of them think about him afterward. He had access and I did not.

So I used the thing he had gotten worse about. I used the asking.

I let him ask me where I would be on the eighth of December and I told him, and I met him up there at five with the building empty and the hall light off.

That booth isn't much of a room and there is nothing comfortable in it.

He had me against that rack before I got my coat off. He got my dress up around my hips and my underwear down and he got two fingers in me standing up with the amber light on that rack going on and off an inch from my hip, and he had his mouth on my throat and he was saying my name into it.

I put my foot up on the seat of that chair to open myself to him and I let him work at me like that for a long while, with my head back against the equipment and my eyes open on that little tilted window and the dark room on the other side of it.

I got his belt undone one handed. I have gotten good at that.

And I got up on the arms of that chair, which is a thing you can do if a chair is bolted down and that one is, and he got into me with my knees up around his sides and the whole rack behind me going every time he moved, and I bit down on the shoulder of his coat because there is an inch of glass in that wall and habit is habit.

He got me there twice. He is good at it now and he was not in September, and I taught him, and I want the credit.

And then, with him still in me and his hand still up under my dress and his breath going in my ear, I put my other hand flat on the middle of his chest and pushed until he stopped, and I said the sentence I had built at my kitchen table.

"I want you to bring me somebody."

He did not understand it at first. It was not stupidity. It was a decent man's ears refusing a thing.

"Bring you."

"To the church. At night. When it is dark and there is nobody in that lot."

"Bring you who."

"A man," I said. "A grown one. Somebody who will not talk and does not need to know one thing about me except what I tell him in that room."

He took his hand out of me and stepped back until he was against the rack, and the light off the board did what it does to his face, and I watched a man I have known since the week we came work out that the woman he has been lying awake over is somebody he has not met.

"No," he said.

"All right."

"Rebecca. No."

"I heard you, honey."

And I fixed my dress and I picked my bag up off the chair and I put my hand on that door, and I said the second sentence, which I had also built at my kitchen table, and which is the worst thing I have ever done to a person on purpose.

"Then I will get one somewhere else."

* * *

That is the thing I am actually confessing to, and it is not the table.

It was not true. I had no way to get one somewhere else and I knew it when I said it. It was a lie told in a flat voice to a man who does not know how to lie to me, and it worked exactly the way I built it to work, and I felt it work, and I will testify to that anywhere they want to put me.

I have never felt guilt. That has been true my whole life and I went and checked in that booth while his face was doing what it was doing, and there was nothing in there, the same as always.

But there was something else in there, and it was new.

I liked it.

Not the getting my way. I have gotten my way my whole life and it is a pleasant thing and it does not stay with you. I liked the cost. I liked watching a grown man's face come apart because of a sentence I made up at a kitchen table on a Tuesday with a Lottie Moon poster in front of me, and I liked that I was the one who made it up, and I liked that it was precise.

I will tell on myself, because nobody else is ever going to. Careless is what a woman like me gets accused of by people who have never met her. Careless is an accident. I sat down and I designed it, and I aimed it at the one thing that man has that is soft, and I pulled it.

I have never been sorry about anything in my life and I am not sorry about this one either. But this is the first thing I have ever done that I would be willing to be sorry about, if being sorry were a thing I had.

That is the closest I have ever come, and it came in a sound booth, and it was about ten seconds long, and then it was gone and I went home and made supper.

* * *

He called me Wednesday.

"Ammons," he said.

I did not say anything, because anything I said was going to cost him something, and because I had already won on Tuesday and a woman who keeps winning out loud after she has won is a woman who gets left.

"Shane Ammons," he said. "He does the Wednesday van. He is forty and his wife left him four years ago and went to Murfreesboro and he has not had one thing since. He will not talk. He does not have anybody to talk to. That is the only reason I am saying his name."

"All right."

"Rebecca, I want to say one thing and then I am not going to say it again."

"Say it."

"You are going to do this whether I am in that room or not."

"Yes."

"That's all I wanted to know."

And he hung up on me, which he has never done, and I stood in my kitchen holding the phone with the Lottie Moon poster still on the table and nine days until my daughter came home.

* * *

I had a week to wait and I spent it the way I have spent every week of my life, which is the part of me nobody has ever seen and the last part I would want explained at my funeral.

I planned it.

Not nervously. There is nothing in me to be nervous with. I planned it the way I plan a funeral dinner, which is that I sat down with what I had and worked out what went where, and I did it in bed at midnight with my husband asleep beside me and his hand on my hip.

The timer on the lot lights. Ten o'clock, and Harold set it himself in 2019, and he has told me about it twice.

Prayer meeting lets out at eight and the last car is gone by twenty after.

Harold walks the building Saturday, not Wednesday.

