Just As You Are

The last Friday in June, after the deacons met, I took my husband's pulpit.

Harold walks the building at nine. He walked it at nine that night and went home at twenty after, and the lot lights went off at ten. By half past there were three vehicles parked behind the storage building where nobody can see them from the road, and I had the side door unlocked.

Kyle. Shane. Charlene.

A year ago I was a woman who had never done one thing. Every one of them was in that building because I put them there.

There is a camera in the ceiling over the baptistry. It is a little brown thing about the size of a coffee cup, up there since before we came, and every soul in that church thinks it is for the water. It is a wide lens. It takes in the whole front of the room: the table, the head of the aisle, the loft, and every inch of the platform.

I sent Kyle up to the booth before we started.

"Leave it on," I said.

He stopped on the bottom step with his hand on the rail. "Recording."

"Recording."

He went up and did it. When he came back down there was a little red light burning in that corner of the ceiling over the tank. It burned the rest of the night, and every single thing I did up on that platform I did underneath it.

Then I went up the three steps and stood behind my husband's pulpit and put my hands on both sides of it the way he does.

It is oak, and it sits eighteen inches up, and I have dusted it every week since we came. There is a shelf inside where he keeps a roll of cough drops, a handkerchief folded in fourths, and a pencil with no eraser left on it. There is a stack of index cards in there too. I type them off his legal pad on Saturday night, and by Sunday they have his pencil all down the margins, bless that man.

I stood up there in my good dress with the three of them on the floor looking up, and I let them look. I did not say anything for long enough that Charlene started to shift her weight.

You can see the whole room from up there. The second pew is twelve feet out and eighteen inches down. I have sat in it every Sunday of my married life at that church, and from the pulpit it is a little piece of a room with a hymnal rack in it and nothing to it at all.

"Come on up here," I said. "All three of you."

I said it in the voice that gets a family up out of a pew and moving toward a graveside.

Then I ran them.

* * *

Back in the winter, before any of this, the line came down, and I did not notice it going.

For thirty three years I had two of everything. Two voices. One for the room and one for behind my face, and I could no more have crossed them than walked into the sanctuary barefoot. I was built that way.

Sometime after Christmas it was gone. I noticed it the way you notice a wall is missing after they have hauled the drywall off.

One Wednesday in March I stood in the fellowship hall and said, "I want you to put me over that table and fuck me until I cannot stand up," to a man I have been telling good morning to since the year we came. In December that sentence would have had to go the long way around, through my whole body first. In March it came out of me like asking him to get the other end of a table.

That man was Shane Ammons. Wednesday nights were his by then, after he put the church van away. The fellowship hall, the chair room, and one time the storage building out back with the roll door run all the way up. That one I keep.

I could say get your mouth on my cunt in that kitchen with the same face I use to tell a man where the mop is. Nobody tells you what it is like on the other side of a thing like that. There is no other side. There is only more room.

Sunday afternoons I had Kyle in the sound booth. Those were quick, and both of us knew they were not the point any more.

One Sunday in March he had me up on the arms of that bolted chair with my heels hooked on the equipment rack, and about halfway through he said, "You are somewhere else."

I was. I was twelve feet out and eighteen inches up.

"I am right here, honey," I said, the way I say it on the telephone about the meal train. I was lying to that man about where I was, and it was about a piece of furniture.

* * *

By March Kyle had quit fighting.

In the fall he was coming apart. He was up all night. He kept asking me where I was going to be. In December he stood in an aisle in the dark with his coat on and his arms down at his sides while another man had me on the communion table, because I told him to stand there.

The second Sunday in January it turned.

I had him in the booth between services and it was bad. He was rough with me, which he has never been, and not the good kind. It was a man trying to get somewhere he was not going to get to. He had me against the rack with my dress up and he could not finish and he would not stop. After about ten minutes he put his forehead down on my shoulder and quit.

"I cannot do this," he said into my collarbone. "I cannot do this and want the rest of it. I have been trying to do both since October and it is killing me."

I stood there with my dress up and his whole weight on me and did the only kind thing I have done in this entire business.

