Chapter 4: Orchard Row

On Wednesday morning the third stair was fixed.

I came down at six with a legal pad and found the new board pale as butter against the old gray ones.

There was a screwdriver on the porch rail and a yellow pencil behind the doorframe.

"You didn't have to," I said when he came in from the truck.

"It was in my way."

"For six weeks?"

"I was waiting to be asked," Amory said.

He was drinking Gran's terrible chicory coffee out of her chipped mug, and he looked more at home in her kitchen than I'd planned for.

"What are you doing with that?" he asked, nodding at the pad.

"Meeting the street at seven. Church hall on Hamburg."

"Who called it?"

"I did."

He set down the mug.

"What are you going to say to them?"

"That I've read the notice four times and it is wrong."

"Wrong how?"

"Wrong the way a lie is wrong. Too tidy."

He studied me for a moment.

"Do you want company?" he said.

"Sit in the back," I said.

"And don't look like a man who knows things."

"I'll look like the help," he said.

I almost laughed.

The church hall held sixty folding chairs and a coffee urn the size of a toddler.

By seven every chair was taken and people were standing along the walls.

I had a stack of eleven notices, one from every house that had received one, and a roll of tape.

I taped them to the wall in a row.

"Everyone reads their own," I said.

"Out loud, if you can stand to. I'll read what doesn't make sense."

Sixty people looked at me like I'd stood up at a funeral and asked for the floor.

Then the widow from 14 stood and read hers in a trembling voice.

The barber read his.

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