Wanda's grandson has basketball on Wednesday night and she skips prayer meeting for it and does not come back.

The side door, not the front, because the front is under the streetlight and the side is not.

I went through all of that on my back in the dark with my hands folded on my stomach like a woman laid out, and every single piece of it that fell into place went through me like a hand.

There is a thing about me I found out the night after the truck, in this same bed. It is not the man. It has never been the man. It is the arranging. It is sitting there on a Thursday knowing what is going to happen six days out and knowing that I am the only person on this earth who knows it, and lying in my own bed next to a sleeping preacher with the whole thing laid out in my head like a seating chart.

I got myself off three nights running that week with my husband asleep eighteen inches away and my hand not moving fast enough to make the mattress do anything, which is a skill, and which I have had since I was fifteen years old in my mother's house.

And what I ran was not the two of them. Not all week.

What I ran was the room.

The oak under me. The letters. The tray at my shoulder with forty cups in it going tick, tick, tick, the way I already knew it would because I have carried that tray every first Sunday since we came and I know exactly what it sounds like when it moves. My own voice coming off the back wall of that sanctuary, which I had never heard and had wanted to hear since the first Sunday I sat down in that pew.

I had the sound of it before I had the night.

That is how far ahead of everybody I have always been, and it is the loneliest fact about me, and there is no place on this earth it will ever go.

* * *

Shane Ammons is forty years old and going gray at both temples and he drives the Wednesday van that picks up the four old women out at the Beulah Road end of the county and brings them in for prayer meeting.

That is how I knew him and it is how everybody in that church knows him. He is a quiet man with big hands, bless him, who took over the van when nobody else would take it, and his mother is not doing well over in Sparta, and his wife left him in 2022 and he has come to that building twice a week by himself ever since.

He has shaken my hand at that door about four hundred times. He has said ma'am and yes ma'am and told me about his mother and taken a plate at every dinner on the grounds and helped stack the chairs afterward.

I had him in my head one time before this, in the sun, on a church lawn in October, in a fantasy with a lot of people in it and a paper tablecloth, and he had his tie on.

I had never gone looking at him. Not the way I look. He is not the kind of man you look at, and nothing about this was a woman being overcome by a man in a parking lot. I did not pick him. Kyle picked him and handed him to me, and when I heard the name I knew it would go with the rest of it and would not fall apart in the middle, and that is the whole of what I brought to it.

He said yes inside of a day.

Of course he did.

A man who has eaten supper by himself for four years does not say no. Not when another man hands him a woman with the word nobody attached to her. He was never going to say no and there was never a version of this where he did.

I knew that when I told Kyle to go get me somebody. That has sat on me since worse than the rest of it put together.

* * *

The sixteenth of December was a Wednesday and the coldest night of that month.

I told them both half past eleven.

I sat in my own living room until ten with Vernon asleep in his chair and Colton in the den with a game on and the Christmas tree going, and at twenty past I put my coat on and said I was going to run over and finish the vestibule poster before it got away from me, and my husband said mm, and my son said nothing, and I drove three miles with the heater on and my hands at ten and two.

I got there at half past ten, a full hour before I told either one of them, and I did that on purpose.

I let myself in at the side door with my own key and I did not turn on one light, and I went down the hall past the nursery and through the fellowship hall to the kitchen, and I got the communion things out of the cabinet over the warming cabinet where they live.

This is the part people will stop on.

The bread at Sardis is not a wafer. It is a sleeve of little unsalted squares that Wanda, bless her, orders out of a catalog twice a year, and it comes in a box, and the box was on the second shelf where it has been since 2019. The juice is Welch's. Two bottles, under the sink, and the cups are in a plastic sleeve of two hundred and fifty, and the trays live in the cabinet with them.

I stood at that counter in my coat in the dark and I filled forty of those little cups with a steady hand.

It takes a while. You have to go slow or it runs down the outside and then the tray is sticky and somebody has to wipe it. I have filled them the first Saturday of every month since we came, in that kitchen, with the radio on, and I have never spilled.

I did not spill that night either.

I carried the tray up the hall and into that dark sanctuary by myself and set it on the end of the communion table, and I put the bread out on the plate the way it goes, in four rows, and I set the plate in the middle where it goes, and I put the lid on it the way it goes, because the lid goes on until he takes it off.

And then I stood in that dark room in my coat with my hands at my sides and looked at what I had set out.

I had it done before either one of them ever pulled into that lot. That is premeditation. I know the word. I sat at a kitchen table on a Tuesday and designed a sentence to break a man with, and I stood at a counter on a Wednesday and filled forty cups, and there is no version of this where I get to say a thing came over me.

Nothing has ever come over me. I have come over things.

* * *

They got there when I told them to and they did not come in together.