"Then quit wanting the rest of it," I said, in the voice I use to tell a woman what time the visitation starts. "You are never going to have me, Kyle. Not the way you have been trying to. There is not a man alive who has had me, and that is not because of you and it is not because of Vernon. There is nobody in there to have."

"Rebecca."

"Look at me."

He picked his head up.

"You can have this. Sunday afternoons and whatever I ask you for, exactly like it has been. What you cannot have is the part you lie awake about. It is not being kept from you. It is not there."

He stood there a long while. Then he said, "You are the first one who has not tried to make it easier on me."

I got my hand on him again and finished him against that rack in about ninety seconds, and he held on to me like a man in water. He was different when he left that booth.

By February he could say Shane's name out loud in a normal voice, the way a man mentions the fellow who does his taxes. He got easy. He got easier with his wife too. I know because she told me so at the door, with her hands cold the way they always are.

I did not break that man. I finished him. A broken man is loud. A finished man says well, Shane had the van Wednesday, in the voice you use about the weather, and goes back to his board.

* * *

Charlene lost the baby in February.

They had done a third round in January, bless her, and it took, and it was five weeks along, and then it was not. She called me on a Tuesday night. She called me and not her mother.

I was at that house in twelve minutes. I sat on the end of her bathtub with my hand on the back of her neck while she cried, and I did not say one word about God's timing. I said, honey, this is the worst thing, and it is not your fault, and I will be here Thursday and I will be here Sunday. I took food over every day that week and the next.

Every word of that was true. I would do it again tonight.

The other thing goes right beside it. Some part of me that never shuts off sat on that tub and noted that she had called me and not her mother. I was not planning anything. But I keep the roll the same as I keep the meal train, and it wrote her name down.

* * *

Then Roberta Dilbeck opened her mouth.

It was Palm Sunday, at the door, which is where everything in my life happens.

Roberta comes through last. She is ninety four and comes down that aisle on Wanda Sowell's arm at about the speed of a season changing. Vernon was beside me that morning, which he usually is not by the time she gets there. The Batson baby had been dedicated and he had stayed down front late.

She took my hand in both of hers and said, "You want to watch that sound man."

That was all. She said it in the deaf voice, which is about the volume of a woman calling a dog in out of the yard, and she said it looking at the front of the room the way she always does. Then Wanda took her on out the door.

"Yes ma'am, I will," I said. I said it in the voice I keep for telling a woman the rolls are covered, with no delay in it at all. I have been ready for a sentence like that since I was thirteen.

Patsy was on my other side, bless her. "She has been telling people to watch the sound man since they put the booth in. She thinks he is recording the Communists."

Two women laughed. Belinda Teague said something about her knee.

Vernon did not turn his head. He did not stop shaking hands. But I have stood beside that man at that door for years, and I know every sound he makes. When Roberta said it he was in the middle of the word morning, and he finished that word about a quarter second slow.

That was all it was. I went on shaking hands.

* * *

That Thursday he came in at five thirty and put his keys in the dish and said what he says, which is, "Where is everybody."

I said Colton was at practice. He said good, good, and went and stood at the sink and drank a glass of water looking out at the yard.

Then, without turning around, he said, "You do too much for that church."

That was the whole of it. He has said some version of that to me maybe five times in twenty six years. It is the closest that man comes to a complaint. It always means he has looked up from what he is doing and seen his wife carrying something, and he has no way to take it off her.

I stood behind him with a dish towel in my hand and felt the floor go.

He did not accuse me. He did not ask me one question, and he has still not asked me one. But that man did not go stand at the sink at five thirty because he was thirsty. He went there because he needed something to do with his face.

I have known Vernon Edgewood since I was nineteen. There is nothing he does with his body that I cannot read, and he was reading me right back, and both of us knew it. We stood there about four seconds. Then I said, "It is my church too, sugar," and he said, "I know it is," and went and got the mail.

That night he had me the way he has had me since the fall, which is better than he had me at thirty. I will tell that on myself. He has had the best year of his ministry and the best year of his marriage at the same time, and both of them are because of me. I come home to that man loose and easy in my own skin. He knows something has changed, and what he decided it was is that his wife is happy.

He has not got all of it. He has a quarter of it at the outside, and he is never going to go get the rest. He is a good man. Going and getting it would make him a man who goes and gets things, and he would rather be who he is than be right.

