Chapter 4: Young Lady

Wednesday prayer meeting was held in the sanctuary with only the front half of the lights on and sixty people in the first ten pews.

I sat in the third pew, the same one where I had sat at seventeen, and nobody asked me to move.

The communion table stood at the front under its white cloth, in the exact spot where my father had put it on the floor.

The pastor read from Psalms and asked us to pray for the sick and the shut-in and the bereaved.

He looked at me when he said bereaved.

I bowed my head and kept my eyes open.

Isaiah sat in the front pew with his hat on his knee and his collar buttoned to the throat.

I knew what was under that collar.

Calvin sat beside him, his glasses catching the light, and Lucius filled the end of the pew with his big shoulders.

Not one of them turned around.

Abner stood at the back by the doors with his arms folded, and I felt him watching me the whole hour.

Two pews up, a church mother in a lavender hat kept turning her head to look at me.

She had known my mother.

She looked at my face, then at the back of the church, then at my face again, and her mouth got smaller each time.

When the benediction ended I took my purse and walked out without speaking to anyone.

I crossed Dauphin Street in the dark.

The bank on the corner closed at five, and its lot held one blue pickup parked under a single streetlight.

Abner leaned on the tailgate with his arms crossed.

He was in the same black suit, with the jacket open and his white hair cropped close.

He watched me cross the lot with the face he used on a boy late to practice.

"You came," he said.

"You said to come as I was," I said.

"I did," he said.

"Isaiah told you my rules."

"He did. One night each. Not twice running," Abner said.

His eyes went over me once, top to bottom.

"I don't care for rules I did not write," Abner said. "But I'll work inside them."

"You'll what?" I said.

"Turn around, young lady."

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