I heard the side door and then I heard it again about ninety seconds later, which means one of them sat in his truck in the dark for ninety seconds before he could do it, and I have never asked which one and I never will.

Before either one of them got up that aisle I said, "Kyle. Go up there and turn it on."

He stopped where he was.

"Rebecca."

"The one over the water. The same as you do it on Sundays now. Go turn it on and come back down here."

And he stood in the dark in the back of that room for about four seconds and then he went up those stairs and did it, and when he came back down the little red light was burning up in the corner over the baptistry, and it stayed on the whole night, and every bit of what happened after that is sitting on a drive in a dark room three miles from my kitchen right now.

He knew what he was turning on. He never did teach me what that lens takes in. I worked that out by myself in October, standing under it in the dark, and he has known ever since that I know. He went up there and pointed the only camera in that building that has ever had my face in it at the front of that room, and then he came back down and stood in the aisle and let me do the rest of it to him.

They came up the aisle and stopped about halfway.

The sanctuary at Sardis at night is not dark the way people think. There is enough coming through the glass at the back off that streetlight on the corner to lay a long gray shape up the middle of the carpet, and the sign over the side door puts a little light on the end of the third pew, and that is the whole of the light in there. It is enough to see a man's shoulders by and not his face.

They stood there like two men at a viewing.

"Come on up," I said, in the voice I use to get a family moving toward a graveside.

And they came, and my shoes were the only sound in that building, and I turned around and put my hands back on the edge of that table.

I could feel the letters under my fingers. I have oiled every one of them.

"Take your coats off," I said, the same way I tell women where to set a dish down. "It is going to be cold and then it is not going to matter."

Being careful is what I do out there. This is the one place I have got where I do not have to.

Kyle would not come past the second row.

He stood there with his coat still on and his hands down and he looked at that table like a man looking at a wreck on the highway. Shane came all the way up. Shane came up to about four feet from me and stopped and said, "Mrs. Edgewood," in the voice he uses at the door on a Sunday, and I heard him hear himself say it.

"Not in here," I said. "Say my name."

"Rebecca."

"Again."

"Rebecca."

"There you go, honey."

And I took that man's hand, the big one, the one that has taken four old women in and out of a van every Wednesday for four years, and I put it flat on my breast over my dress and held it there, and I felt the whole of him go still the way a man goes still when a thing he had decided was never going to happen to him again starts happening.

I got my coat off and my dress unbuttoned all the way down the front and I stood there and let him look.

I am forty five and I have had two children and I have spent my adult life in clothes chosen to keep anybody from noticing that there is a body in them. Heavy through the chest and thick through the hips and the backside, which I have dressed to disguise since I was twenty two years old.

I let a man look at every bit of it in the middle of my husband's church with the streetlight coming down the aisle.

"Good Lord," he said. Quiet. Not at me. To himself, the way a man says it when he is alone.

"Do not say that in here," I said, and I was smiling when I said it, and that is the first joke I have ever made in that room.

He put his mouth on me standing up first.

There's a thing a starved man does that a man who has plenty does not do. He does not skip anything. He got my dress off my shoulders and my bra undone with two fingers like a man who has done it in the dark before, and then he put his face down in the side of my neck and stayed there long enough that I had to put my hand in his hair, and then he came down onto my breasts and took his time about that too. Both of them. Unhurried. Not a man sampling a thing on his way somewhere else. A man who had decided that was where he was going to be for a while.

He got down on his knees on that carpet in front of the communion table and got my underwear down off my feet one at a time, and he put both those big hands flat on the backs of my thighs and held on, and he did not ask me anything.

I had my hands on the edge of that table behind me to hold myself up and my head back and my eyes open on that ceiling.

The ceiling at Sardis has a water stain over the third light from the front that Harold has had two men look at.

I looked right at it while a man I have said good morning to four hundred times put his tongue in me in my husband's sanctuary, and I got my hand down into his hair and held him there, and I moved him, and he let me move him, and the first one came up out of me before I had the least idea it was coming.

I did not make a sound on that one. Twenty five years of training does not come off in a night.

But my knees quit, and he felt them quit, and he stood up and got both arms around me and put me up on that table.

He had me on my back on that oak with my dress hanging off one arm and my heels up on the edge, and he got into me standing at the end of the table with his belt still hanging out of the loops, the whole of him, all at once, and the sound that came out of me that time came off the back wall of that sanctuary and came back at us, because that room is built to carry a voice and it does not care whose it is.

He was not careful. Kyle had handed me a careful man and I had taken his word for it, and we were both wrong, and being wrong about that is the single best thing that happened to me that whole year.

He got a hand under the small of my back and pulled me down the table into him. He got his other hand flat on my chest, not on my throat, flat, holding me down on that wood, and he used it for leverage and he went at me like a man who had four years of Wednesday nights in a church van to get out of himself.