But he knows something. And he knows that I know he knows.

For twenty six years everything I had, I built in a room he was not in. On a Thursday at five thirty he put one foot in the doorway of that room.

* * *

I could not get out from under it, not all through Easter.

I didn't cry. I did the meal train. I took a tray to the Sowells and did the flowers for the Hodge funeral, and that Sunday I ran Easter.

It went into my body, which I did not expect. Night after night I could not get myself off in my own bed. That had never happened to me. Not at fifteen, not when I was big as a house with Colton, not the week my mother died. I would get right to the edge, and his hand would land on my hip in his sleep, and the whole thing would go out from under me like a chair pulled back.

Everybody will want that to be guilt. It was not. I have been all through that house and there is no such room in it. For thirty three years the engine ran on him not knowing, and with him standing in the doorway it would not turn over.

Easter we had three hundred and forty people in that building. I had the breakfast at seven and the flowers on the cross and the overflow chairs down both side aisles and a list in my apron pocket, and nobody in that county saw one thing.

Vernon preached the end of Matthew, the Go ye therefore. He preaches it every Easter.

I sat in the second pew in a yellow dress and took inventory.

Shane on the end of the fourth row in his suit. I had run the food for his mother's funeral in January and told him I was so sorry, honey, and by March I had him in that storage building with the door up. Kyle in the booth over the back row with the stream running. Charlene up in the loft, second row on the end, in the blue robe with the gold down the front, singing alto four feet in front of the water.

All three of them in one room. Every one of them had been under my hands, and nobody in three hundred and forty people knew.

Then I went around the rest of the room. Harold Culpepper across the aisle with his hands folded and his ring of keys, who has never read a face in his life. Belinda Teague and her knee. Miss Ollie. Wanda Sowell and her sister.

What went through me was not that I wanted any of them.

It was that I could get any four of them I picked.

Not desire. Confidence. I sat there with my knees together and understood it the way you understand a thing about your own hands. With a couple of months and a kitchen table and the truth, I could have any four people in that building up on that platform with the lights off.

Then Vernon said let us pray. I bowed my head with everybody else, and went home that afternoon, and still could not get anywhere in my own bed.

* * *

The Monday night after Easter I got up at two in the morning and sat at my kitchen table in the dark in my nightgown with my hands flat on the wood.

I said to myself: he has a quarter of it and he is never going to ask, and that is not going away. You can quit for the rest of your life, or you can carry him into the room with you.

I carried him in.

Not doing one thing to me. I never wanted that out of that man. I put Vernon Edgewood up in that dark booth in his own church with his glasses on, going back through every Sunday on that drive. Years of the back of my head, then my face. All the way to the end of it.

I sat in my own kitchen chair with my nightgown up and my husband asleep down the hall, and I got myself off on him finally knowing. It was the hardest one of my life.

I didn't slow down after that. I did not get careful.

I went and got the rest of it.

* * *

I had Charlene in my kitchen the Tuesday after Easter.

She came to bring back a dish of mine she had had since the funeral food in October, and she stayed because I asked her to. I got her a Coke out of the icebox and we sat there an hour and a half. Most of it was her. The doctor in Nashville, and what the third round cost, and the sister in law who keeps saying at least you know you can.

Then she said, "Kyle is different. He is so much better and I do not know what did it and I have quit asking. He sleeps."

"Well. I am glad of that."

"It is like he set something down."

"Maybe he did," I said.

I did not seduce that woman in my kitchen. What I did was worse, and it took eight weeks.

I told her the truth. Not all of it. The part that was hers.

"You have been good your whole life and not one person has ever thanked you for it."

She did not say anything.

"You have got the best voice in this county and you sing the second row because somebody told you when you were a girl that the front was for somebody else. She was wrong."

"Rebecca."

"You have been lying in a bed for two years beside a man who was not in it with you. You have not said that out loud to anybody and I am not asking you to say it now." I let that sit. "You are thirty eight years old, honey, and there is a whole woman in there who has never one time been let out of the house."

She put her face in her hands and cried the bad kind.

