Chapter 15: The Fourth of July

Three hundred heads turned to me, and the fluorescent lights hummed.

I was still standing on the Lions Club stage with my hand flat on a cashier's check.

I could have run for the door.

I thought about it for about a second and a half.

"He sleeps in the bunkhouse, Travis," I said into the microphone.

It came out much louder than I meant, and I didn't turn it down.

"It's a one-room cabin with a woodstove and a cot his mother taught him to make."

"He sleeps there because he wrote down on a legal pad that he wouldn't ask me for anything, and I haven't told him he can."

"That's fifty-four nights, and he's kept every one."

"Which is more than anyone in this family has done for Grandpa out loud."

Somebody near the front said, "Well, hell," softly, and a woman beside him said, "Language," and then she clapped.

Then somebody else clapped.

Travis stood against the wall with his finger still pointed at me.

He looked at it, and then he put it in his pocket.

Ginny had set the clipboard down on the stage.

She went down the side steps without looking at anyone and out through the kitchen, where no one stopped her.

I did not watch her go.

I watched the griddle, dark and steaming, and the twelve aprons on their hooks.

On Thursday morning there was a pie on the porch.

It was peach, with a lattice top, under a dish towel, and a card tucked into the crust.

Sorry. We should have asked. The Circle.

By ten there were four more pies.

By noon the Pioneer cap man had driven by twice and honked, and the heavy man from the co-op board had parked at the end of my lane and just waved.