The tray walked.

It is the truest detail I have got out of that whole night. Forty little plastic cups of grape juice in a brass tray on the end of that table, and the whole thing walked about two inches toward the edge in the course of it, ticking, every one of those cups going against its neighbor, and I turned my head and watched it come and I did not tell him to stop.

My wedding ring was flat on that oak where my hand was. The carved sentence was under my hipbones and I know it was, because I had it for four days after, a line of it, bruised in.

This do in remembrance of me.

* * *

And Kyle stood in the aisle the whole time and watched.

When Shane had me on that table I said Kyle's name, not loud, in the voice I use on the telephone about the meal train.

"Kyle. Come up here where I can see you."

And he came. Up that aisle, past the pew with my bag in it, into the light off the streetlight, and he stood about six feet from the end of that table with his coat on and his arms down at his sides.

"You are not going to touch me yet," I said.

He did not say anything.

"Look at me, honey."

And he looked at me. A grown man of thirty eight years old with his mouth open a little and his eyes wet, standing in a church he has run the sound in since before we ever came, watching a woman he is in love with get taken apart on the communion table by a man he went and got himself because she told him to.

"Tell me you love me," I said.

"Rebecca."

"You have never said it. You have been saying it up in that booth with your mouth shut since the week we came. Say it in here, out loud, where it goes off the wall."

And he said it.

"I love you."

He said it standing in the middle aisle of a Baptist church at midnight with his coat on, to his pastor's wife, while another man had her on the communion table, because she asked him to. It went out across those empty seats and came back off the back wall at all three of us.

And I came the second he said it, on that table, with another man's hands on me and my face turned toward the one who loved me.

I did not do it because I wanted him to hurt.

I did it because the hurt was going to happen either way, and because it made the thing bigger, and because I have got room in me for exactly that and no room at all for the other part. He was standing in that aisle because a sentence I designed on a Tuesday put him there. I knew what it would cost him and I spent it.

We were nowhere near done.

Shane finished in me the first time standing at the end of that table with his hand flat on my chest, and I felt it happen, and he made a sound over me that I am going to have for the rest of my life. Then he sat down on the front pew with his head back and his shirt open and did not say one word for about two minutes.

I got up on my elbows on that table.

Two things had never once gotten out of me on that ground.

I broke them both, sitting up on that table with my legs hanging off it, inside of four seconds.

I put my hand out toward Shane Ammons and I said it in Vernon's cadence, because that is the only cadence that sentence has ever had in my ears.

"Take, eat."

And then I said, "Get back down there and put your mouth on my cunt."

I had never heard my own words in that room.

That is the part I had not seen coming. Eleven years of my husband's voice coming off those walls and mine underneath it in the alto line where it is supposed to be, on the beat, in tune, saying somebody else's words.

And there it was. My own voice. In that building. Saying that.

It came back off the wall at me about a half second later, and I heard it twice, once going out and once coming home. The second one is the one that got me.

The room took it.

I asked for this in October. Down at the other end of that building, bent over a counter with a hand over my mouth, I ran a whole sermon of it behind my teeth and the last thing I asked for was to hear it said out loud in the same voice that building says the blessing in. None of it got out. The only thing in that kitchen that answered me was a cooler coming on.

That room answers. It has answered my husband off that same wall for eleven years and it answered me the same way.

A truck does not. A motel does not. A kitchen with a hand over my mouth does not.

I have wanted somebody to hear me since I was thirteen years old, and it turns out what I wanted was not a person at all. It was that room. The one with three hundred seats in it and my husband's voice in the walls.

And he went back down on his knees and did what I told him to do, and I held his head there and I talked the whole time.

"Right there. No. Up. There. Do not move off of that."

He moved off of it, because a man always does the first time, and I got a fistful of his hair and put him back.

"I said do not move off of it. Now use your tongue and quit being polite with me, I have been polite in this room since the day we came."

And he did.

"That is it. That is it, honey. Do not stop when I tell you to stop."

"Get your hands up on me. Both of them. I have got tits on me, use them."

I said all of that out loud at a quarter past midnight in Advent, in my speaking voice, the one I use at that door on a Sunday.

And then it got worse, because I let it.

"I am not a good woman," I said.

Out loud. In that room. In the plain flat way you would say your own maiden name to a woman filling out a form.

That is the one thing everybody in that building has said about me since the week we came. She is a good woman. They say it at the door and they say it in the kitchen and they will say it over my casket. I lay back on that table and told the room the truth.

Then I told it what I am instead, and I took my time, because I have got a lifetime of words stacked up in there.

I said nasty, which is the word my mother used for women on the television. I said slut. I said I am a filthy woman and always have been.

