Wesley is always there first, truck parked crooked by the side door, lights humming on as dawn seeps into the hollow. He has never once, in all Kathleen’s remembered Sundays, arrived after the pastor. She sometimes thinks the building might fold in on itself like a tired lung if he did.
Inside, he walks the aisles with a push broom, the soft rasp of bristles on old carpet rising and falling like another kind of hymn. Bulletins from last week, someone’s child has folded one into an airplane; another is crumpled under the third pew, go into the black trash bag tied to his belt. He straightens hymnals like a librarian reshelving restless books, fingers moving automatically from cracked spine to cracked spine, pausing only where a torn page needs tape or a cover flaps loose on its binding. Kathleen, counting envelopes at her kitchen table across the hollow, could have told you he would stop at Mrs. Combs’s pew and tuck her large-print Bible a little closer to the aisle, the way he always does.
Down in the fellowship hall, he tests the coffee maker with the wariness of a man acquainted with its temper. A practiced twist to the power strip, a thump to the side panel, and the old machine sputters to life, coughing out its first bitter breath. He empties yesterday’s grounds, wipes the counter with a fraying dishcloth, and sets out Styrofoam cups in deliberate rows that no one will notice until one is missing.
Outside, he checks the propane gauge with a private wince, calculating whether the sanctuary will be warm enough without burning next month’s bill. His lips move, not in prayer exactly, but in the arithmetic of survival. How long he can stretch half a tank, whether he dares bump the thermostat past sixty-two.
He makes the circuit like a quiet caretaker of a stubborn old relative: testing exit lights, jiggling the toilet handle in the men’s room until it stops running, rapping a knuckle against the furnace casing to listen for any new rattle in its complaint. The bell rope, stiff from last week’s rain, gets a testing tug; the sound that answers is thin but serviceable. In Pine Hollow, that will have to do.
By the time Kathleen steps through the front doors, gloved hand closing around the cool brass of the handle, the church is already awake and waiting, every small mercy of order laid out as if it had happened by itself.
By eight-thirty, the regulars begin to present themselves like actors who have never once forgotten their cues, Geraldine Lawson’s rusted Ford coughing into place on the far edge of the gravel, exactly where the pothole swallows her back tire every week; the Kirby sedan nosed in clean and straight beside the short stretch of cinderblock wall Kathleen has long considered “hers”; a scattering of compact cars from town, newer paint and slimmer silhouettes betraying their owners’ partial escape from the hollow.
Men form a loose, denim-colored hedge under the front awning, hands in pockets, talk settling first on the weather (rain up on the ridge, frost in the low field) before circling dutifully to overtime hours and layoffs. Their laughter is brief and careful, like they have agreed to keep it from carrying.
Women slip in through the side door toward the kitchen, shoulders angling to accommodate foil-covered pans and slow cookers like precious relics. Crockpots, casseroles, and cakes take their ordained places on the folding tables, lids lifted and steam checked with the same sober attention they give to the elements, for this is the other sacrament Pine Hollow understands.
The service itself unspools in its familiar, frayed rhythm: Brother Henson mounting the pulpit with the air of a man ascending something far steeper, clearing his throat three solemn times before the call to worship, as if each cough must rouse another portion of the hollow. The pianist, Mrs. Combs’s granddaughter this month, trails the congregation by half a beat and one uncertain key, turning “How Great Thou Art” into a gentle tug-of-war between melody and memory. A baby fusses somewhere near the back, swiftly jostled against a shoulder in that practiced, pious sway.
From the side aisle, near the fire extinguisher nobody remembers until inspection week, Wesley keeps a parallel vigil. One eye remains on the sullen flicker of the exit sign, the other on the furnace’s uneven groan. He moves only in the seams of sound (during the last verse of a hymn, under cover of communal “Amens”) tightening a loose screw on the back pew, nudging a stubborn door that will otherwise bang at the next late arrival. Where others bow their heads, he bows his back, timing each small intervention so that any failure is mended before it ripens into a scene and, worse, discussion.