I got up and went around the table and put both hands on her shoulders, the same as I have done for two hundred women in this county. I did not do one thing to her that I have not done to all of them.

You tell a good woman the truth about herself one time and you have got her for good. There is not a preacher in this state who does not know that, and half of them do not know they know it.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

That is the invitation. I have heard my husband read it over that congregation more times than I can count. It came up in me with my hands on that woman's shoulders, and I let it come all the way.

* * *

I did not put a hand on her for eight weeks. The not doing it was the work.

Coffee at my house on a Tuesday. Coffee at hers on a Thursday. Two hours in a car to Cookeville about a dress. Her on my porch in May with her shoes off and her feet on the rail. By the middle of May she was touching me. Her hand on my arm when she laughed. Her bare foot against my leg on that porch, left there a full minute, and neither of us said a word about it.

I let her come the whole way across the floor by herself, so she would always know she walked it.

The last Wednesday in May I took her up to the choir loft in the dark and put her in her own seat, second row on the end, and got down on the carpet in front of her. It was the first time I ever had my mouth on a woman. When she finally let go of the sound she had been holding in her whole life, up there in the room where she sings, it came off the back wall at both of us.

She got good fast. Women do. By the second Tuesday afternoon in my own bed she was the one with her hand in my hair. She turned out to like being told what to do, which I had not known I was hungry for.

The first week of June I told her about her husband and me, in her car, in the lot behind the Kroger. All of it but the table. She sat there a long time with her hands on the wheel and then said, "I figured it was somebody."

The second Wednesday in June I put the two of them in the fellowship hall and told him to come kiss his wife. For about forty seconds it was like watching two strangers share a hymnal. Then it was not. We were in that hall until one thirty in the morning.

* * *

After that I gave her the file.

I had Kyle put the sixteenth of December on a drive the size of my thumb. The front camera, the table, and me on it with two men. He did it in about four minutes with his coffee going cold and did not ask me why. Then he held it out and said, "You want the back wall too? That one has got me in it."

I said no. Not yet.

I gave the drive to his wife on my own front porch and told her what was on it.

She held it in her hand. "Why are you giving me this."

"Because you are in this now, and I am not going to have you in it without a way out. Anybody you hand that to and I am finished, and so is Kyle."

"I would never."

"I know it. But some night you are going to wake up at three in the morning and think, what has she done to my life. Everybody does. When you do, you put your hand on that drive and know you could end it inside of an hour, and that I gave you the way. Then you go back to sleep."

She did not say anything.

"I am not asking you to keep a secret, honey. I am giving you the door and telling you it is unlocked. It is the only way I know to have anybody."

She still has it. I do not know where, and I have never asked.

So by the last Friday in June I had a camera, and a pulpit, and the three of them standing at the foot of it looking up at me.

* * *

"Get her up here," I said. "On her back. Right there, where he stands."

Nobody moved for about a second and a half. Kyle looked at his wife and his wife looked at me.

"I have asked you twice," I said, in the voice I use on a woman who says she cannot possibly take the nursery. "I am not going to ask three times."

They moved.

"Shane. You are going to fuck her first, and then you are going to fuck me, and I do not want either one of us handled."

"Kyle. Get up here where she can see you. No. Where she can see your face."

"Charlene, tell him what you want. Out loud, in front of me. He has been married to you fourteen years and he has never heard it."

She told him. "I want you to fuck me in front of her."

Her husband made a sound like a man who had been hit.

"Again. Louder. This building carries."

She said it again, louder, into all those empty seats, with her husband four feet from her.

I gave orders from that pulpit all night long, in the words I wanted, and I said them the way that man says brethren. Same spot. Same cadence. My hands on the same oak.

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

That is what the book says to the church at Sardis, by name, and it had been sitting in the back of it waiting on me since the year we got here. It came for me right then, watching three grown people come up three steps because a woman told them to.

That verse was never talking about the four of us. It was talking about the three hundred and forty who sat in those seats on Easter in their good clothes and sang every word and went home. I do not know that one of them has ever been all the way alive in that room. I have been alive in it every single Sunday, with my hands in my lap and my knees together.

I took my own dress off up there. Nobody took it off me.