I said trash.

There is no bad word in that one at all and it is the worst thing in the whole list. Trash is what those women say about a girl who has gone wrong out at the county line, in the kitchen, over a pan of cornbread, in a voice with no heat in it at all. They said it about a girl who married out of that church and moved off to Nashville and they said it for ten solid years after she was gone.

I have heard them say it my whole life and I have never said it about one living soul.

I said it about myself, out loud, at speaking volume, in the room where they say it about other people.

And then I said adulteress.

That is the Bible's word for me before it was ever mine. My husband has preached it out of the fifth chapter of Matthew from twelve feet in front of where I sit, with children in the room, and not a soul in there thought a thing about it. It was in the book all along, waiting, meaning exactly me.

Half of what I have got, they handed me. They read it to me off a stage from the time I was a girl, in a good suit, in a kind voice, and then they sent me home to be good, and I went home and I was good for thirty two years.

And on the sixteenth of December I stood the whole of it up in an empty room and said it in my own voice.

And he answered me with his mouth still on me, a sound I felt more than heard, and I went off again right there on the edge of that table with a church van driver's tongue in me and this do in remembrance of me under the heels of my hands.

Let us break bread together on our knees.

They sing that at Sardis twice a year and the congregation kneels on the second verse if their knees will do it, and it came up in me while a forty year old man was on his knees in front of that table with his hands on the backs of my thighs, and I turned it loose and let it run.

When I was done with that I reached over and took the lid off the bread plate.

Nobody asked me to do that and nobody would have thought of it but me.

I took a piece of that bread out of the plate, one of those little unsalted squares out of Wanda's catalog box, and I put it in that man's mouth with my fingers.

"Take, eat," I said. Again. On purpose.

And he ate it, looking at me, kneeling in front of that table.

Then I took one of the little cups out of the tray and drank about half of it, and I poured the rest of it down the front of me.

It's cold. Nobody tells you that. It came down between my breasts and off my ribs and onto that oak and it went into the carving, and I watched it run along the inside of the letters and find the low corner, the one I go down on my knees with a hymnal to reach.

Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.

That is John and it is the hardest thing in that book and there is not a preacher in this county who will touch it, and it came up in me sitting in a puddle of Welch's on that table with a man's mouth coming up my stomach.

He cleaned it off me. All of it, up my stomach and up my ribs and off both breasts and out of the hollow of my collarbone, and I had my hand in his hair the whole time telling him where he had missed, and when he got up to my mouth I could taste it on him and I let him put his tongue in my mouth with it and I held the back of his head.

And then I got down off that table and turned around and bent over it again.

"The other way," I said.

He did not say anything. He put his hand on the small of my back and I heard him wet his fingers and I put my forehead down on that oak.

I had done it once before in my life, in September, in a rented room off the interstate in the middle of the afternoon, and it had hurt worse than anything I ever built, and there had been a stretch of it in the middle where all I could do was take hold of that bedspread and get my breath.

There was a bad minute this time too. He was not in a hurry about it, and that is the only reason there was only one.

He worked at me with his thumb first, standing behind me in the dark, until I had quit holding on to it. Then he put himself against me and waited there, and then he came into me about half and stopped, and I got hold of the far edge of that table with both hands and said, "Oh, fuck," into the wood.

Then the rest of it.

And then it turned over the way it does, the way it did in September, and I understood all over again why women do not talk about it, and I got up on my toes on that carpet with my whole front flat on the communion table of Sardis Baptist Church and let Shane Ammons have me that way in front of three hundred empty seats.

I was loud, and I said all of it.

"Fuck. Oh, fuck me. Don't you dare stop."

"Harder than that. I am not going to break."

"That is it. Right there. Do it to me like it has been four years."

I said my own name in there somewhere, which I have never done, and I said his, and I told that table twice, out loud, exactly what I wanted done to me on it, with my face down on the wood he serves the Supper off of, and the second time I laughed while I said it. Nobody in this world has ever heard me laugh like that.

And when it went, it went all at once and all the way, and there was nothing left underneath it. Just a woman face down on an oiled oak table saying the worst of it out loud into the dark in her husband's church, and the room taking every word of it the way it takes a hymn.

Kyle made a sound behind us.

I did not turn my head. I could not have. But I heard it, and it was not a sound of a man who was leaving.

Shane finished in me that way with both hands on my hips and his forehead down between my shoulder blades, and I stayed bent over that table for a while afterward because my legs were not going to hold me yet and I was not in any particular hurry to find out.

And then I said his name.

"Kyle."

"Take your coat off and come here," I said, the way I would tell a man where to set a casserole down.

I had made that man stand in an aisle for the better part of an hour. What I did next was worse than the standing.