During the sermon, attention rises and falls like the creek out back: heads nodding in practiced sympathy at mentions of “these hard times,” eyes glazing when the text wanders off into Canaanite genealogies no one intends to meet in glory. Teenagers trade glances and silent jokes two pews from the rear; a bulletin triangle migrates stealthily along the hymnal rack. Kathleen’s pen scratches in the margin of her folded program, her notes less exegesis than inventory: who coughed and did not quite stop, who dabbed at their eyes, whose absence leaves a gap in the third pew, who slipped in late and, most tellingly, chose to sit alone.
When the final “Amen” fades, the congregation pivots almost as one toward the back doors, the sanctuary emptying into the fellowship hall in a well-practiced tide. Chairs scrape, coffee urns hiss, and the line for paper plates forms itself according to invisible rank, widows first, then families with small children, then everyone else, each person claiming their usual spot, the few available chairs at Kathleen’s table hotly, if silently, contested. Wesley ghosts past with a roll of paper towels and a wary eye on the breaker box, while Brent materializes near the coffee like a sponsor logo, all easy chuckles and “y’all help yourselves,” as if the refreshments had descended by providence rather than delivery truck.
Seating, serving, and speaking all follow codes everyone claims not to care about but silently enforces; a newcomer can feel the weight of a dozen glances steer them away from the wrong chair, the wrong pew, the wrong end of the dessert table. The choreography is never explained aloud, no laminated chart on the bulletin board, no line in the church covenant, yet missteps are corrected with a precision any military drill sergeant might envy, though here the weapons are smiles and refills.
Kathleen, without appearing to look, notes each small infraction. When Miriam, in her first weeks, drifted toward the widows’ table with her plate, Kathleen’s fingertips brushed the girl’s elbow in passing. “Oh love, you’ll freeze to death over here by the door. Come sit where you can hear,” she murmured, already angling her toward an empty chair between two middle-aged mothers in need of a fresh audience. The widows, properly protected from the perceived awkwardness of youth and money, resumed their low discussion of blood pressure and prodigal grandchildren.
Similarly, no one tells Darren (on his first reappearance in the fellowship hall after years away) that men who stopped coming regular lose their claim to the corner by the coffee pot. Yet when he leans there, shoulder to wall, Brent materializes with a stack of foam cups and a genial, “Mind if I squeeze by, brother?” which reallocates Darren two feet down, leaving Brent in pride of place to dispense caffeine and casual inquiries.
Children are the only ones who may cross these borders unrebuked, though even they learn quickly that Kathleen’s pew is navigated with care and that dessert is not taken before at least one form of vegetable has been endured. Wesley, moving through it all with a dishcloth and an apologetic half-smile, enforces a gentler code (chairs shifted so no one sits entirely alone, coffee topped off before loneliness hardens into fact) small, merciful edits to a social order that prefers not to admit it has one.
Ideas about changing anything (Sunday school curriculum, bulletin font, color of the tablecloths) float first through murmured hallway conversations, then get kneaded and seasoned in kitchens where crockpots and opinions simmer side by side. A remark dropped over rinsed casserole dishes becomes, by dessert, “something several of us have been thinking.” Kathleen prefers to hear new notions while her hands are busy (snapping beans, rolling out biscuit dough) so she may nod without yet committing and, if necessary, misremember later who said what.
Proposals travel best folded into recipes. “What if the little ones had their own songs?” sounds less dangerous when accompanied by a promise of mini-muffins; a change in bulletin layout is more palatable if presented as saving ink money “for missions.” In these domestic synods, tone matters more than content. A woman who has brought a successful cobbler may venture bolder reforms than one whose Jell-O failed to set. Kathleen listens, measures, and occasionally adds her own quiet pinch of doubt or approval, until the idea is either baked into consensus or scraped, without comment, into the trash.
By the time a “simple suggestion” reaches an actual meeting, it has already been vetted in parking lots, prayer chains, and grocery aisles, its sharp edges sanded down so no one has to admit where it really started. Kathleen prefers it that way. An idea arriving too fresh, with its author still attached, obliges people to take positions they might later regret. But after three or four retellings, “well, some folks were wondering,” “I’ve heard it mentioned more than once”, it becomes an orphaned notion, available for adoption by whomever proves bold and respectable enough. In this softened state, even the most radical proposal can be received as mere common sense, a natural development rather than anyone’s unfortunate bout of originality.
