Wash Her Feet novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: The Question

"Wash her feet!" the square roared. "Wash her feet!"

Somebody carried over a plastic basin from the lemonade stand.

Somebody else filled it from the fountain.

It was put down on the stones between us, with a hollow knock, and the water rocked and went still.

Shelby looked at it.

I had seen that basin on a kitchen stool, in a clinic lobby, on my own back porch.

I had never seen her look at one.

"No," she said.

"You lost," a woman called.

"You made the rules!" a man shouted. "Pay up!"

"I will not," Shelby said, and her voice carried clear across the square.

She straightened her back and tried the smile, the one that had worked in a hundred hospital rooms.

It slid.

"This is mob behavior," she said. "I'm a nurse. I have taken care of your children. You are going to let her humiliate me because of a game?"

A few people shifted on their feet.

"It was your game," I said.

I had not meant to speak.

Shelby's eyes found mine.

"You've lost me my job," she said. "My friends. My name. And you want me on my knees on top of it."

"I don't want anything," I said. "You said first to move loses. You said the loser washes the feet."

"You can't make me."

"No," I said. "I can't."

The chanting thinned out and went away.

I had expected to feel glad.

I looked at her standing alone in the middle of nine hundred people, and what I felt was tired.

"Shelby," Rafe said.

She turned her head.

He had not moved from where he stood, one step from her.

"I have one question," he said. "I've had it for sixteen years, and Hallie said I could ask it in front of everyone."

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