He came and he could not get his coat off fast enough and his hands were not working right.

I got down off that table onto that carpet and I put him where I wanted him, and I got my mouth on him right there in the middle of the front of that sanctuary with his hand in my hair, and I looked up at him the whole time and watched that man's face come apart all over again.

And when he was close I took my mouth off him and stood up and said, "Not like that."

And I turned around and put my hands back on that table.

* * *

Both of them.

I am not being coy about what I mean.

I got up on that table on my hands and knees with the carving under my palms and the tray at my shoulder, one of them behind me and one of them in front of me. I had both of them at once in my husband's sanctuary on the table with this do in remembrance of me cut into the face of it. I stayed up there until my arms gave out, and then I went down onto my forearms and stayed there anyway.

Shane took me from behind and did not hurry about it and did not ask about one thing.

And Kyle was in my mouth with both hands in my hair and he was saying my name over and over the way a man says a thing he has already lost, and I could hear that, and the other one behind me, and the cups ticking in the tray by my shoulder all the way through.

The one behind me finished in me first.

And then the one in my mouth, and I did not take my mouth off him.

I have done that one time before in my life, in a truck, in September, and it was mine and I took it because I wanted it, and I have never been sorry about it for one second.

This one was not mine. I did it on a communion table at one o'clock in the morning for a man whose whole evening I had spent on purpose, and I have never been able to decide whether that makes it a kindness or the last cruel thing in a night full of them.

* * *

And then it was quiet in there, and I sat up on that table with my legs over the side and my dress in my lap and grape juice down the whole front of me, and Shane Ammons sat down in the front pew again, and Kyle sat down on the step in front of the rail with his back against it, and none of us said anything for a good while.

That room is loud when it's empty. The heat comes on and the ducts go, and there is a clock in the vestibule you cannot hear during the day.

It was neither of the two things it should have been.

It was not shame. I have been over the whole house and there is no room in it with that in there. It was not triumph either.

What it was, was quiet. The way a kitchen is quiet after a funeral dinner when the last dish is dried and put up and there is nothing else you can do for anybody. It had happened and it was not going to un-happen, and the whole of me went quiet all at once. I sat up on that table in the dark with two men who had nothing left to say, and I was more at rest than I have been in my life.

We went out the side door at about one in the morning and the lot was black because the timer is set to ten. Shane Ammons shook my hand in the dark like a man leaving a funeral and said, "Ma'am," and got in his truck, and I have not had one uncomfortable second with him since, because a man who has eaten supper alone for four years understands better than anybody alive what it costs to say a thing out loud.

Kyle stood at his truck door and did not open it.

"Rebecca."

"I know it, honey."

"You don't."

And he got in and shut the door, and I stood in that black lot in my coat and watched his taillights go out onto the road, and I have chewed on those two words ever since.

* * *

I went back in by myself before I locked up.

I put the lid back on the bread plate. I counted the cups, because there were forty going in and there had to be forty coming back. I carried all of it down that hall to the kitchen. I rinsed the tray at that sink and dried it and put it up, and the forty cups went in a grocery sack that rode home on my floorboard.

There is a lemon oil and a soft rag in the cabinet under the sink and I went and got them and I came back up that hall and I wiped that table down the way I have wiped it down since the week we came. The whole face of it. Then the top, twice, because of the juice. Then the carved letters, getting the rag down into them with my thumbnail the way you have to, all the way along, this do in remembrance of me, and then the low corner on the back edge, on my knees, with my coat folded under them because there was no hymnal handy.

It took me about forty minutes and I did it right.

And I did not go up those stairs and turn that camera off.

I thought about it standing there with the rag in my hand. I knew exactly which two buttons it was. And I left it running on an empty room, because I have spent my whole life putting every single thing back the way I found it, and that one thing I was going to leave exactly where it was.

Then I locked the side door and drove home and got in the bed beside my husband at twenty of two, and he rolled over without waking up and put his arm across me, and I lay there under it with the letters still on my hips and I slept like a child.

* * *

Presley came home two days later.

She came through that door at six in the evening on the eighteenth with a duffel bag and a laundry basket and cold in her hair and she said, "Mama," and put her arms around my neck, and I held on to my girl in my own front hall for a good while.

And that was the end of December for me.

Sixteen days. She sat on my counter and she rode to the Kroger and she was up at one in the morning making eggs and she watched my face the entire time the way she has since she was four years old.

I did not go anywhere. Not the whole time she was in that house. I did not want to, and that is worth saying, because it is the only stretch since September where the wanting went quiet, and it went quiet because my daughter was in the house and there is a thing in me that is bigger than the other thing and it has her name on it.

It is the only fact in my life that has ever stopped me.