News, too, follows its own liturgy: a whispered confidence in the foyer, a carefully phrased “keep them in your prayers” during announcements, then a well-meaning dissection over potato salad until every angle has been turned over like leftovers in a fridge. By Tuesday it has acquired Scripture references, medical details, and at least one misquoted dollar amount, all tenderly meant and slightly wrong.
Quiet crises stay invisible until they cross that threshold: once someone’s trouble is named out loud from the pulpit and ladled into conversation beside coleslaw and cobbler, it becomes part of the community’s shared script, impossible to retract and difficult to revise, accruing details with each retelling until the original pain is nearly obscured by everyone’s best intentions and borrowed expertise.
Kathleen’s dominion is both visible and invisible: she curates floral arrangements, potluck rotations, and visitation schedules with the quiet finality of someone used to signing orders on hospital wards, her pen gliding over signup sheets as if they were patient charts and the congregation her carefully monitored floor. The old clipboard that lives in her handbag emerges at the slightest hint of need; before the pastor has finished saying “we’ll have to see about meals for them,” three names are already bracketed for lasagna, two for chicken and rice, and one for a sugar-free dessert “because of his numbers, dear, we mustn’t forget.” No one quite recalls volunteering, but they all nod when she reads the list back, as if they had only been waiting to be reminded of their better selves.
Her authority is never announced, only assumed. She does not say, “I am in charge of the kitchen,” she simply appears there first, with keys, knowing where the good tablecloths are stored and how many crockpots the outlets will tolerate before the breaker throws its weekly fit. When a younger woman reaches instinctively for the newer plastic pitchers, Kathleen’s mild, “Oh, let’s save those for summer, shall we?” sends them quietly back to the cabinet without the indignity of an argument. It is not that she forbids; she merely suggests in a tone that makes any alternative sound faintly unsanitary.
She keeps, in a neat notebook at home, the dates of surgeries, anniversaries of deaths, and those vague “hard times” that never received a formal diagnosis but still require a pound cake on the porch. The pastor may forget who lost a brother three years ago; Kathleen does not. Her calendar is a kind of private liturgy, a sequence of casseroles and sympathy cards by which the hollow’s sorrows are acknowledged and, as far as possible, domesticated.
If someone suggests a different course, she does not contradict; she pauses, considers, and then folds it neatly into a version of the plan that looks remarkably like the one she had in mind all along. “Yes, and along with that we might also…” is her preferred suture, closing any threatened wound to consensus. People leave meetings faintly pleased with themselves, certain they have been consulted, dimly aware that they are now on a committee they did not recall joining.
Even her hesitations function as guidance. A small purse of the lips at the mention of store-bought rolls has killed more ill-conceived contributions than any outright ban. “If you’ve the time to do homemade, that would be lovely,” she’ll murmur, and suddenly everyone has the time. The few who persist in improvisation learn, without ever being scolded, that their dishes migrate to the far end of the buffet, past the deviled eggs and respectable casseroles, where the line grows thin and appetites are already politely spent.
Brent, for his part, threads commerce through charity with a lighter touch, rolling in coolers for youth car washes and slipping extra coffee canisters into his donations, the Colby’s General & Feed logo winking from every plastic sleeve and cardboard box like a second, unofficial church crest. He never quite suggests that loyalty at the register and loyalty to the Lord are related, but his raised eyebrow when someone mentions driving to Walmart serves the same purpose. “Well now, if y’all need anything for that bake sale, just put it on my tab for the church,” he’ll say, already picturing the receipt taped to the fellowship hall fridge. Gratitude, properly cultivated, is an excellent customer-retention strategy.
The pastor, a decent man with a thinning tie collection and a talent for noncommittal smiles, learns to preach between their fault lines. Praising Kathleen’s organization one week, thanking Brent’s “generosity” the next, eyes never lingering too long in either direction. Stewardship texts become oddly abstract, his applications so carefully balanced that no casserole or coffee urn can take offense.