I let it go down and stepped out of it and laid it over the back of the chair Vernon sits in during the special music. Then I stood behind that pulpit in nothing but my slip with my hands on both sides of it.

"Charlene. Come here."

She came and stood in front of me and could not decide what to do with her eyes. I got her chin and turned her face up and kissed her in front of both of those men until she quit thinking about them. Then I got her dress off her.

She is thirty eight and nobody has ever really looked at her. Her husband stood eight feet away and watched me undress his wife on a church platform, and I watched his face while I did it.

"Look at her, Kyle."

"I am."

"No. Look at her." I had my hands on her from behind by then, up under her breasts and holding them. "Look at what you have had."

He did, and his face did a thing, and Charlene put her head back against my shoulder and let him.

I had her down first, on her dress and mine, on the carpet between the pulpit and the rail. I got her knees apart and my mouth on her and my hands up under her to hold her off the floor, and I took my time, because I had all night.

I had two fingers in her and my mouth on her. She had one hand in my hair and the other flat on the carpet, and she was making a noise that would have brought a deacon out of his truck. Her husband was down on one knee beside us, watching her face like he had never seen it.

"Get your mouth on her," I told him, the way I tell a man where to set the tea. "Up on her tits. I have got the rest of it."

He did. I felt what that did go all the way through her. I looked up the length of that woman at her husband's head on her breast and thought: I made this. Both of them, in one room, in a building with a cross on the front of it.

She went off with the two of us on her and said God out loud twice, and neither one was praying.

Then I put Shane in her.

Charlene had asked for her husband. I gave her Shane. I got up off my knees and moved the three of them where I wanted them, the way I move a serving line.

I put Charlene on her hands and knees at the front edge of the platform, facing out at the room, her hands nearly off the top step. I put Shane on his knees behind her. I put Kyle on the floor in front of his wife, close enough that she could have put her chin on his shoulder, where he could see every bit of her face.

Then I went and stood behind my husband's pulpit.

From there I looked down at the back of her head and out past the three of them at the empty seats going back into the dark. That is my husband's view. He has had it twice a Sunday since we came, and he has never had this in it.

"All right," I said. "Go on."

Shane went on.

He is not quick and he was not quick that night. He got hold of her hips and put it in her slow, the whole way, and let her sit with it. Then he started working and did not stop for a long while. He is the only man I have ever had who does not speed up when it gets good. He does the same thing at the same rate until it is finished, the same way he backs that van into the shed, bless him.

Charlene put her forehead down on the carpet inside of two minutes.

"No. Head up. Look at your husband."

She picked it back up and looked at him and took it. She made a sound on about every third stroke, and the room gave every one of them back.

"Kyle," I said. "How is she doing?"

"She is doing fine." His voice was not right.

"Ask her."

He asked his own wife, down on that floor with another man in her, how she was doing.

"I am doing real good," she said, in the voice she uses to tell you the nursery is covered. Then she laughed. Then she quit laughing, because Shane got a fistful of her hair and pushed her chest down on the carpet and changed the angle on her.

"Kyle."

"Ma'am," he said.

I laughed out loud in that pulpit. The last time that word came out of him like that, it was September, in this same room, and he was telling me no.

"Is he bigger than you?"

He did not answer.

"I asked you a question in church."

"Yes."

"Say it to her."

He knelt on the floor of his own church in front of his wife and said, "He is bigger than me, baby."

"I know it," Charlene said, with her cheek on the carpet. The two of them laughed at each other while she was being taken from behind four feet in front of my hands, on the floor of a church at midnight, like two people on their own porch.

"Come up here," I said.

Kyle came up the steps and stood beside me behind the pulpit, and the two of us looked down at his wife together.

I put my hand on the back of his neck, the way I have put it on a hundred necks in that building.

"Is she all right?"

"She's all right."

"Is she better than all right?"

He could not answer that, and I laughed. I had my other hand around him by then. He was hard as that oak, and nobody had laid a hand on him all night. I worked him slow, with my eyes where his were, and every time his wife made that sound he moved in my hand.

"Tell her what she looks like," I said. "I have heard you say worse to me in a truck."

He leaned over the front of his pastor's pulpit, bless his heart, and said it.