* * *

Christmas Eve at Sardis is at six o'clock and it is candles and it is the fullest that room gets all year, better than three hundred, with folding chairs down both side aisles.

We do the Lord's Supper at the end of it. Vernon started that the second year we were here and people would riot now if he quit.

I sat in the second pew between my daughter and my son in a green dress with my hair down my back.

Presley had her arm through mine. Colton had his phone in his coat pocket, bless him, and his hands folded on it like a hymnal, which he thinks I do not know about. The choir came down and stood along the front in their robes and Charlene Ledford sang the first verse of O Holy Night by herself from the end of the row, and that woman has a voice on her, and the whole room went quiet in the way a room does about twice a year.

And at the end of it my husband stood up behind that table with his hands on either side of the bread.

I had the letters gone off me by then. Four days and they were gone.

I sat through that hour and I looked like a woman sitting through it.

I ran the whole of that Wednesday night, start to finish, in order, in a green dress, between my two children, in the candlelight.

I did it the way you play a thing you know by heart. The side door and the cold. My own hands filling forty cups at that counter in the dark. The little red light burning up in that corner the whole way through, on purpose, because I sent a man upstairs to put it there. The two of them coming up that aisle. My dress coming off my shoulders. Shane Ammons on his knees on that carpet with his hands on the backs of my thighs and the water stain over the third light. Me on my back on that oak with the tray walking. Kyle in the aisle with his arms down telling me he loves me, out loud, in that room. My own voice coming off the back wall. The juice going cold down my front and into the letters. Both of them at once and my arms giving out and me staying up there anyway.

All of it, in order, in an hour, with my daughter's arm through mine.

And I sang O Come, All Ye Faithful and Joy to the World and I sang both of them right through, and when Colton dropped his candle cup I picked it up off the floor and handed it back to him without looking down.

There is not a person alive who can do what I can do. Kyle Ledford knows more about me than anybody breathing and he does not know that, because there is no way to say it that does not sound like bragging about a thing nobody would want.

He said the words. He has said them more times than I can count now.

This is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.

And Harold Culpepper and three other men took the trays off that table, and one of them came down my row, and my daughter took a cup and passed it to me, and I took one and passed it to my son.

And we sat there, my children and me and three hundred other people, holding little plastic cups in the candlelight, not drinking, waiting for him to say we could.

But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord's body.

That is the rest of it, four verses on, and nobody reads that part out loud at Christmas. It came up in me in the candlelight with my daughter's shoulder against mine.

Damnation to himself.

I turned that over while I held my cup, and what I found is not what a person would expect.

Nothing.

Not defiance. I was not sitting in that pew telling God anything. I was not daring one thing. I held that cup and I looked at the table where a man had me on my back eight days before and I went in and had a good look around for the part that is supposed to go off, and it was not in there, the same as it has never been in there, the same as that drawer with the false front on it that was never a drawer at all.

There has never been anything behind that trim. There is not going to be.

And Vernon said, "Let us drink together," and three hundred people drank, and I drank with them.

We sang Silent Night at the end with the candles going down the rows, and Presley held hers in both hands, bless her, the way she has since she was six, and Colton held his like it might go off.

And on the front pew, left side, Roberta Dilbeck sat with her candle not lit because Wanda will not let her have a flame any more.

She is past ninety and she has sat on that pew since before I was born and in all the time I have been in that church I have not seen her look at anything but the front of it, and that night she turned her head.

She did not turn it toward me. She turned it toward the table, and she looked at it for a while, and then she said out loud in the middle of Silent Night, in the voice deaf people use because they cannot hear themselves, "Have they had that table cleaned?"

And Wanda said, "Yes ma'am, it's clean."

And Patsy Threadgill, in the pew behind me, leaned up and said in my ear, "She has asked me about that table twice a year since before you ever got here. She thinks it's the one from the old building."

And I said, "Bless her heart."

And we sang the last verse.

* * *

Afterward I stood at that door for an hour and a half in a green dress with my coat over my arm and shook every hand that came out of that building.

It is the job and there is not a woman in this state who does it better.

I got told about a hip and a grandson in the Navy and a sister in Jackson, bless her, who is not speaking to anybody. There was a girl visiting from somewhere with a baby on her hip and I said aren't you sweet to come out in this cold, sweetheart, and I meant it. I got hugged by women who lost somebody this year and I held on as long as they needed me to, every time, and I meant it every time, and the meaning it is not a performance and never has been.

Shane Ammons came out with his coat buttoned and shook my hand and said, "Merry Christmas, Mrs. Edgewood."

"Merry Christmas, honey. How is your mother?" I said it the way I say it at that door to any man in that church, because that is what it was.

"About the same."

"You tell her I asked."

"Yes ma'am. I will."

And he went on out to his truck.