Around them, the elderly deacons perform a kind of ritual assent, as if their very creaks were minutes entered into the record. They clear their throats, tap hymnals against trouser legs, and lean toward one another to exchange fragments of agreement (“Mm-hm,” “Reckon so,” “Sounds fine”) until, when the moment comes, their official vote merely blesses arrangements already settled over telephones, porch rails, and low-voiced consultations after Wednesday prayer meeting, long after the pastor has gone home.
It suits Kathleen, on the whole, that Wesley should be so little noticed, though she would never have admitted as much even to herself. The church, like certain households she had known in her nursing days, ran best when its indispensable people were also its quietest. A man who could appear, as if summoned by thought alone, with a toolbox, a mop, or the right extension cord, and then vanish before anyone felt socially obliged to set down a casserole and say thank you properly. Such a man was a providence, if one did not look too closely at his face.
From her second pew on the left, Kathleen observed that Wesley often arrived before the first car turned off the county road and was still moving in the half-dark while others were comparing leftovers in the parking lot. He did not bustle; he seeped. One moment he was up by the baptistry, checking the temperamental valve as if it were a sulky child; the next he had materialized beside the fellowship hall door, shoulder braced against it so Mrs. Puckett’s walker wouldn’t catch. If anyone remarked on this omnipresence, it was with that indulgent, careless fondness reserved for church fixtures and old hymnals.
“Wes, could you. The sentence hardly needed finishing; he was already moving. There was, Kathleen sometimes thought, a faint danger in such readiness. People grew used to a floor that did not quite collapse, to lights that mostly worked, to bills that somehow did not result in disconnection. They mistook the absence of disaster for ease, and the man holding it back for part of the scenery.
She herself was not immune. “Wesley, love, when you have a minute,” she would call, which meant at once; and he would come, wiping his hands on his jeans, offering that small, abashed half-smile that made refusal unthinkable and proper gratitude oddly difficult.
To most of them he is simply “the one who takes care of things,” a phrase that, like most convenient fictions, has the merit of sounding grateful while carefully averting the eyes. It covers, in a single benevolent blur, all the items no one wishes to examine too closely: the brown ring slowly blooming across a ceiling tile over the third pew, discreetly replaced between services so that each new spot may be attributed to “old buildings” rather than neglected gutters; the pink past‑due notice folded neatly beneath the church’s electric bill in the office drawer that only Wesley and the treasurer ever open; the fuse that sulks and dies every time the women of the church decide that true Christian hospitality requires four crockpots, a coffee urn, and the ancient percolator running at once.
When these things fail, it is the devil, or the weather, or “the way they make things nowadays.” When they work again, it is because “Wes took care of it,” as if the problem had obligingly fixed itself upon hearing his name.
His days make a kind of chain‑link, each small emergency fastening neatly to the next. Swapping bulbs on Saturday evening so no one will notice on Sunday that half the fixtures are original to the Carter administration; coaxing the baptismal pump into obedience with plumber’s tape and a muttered prayer, knowing full well it ought to be replaced rather than sweet‑talked; shifting money from one labeled envelope to another in the office drawer, composing, even as he does it, the tidy fiction he will tell himself about putting it back when the next tithe check clears. It is all triage, really, pressure here to stop the bleeding there, performed so quietly that most of the patient never realizes how close it has come to the edge.
In those narrow intervals between urgencies, in the boiler room’s damp half‑light or the sanctuary gone dim and echoing after a Wednesday night study, other arrangements of his life sometimes edged into view. Not escape (he was past that romance) but some quieter version in which the next calamity was not already queued with his name neatly written on it.
In Miriam’s unformed generosity Kathleen saw both promise and hazard. Money, like electricity, required proper routing; left to itself it scorched wiring and egos alike. So she praised Miriam’s “servant’s heart” in the same breath that she suggested perhaps a quiet scholarship here, a bit of paint there. Nothing with plaques or press releases that might invite a committee from town.
Kathleen watched Miriam as if she were some rare hymnbook discovered in a forgotten cabinet. Handsomely bound, undeniably useful, and, in Kathleen’s private estimation, safest when catalogued firmly on her own shelf rather than left for general circulation. It was not possessiveness, she would have said, merely stewardship. Some things in a church were too valuable to be handled without guidance.