"Look at you take that. Fourteen years and I never knew you had it in you. You are a filthy woman, Charlene, and I have been married to you since I was twenty four and never got to say so."

She went off in about fifteen seconds.

"Shane," I said, while she was still going. "Not in her. I want her husband to watch you come all over her."

He came out of her and finished on her back, the whole length of it, across both shoulder blades and into her hair. She stayed down on her hands and knees and took every bit of it. Her husband stood beside me with my hand around him and watched another man do that to his wife, and he went off in my hand before it was over. It went on the front of my husband's pulpit and down the oak and up my wrist.

I did not wipe it off. I stood there with it on me and looked out at those seats.

Then I sent Kyle down. I told him to go sit in the second pew and get his breath and not come back up until I said so. He went down the three steps and sat himself down in my seat in the dark, and that is where he stayed for the next hour, watching.

* * *

I sat down in the chair Vernon sits in during the special music.

It is big and oak, with arms and a cushion gone shiny in the seat. That man sits in it four minutes twice a Sunday with his Bible on his knee and his head down, where every soul in the congregation can see him.

I sat in it in my slip with my heels up on the edge of the platform and my knees apart. "Charlene. Come here."

She came across that carpet on her hands and knees and put her head down between my legs without being told twice. She had learned a lot in a month. She got my slip out of the way and went at me slow, and then not slow at all, with two fingers up in me working and her mouth never coming off me, the way I taught her in my own bed on a Tuesday afternoon.

I had one hand in her hair and my other arm over the arm of my husband's chair. I looked out over the top of her head at his pulpit, and the rail, and three hundred seats going back into the dark with one man sitting in them.

I came in my husband's chair with my heels on the edge of his platform and both hands on the arms of it, looking the whole length of that room at Kyle Ledford sitting in my seat.

Shane stood at the back of the platform in the baptistry doorway through all of it. I put him there and he did not come off it. He did not touch himself and he did not say a word, and there is not another man alive I could have asked that of.

About twenty minutes later I had him in me from behind, up against the pulpit, with my forearms flat on the top of it.

The top of that thing comes to my ribs. It is built for my husband, not for me. You do not bend over it. You put your forearms down and your chest on your forearms and come up on the balls of your feet. Then every bit of your weight goes into the oak.

My face was about eight inches off his cards, and I read them while Shane did it.

Matt. 28. Go ye therefore. I had typed that one myself. Under it, in his pencil, all capitals the way he writes when it matters: GO. not a suggestion. they are already sent, the question is whether they know it.

He keeps the ones he thinks came out right, and that one had been in there since Easter. He wrote that sermon at our kitchen table the Thursday before, on his legal pad, with his glasses down and a cup of coffee. It was the same Thursday he stood at the sink with his back to me. He read it to me that evening and asked if it worked. I told him it was the best thing he had written in five years, and I meant it. I typed it Saturday night. The capitals he put on Sunday morning.

There is a place on the front edge of that pulpit where the finish is worn through to the pale wood, about the size of a hand. That man has stood there with his fingers over that edge twice a week for years. Sunday mornings his hand is on that exact spot when he says let us pray.

I put my palm flat on it. On purpose. A man was fucking me from behind hard enough to move that pulpit on the carpet, and I got it walking about two inches off where it sits.

I came on top of it with his cards under my cheek and Shane's hand in my hair, standing where my husband stands. What came out of me was the sound I had been keeping in that room for years, and the room took it the way it takes a hymn.

Charlene had got herself cleaned up with somebody's shirt. She came and stood behind me while he was still in me and put her hands on my shoulders and her mouth on the back of my neck. I had not known I wanted that until it was happening.

I did not let him finish in me. I knew what I was keeping him for, and it had not happened yet.

* * *

Then I did the thing I had come up there for.

I got Charlene up and put her on her knees on the top step, facing out at the room, the way you would put somebody at a rail. I stood behind her with my hands on her shoulders and said it out loud, in the voice my husband uses, down the length of that room.

"Come on down. Whosoever will. There is room at this altar for every woman in this county who is not good, and I will take every one of you myself."

There was one soul in that house, and he sat down there in the dark with his hands on his knees like a man at a service.