Kyle came out near the end with his wife on his arm, because the sound man has to shut the board down, and Charlene hugged me, bless her, and her hands were cold and she said the cantata went beautiful and she could not have done it without me, which is not true and which she believes.

And Kyle shook my hand.

He has never done that. Not one time in all these years has that man shaken my hand at that door, because he goes out the side with his bag over his shoulder.

He put his hand in mine and held on about a half second past where it should have stopped and said, "Merry Christmas, Mrs. Edgewood," and he did not look at me while he said it.

And I said, "Merry Christmas, Kyle."

And that was all of it.

My husband came and got me at the end of it, with the lights going off one bank at a time and nine or ten people still going down the rows picking candle cups up off the floor.

He came up behind me and put his hand flat on my back the way he does.

"Best one we have ever had," he said.

"It was a good one."

"Rebecca." And he turned me around by the shoulders and looked at me in a way that man does about twice a decade. "I have had the best year of my life."

And I said, "So have I, sugar."

And that is not a lie. I have gone back over that sentence a hundred times looking for the lie in it and it is not in there. That is the trouble with me and it always has been. It would be so much simpler for everybody if one of those two things were not true.

He kissed me in the vestibule of his own church with the lights going off behind us, and then we went home and put out what the children were getting and I was up until one thirty wrapping.

* * *

Presley went back on the third of January.

I stood in the driveway and hugged my girl and told her to text me when she got there, and she did, and I put the phone down on the counter and stood in my own kitchen in the quiet for about a minute.

Then I called Shane Ammons.

* * *

Kyle did not know about that and still does not.

The Wednesday van gets back to the church at about a quarter till nine and Shane puts it in the shed and locks the shed and that is the end of his week. I met him in the fellowship hall on the sixth of January with the lights off and the heat ticking and my coat over the back of a chair.

It was different without the other one there and I had known it would be.

There was nobody to perform for. There was no aisle with a man standing in it. It was a forty year old man who had not touched a woman in four years until three weeks before, and a forty five year old woman who has spent her whole life making things nobody else ever got to see, alone in a fellowship hall at nine o'clock at night.

He did not say much. He has never said much.

He got my coat off the chair and put it down on the floor by the wall, and then he got me down on it, and I went, and that is the first time in my life a man has put me on the floor of a building I have keys to.

He took his time the way he does. He got my sweater up and my bra pushed out of the way and spent about ten minutes on nothing but my breasts with his weight half on me and one hand working between my legs, and I lay on my own coat on that tile with my head turned to the side looking at the legs of eighty folding chairs stacked along the wall.

Then he got down between my legs and stayed there until I had to put my hand over my own mouth, which I did not have to do, and did anyway, and that is habit and I expect I will have it until I die.

And then he got into me on that floor with my knees up and my heels in the small of his back, and it went slow, and it went long, and he watched my face the entire time.

Kyle looks at my face to find out how he is doing. He always has. He is checking the dial.

Shane Ammons looks at my face because he cannot believe it is there.

It is the whole of what he is worth to me and it is worth more to me than what Kyle has got, and I do not expect one soul to understand that.

He finished in me on a fellowship hall floor with his forehead against mine, and afterward he got up and got my coat out from under me and shook it out and held it for me to put my arms in, and he did it the way a man does it at a funeral.

"Same as before," he said. "Whenever you want."

"I know it," I said, in the voice I keep for telling a woman on the telephone that the ham is covered.

"Mrs. Edgewood." He was buttoning his own coat by then and he would not look up. "It is not going to be my business who else."

"No," I said. "It is not."

"All right then."

And he went out to the shed to check that he had locked it, because he had, and because he is that kind of man.

* * *

The table is still there.

They oiled it in the last week of January the way they do, and I helped, and I got down on my knees in front of it with a hymnal under them to get the low corner, the way I have since the week we came.

* * *

And I have got one more year of that room in me at least, and there is a thing in the back of my head about the pulpit now, which is up the steps behind that table and higher, and is the one place in that room higher than the table.

But that is not this one.

The last thing is this.

On the first Sunday of February I sat in the second pew and my husband stood behind that table and said the words over the bread, and the little cups went down the rows in four brass trays, and I took mine and held it and waited like everybody else.

And the minute came. The long one. A whole church and not a sound in that building and every one of them with a cup in their fingers.

I have spent that minute the same way every month since the week we came here.

I did not spend it that way. And I did not spend it on the table, which is where I had expected to spend it.

I spent it running my thumb along the edge of that little plastic cup, in a green dress, in the second pew, sitting the way I have always sat, thinking about a Wednesday night and a cold room and my own voice coming back off the wall at me.

And then Vernon said let us drink together, and I drank, and I went to the door.

* * *

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