Over coffee‑hour cleanup she arranged herself at the end of the folding table where Miriam happened to be stacking Styrofoam cups, and from that point the entire choreography unfolded with the easy inevitability of a well‑rehearsed special. A remark here about how “we’ve never quite managed to get a young folks’ brunch off the ground”; a soft laugh there at the notion of “all that paperwork the denomination loves so much.” By the time the last crumbs of sheet cake were being brushed into the trash, Miriam found herself not only in the center of a loose ring of women but also the object of a general, admiring consensus that she had “such a gift for bringing people together.”
Kathleen was careful, as always, that the circle never hardened into a committee. Any talk that smacked of “formal partnership with the foundation” or “outside oversight” was headed off with a little tightening of her smile and a change of subject. “Oh, now, let’s not saddle Miriam with red tape,” she would murmur. “She’s here to be part of us, not to manage us.” The others, who had no wish to be managed by anybody’s granddaughter, wealthy or not, nodded along.
Instead, Kathleen suggested “little things” with the air of someone plucking modest blossoms rather than laying foundations: perhaps Miriam might host a simple brunch for the college‑age crowd (“Nothing fancy, dear, they’ll just be thrilled someone thought of them”); perhaps she could make a call to her grandfather’s office about a surplus of paint or folding chairs (“only if it’s not a trouble, of course”); perhaps she might let them put “Langley Family” in small print at the bottom of the fall revival flyer (“it does lend a bit of shine, you know, and people in town do read such things”).
Each proposal was framed not as an obligation but as a natural extension of what Miriam already “was so good at”. Being gracious, being present, being, in short, an ornament to Pine Hollow Baptist rather than an instrument of its reform. Kathleen’s compliments wrapped around the younger woman like a shawl: warm, flattering, and just heavy enough to keep her from wandering into bolder notions about boards, audits, or the kind of giving that arrived with agendas attached.
Brent had a genius for arriving just as a need presented itself: cups running low, coffee urn gurgling its last, Miriam glancing round for a fresh box of filters. Each time, there he was, polishing his good smile along with the stainless steel, setting down a case of off‑brand grounds with a grunt that suggested both generosity and sacrifice.
“Figured y’all could use a little extra,” he’d say, loud enough for the nearest ears. “Wholesale for the church, of course. Practically givin’ it away.”
His business card appeared beside the sugar packets, beside the sign‑up sheets, beside Miriam’s folded hands as she listened to some widow’s story. “Now, you just hold on to that,” he told her, thumb grazing her wrist a half‑second longer than necessity required. “For when your granddaddy’s folks at the foundation need a reliable local partner. Somebody who understands how hard it is keepin’ a small place afloat these days.”
The line between testimony and sales pitch blurred pleasantly in Brent’s mouth. To hear him tell it, his coffee, his store, and his steady presence at Miriam’s elbow were all part of the same noble struggle.
Kathleen watched the approach from the fellowship‑hall window, the pastor angling his bulk between Darren and the open road with all the benign determination of a man about to borrow a truck he had no gas money to refill. The pastor’s jacket was already off, tie askew, sermon notes poking out of his Bible like unpaid bills. He talked with his hands, sketching leaks and sagging beams in the air, his praise for Darren’s “experience out there in the world” threaded through assurances that they’d “keep everything simple” and “stick to the old ways.”
From her vantage point, it was plain enough: they wanted Darren’s back and his building codes, not his memories or his mouth. Doctrine, like drywall, was to remain strictly untouched.
Lydia, notebook hidden in a canvas tote like contraband, trails after Wesley during odd jobs and hospital visits, telling herself she’s here for “participant observation” while flinching at how clinical that sounds in his presence. Once, she would have called it “fieldwork”; now, watching him coax a stubborn pilot light back to life, the term feels indecent. Every time she scribbles down a turn of phrase or a family story, she hears her own voice, younger and sharper, announcing she was “getting out,” and stumbles over half‑finished apologies that never quite bridge the gap between cousin and subject, between the girl who left and the man who never had that luxury.