Every Sunday of my life somebody has stood in that exact spot with the lights down and the piano going and asked whoever is out there to come on.

Just as I am, without one plea.

That one came up in me standing in his place. It had been waiting on me my whole life, and it is the only thing anybody ever offered me that I actually wanted. Not mended. Not sorry. Just as I am.

Nobody ever came down an aisle after me. I am the one who goes and gets them now.

Just as you are. Come on.

Then I turned that woman around.

I put her back on her knees on the top step with her face to me and her back to the room, and I did not move a foot. I was already standing where he stands. I got my slip up over my hips and put her face in it. Her hands came around the backs of my legs and both of mine went into her hair.

I had the whole room in front of me and she had none of it, and I did not have to think one second about why I wanted it that way.

I did not let her set the pace. I held her by the hair and moved her where I wanted her and kept her there, and I used her mouth standing up in my husband's place. She got her tongue in me, then two fingers with it, then three, and she was making a sound into me that I could feel come up the middle of me.

I did not sit down for it and I did not hold on to anything. I stood on my own two feet with my knees going and took it, the way he stands up there every Sunday and takes whatever comes down that aisle at him.

I kept talking to that room the whole time, in his cadence. It is the only one that room answers to.

"Every one of you. The whole house. I will take every last one of you up here and fuck you in his place. Don't you just sit there."

It came back at me. Every word, off that back wall, half a second behind, the way it has come back to him every Sunday we have been there. This time I was ready for it, and I said it again just to hear the room say it.

"Come on. Come on down."

And the room said come on down.

I came standing up in my husband's place with my fist in the back of that woman's hair, holding her on me. For a breath or two there was no sound out of me at all. Then all of it at once. It went out into that dark room and came back to me in my own voice, and I do not know to this day what I said, and she has never told me.

I have never come like that in my life.

* * *

I called Kyle back up out of the pew. I was not going to finish it with that man sitting down there in the dark by himself.

Shane had me last, and he was ready. I had not let him finish since Charlene's back, and he came down over me so far past asking that I laughed at him. He did not think it was funny.

He had me on my back on my own dress at the edge of the platform, with my heels hooked on the top step and my head on the carpet, looking straight up at the oak underneath his pulpit.

He took his time the way he does. When he was close he asked me the only question that man asked all night. He asked it by slowing down and looking at me.

"In me," I said. "I want to be walking around with it Sunday."

So he finished in me, all the way, with my knees up over his arms and his forehead down on mine. When he pulled out, Charlene got down on her elbow beside us and put her fingers in it and then her mouth, and cleaned me out with her husband watching. She took her time and did not skip anywhere. I lay back on my husband's platform with my hand in her hair, telling her where she had missed.

Kyle finished in his wife four feet from us while she did it. He had her by the hips, up on her knees with her face down over me, and he looked at me the whole way through and I looked right back.

Then the four of us lay out on the platform of Sardis Baptist Church in the dark like people after a wreck.

That carpet is rough. I had it on both shoulder blades for a week.

Nobody said anything for a good while. Somewhere in the building the air handler came on. Then Charlene started laughing. A good woman on her back on a church platform at one in the morning with her hair wrecked, laughing out of pure relief, because somebody had finally let her out of the house. That is the sound I want to have in my ears when I am dying.

* * *

Kyle was the last one, and it was quiet.

The others were dressing. I was sitting up on the platform working the tangles out of my hair with my fingers when he came up the steps and stood there.

"Rebecca."

"Mm."

"I am all right," he said.

I took my hands out of my hair. "I know you are, honey."

"No." He put his hands in his pockets. "I mean I am all right. I have been trying to work out how to tell you since about February. I am not eat up with it any more. I go home and I am with my wife and I sleep at night and I come in here Sunday and do my job, and I am all right."

He stood there on my husband's platform with his shirt untucked and his wife eight feet away buttoning her blouse, and he was telling me the truth. It was the worst thing anybody has ever said to me.

"Good," I said.

"Is it?"

"It is what I wanted for you."

That was a lie. It is the only time I ever lied to him about what I wanted, which is the only kind of lie that was ever going to matter between us.

What I wanted was the man from December, standing in that aisle in the dark with his coat on and his arms down, coming apart because I told him to stand there.

* * *

I cleaned that platform myself before I left.

I got the chairs straight. I put Vernon's cards back in the order he had them, which I know, because I typed them. I put the pulpit back on its marks. There are four little dents in the carpet where its feet sit, and it had walked out of them, and I set it back in. I got the front of that pulpit with a wet rag from the nursery, twice, and the worn place last.

Then I got the vacuum out of the closet by the nursery and ran it over that platform at half past one in the morning. The pile was laid over wrong in about six places, and Wanda Sowell, bless her, would have noticed it Sunday.

I leave every room the way I found it. Nobody has ever caught me, and it was never luck.

Kyle put that night on a drive for me too. He brought it to me on the Tuesday and did not say a word about it. It is in the kitchen drawer where I keep the meal train lists and the funeral cards. I have watched a few minutes of it, one time, with the house empty.

* * *

Sunday morning I sat in the second pew in a blue dress, twelve feet from all of it.

The three of them were in the room. Kyle in the booth. Shane on the end of the fourth row. Charlene in the loft in a summer dress with her arms bare, singing.

My husband put his hand on the worn place on the front of that pulpit and said let us pray. Every head went down and mine with them, and the picture show started up in me the same as it has every Sunday since I was thirteen.

I had half thought it would be gone. That a woman does what I did on a Friday and finally gets full. It wasn't gone. What changed is what was in it. For thirty three years it was people who did not know they were in it, in rooms that do not exist. Now the ones in it know, and every one of them would come if I called on a Tuesday.

The hunger did not go anywhere. It quit being a place I go by myself.

* * *

The first Sunday in July it was hot and the air was not keeping up. Vernon preached short, which he does maybe twice a year, and everybody loved him for it.

We had the Supper at the end. Vernon stood behind the table and said the words over it. It is the same table. Nobody has moved it and nobody ever will. Harold Culpepper and three other men carried the little plastic cups down the aisles in the brass trays, and the room went so quiet you could hear the trays touch when the men handed them off.

Harold brought the second pew its tray, the same as every first Sunday. I took my cup and held it in my lap with my thumb over the top and waited on the rest of the house, because you do not drink until everybody has one.

What I ran while I waited was that same table with my back on it in December and grape juice down the whole front of me.

Then my husband said take, drink, and the whole house drank at once, and so did I.

It went down warm. It always does.

I was at the door an hour after.

Belinda Teague's knee. A grandson going to basic, and I told his grandmother he would be fine, honey, and to send me the address. Miss Ollie, bless her, wanting to know what I put in the squash. Roberta Dilbeck came through last on Wanda's arm and took my hand in both of hers and did not say anything at all this time. She looked at the front of the room and went on.

Charlene came through with her husband and hugged me, and her hands were cold. "That was a good one," she said. "It was short," I said, "and that is why." She laughed. Kyle shook my hand.

Shane Ammons said, "Morning, Mrs. Edgewood," and went on out to get the van around for the ones who need a ride home.

Then it was down to the last few, the ones who stand in a vestibule talking about nothing because they have nowhere to be.

Vernon came up behind me.

He did not say anything. He put his hand flat on my back, the way he has since I was nineteen, right between my shoulder blades where it always goes, and he left it there.

He has done that ten thousand times. At gravesides and in hospital hallways and in the kitchen when I am at the sink. It is how that man says a thing he has not got the words for. I have taken it my whole adult life without once thinking about it, the way you take a floor.

He left it there longer than he leaves it.

I felt it.

All of Easter week I could not get anywhere in my own bed because that same hand kept landing on my hip in his sleep. In July it came down flat between my shoulder blades in a vestibule in front of forty people, and it went all the way down me and took my knees. I had to put my other hand on the door frame.

Four seconds past where it usually comes off.

I did not turn around. If I had turned around he would have had to have a face, and I was not going to make that man have one.

So we stood there at the door of his church. Him knowing what he knows, and me knowing what he knows. Neither one of us is ever going to say a word about it. Every Sunday for the rest of our lives, right here.

Behold, I stand at the door, and knock.

The Batson girl came up with her baby on her hip and put her hand out.

I took it.

* * *

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