For most of them, Miriam ceases to be a shy young woman rinsing casseroles and becomes a walking possibility: “the Langley girl,” a hypothetical line item who might, properly cultivated, blossom into a six‑figure check. In back pews and over congealing macaroni, they script futures in which her grandfather’s foundation retires every debt, replaces the roof, tames the furnace, perhaps even bestows central air. The liturgy, of course, will remain untouched, the hymn numbers unchanged, the walls the same agreeable off‑white, and the quiet hierarchy intact.
Kathleen allowed herself the smallest of smiles as the familiar line made its rounds again, hopping table to table like a well‑worn casserole dish. “Too broke to be corrupt and too small to split.” It had begun, years ago, as one of Brent Colby’s better turns of phrase, tossed out when the denomination sent a survey about “congregational health.” Now it was practically liturgy, invoked whenever someone mentioned budgets, building funds, or any word with the faintest scent of initiative.
“Too broke to be corrupt,” Mrs. Hall repeated now, ladling green beans with the solemnity of a benediction.
“And too small to split,” her sister chimed in, passing the rolls. A bubble of soft laughter rose, the sort of comfortable amusement that required no one to change anything afterward.
Kathleen chuckled with them, because that was expected, and because there was a real, if perverse, comfort in the joke. It was easier to think of their limitations as a hedge of protection, God’s own fiscal chastity belt, than as evidence of slow decline. To say they were “too small to split” suggested an enviable unity, not the bare fact that half the people who might have stormed out years ago were already attending somewhere with better carpet.
From the doorway to the kitchen, she could see Wesley lean back in his chair at the edge of the room, mouth quirking in that polite half‑smile he wore like a uniform. He laughed when the punch line came, but his eyes slid, almost involuntarily, toward the fellowship‑hall lights. One of the fluorescent tubes over the dessert table had been stuttering all evening, threatening to give up entirely. He would stay late to coax it back, as he always did.
He, unlike the ladies at the bean table, knew precisely how “too broke” they were: down to the week the power company would stop believing in pastoral charm and start believing in shutoffs. He’d been out to the breaker box three times since Monday, tapping and jiggling and praying under his breath while the sanctuary sat dark and empty, the hymnals ghostly in the half‑light.
“Too broke to be corrupt,” someone repeated, this time with an approving nod toward the pastor’s bowed head at the far table, as if poverty itself guaranteed virtue. Kathleen felt an old, private impatience stir. She had seen enough in hospital corridors and church basements to know that greed wore many faces, some of them thrift‑store plain. Money did not create character so much as amplify whatever was already present.
Still, she let the phrase stand. There was no use being the one to puncture their small theology of insufficiency. Let them pretend that empty coffers kept them pure and single services kept them whole. It was a gentler superstition than most, and, for the moment, cheaper than replacing the roof.
Suggestions for “vision” passed through the room like a cold front: noted, commented on, and ultimately blamed on the jet stream. When the younger deacon’s wife (Chelsea, still fresh enough to believe in bullet points and church‑growth blogs) ventured something about livestreaming services and online giving, the air shifted.
“Next thing you know we’ll have one o’ them fog machines,” a man near the dessert table murmured, low enough to count as a joke and high enough to count as a warning.
“Televangelist nonsense,” another agreed, nudging his Styrofoam cup. A small, relieved laugh went up. Common sense, it seemed, had prevailed over silicone wristbands and branding.
Kathleen smiled a thin, diplomatic smile and did not point out that most of their own missionaries already sent updates by email. One did not confuse people with facts when they were enjoying themselves.
Yet before the evening was out, Lydia found herself cornered by the potato‑salad bowl, fielding inquiries in the same breathless, confidential tone usually reserved for medical symptoms and prodigal children. What, exactly, was a grant application? Did it cost anything to file? Could you do it on “just regular Wi‑Fi,” or did you need, as one anxious soprano put it, “the fast kind the government sees”?
The notion had blown in on the denominational newsletter and by Wednesday night it had acquired capital letters. A Vision Committee. The phrase itself drew a visible shiver through the room.
“Last thing we need is more committees,” one of the older men muttered, loud enough for his table but not for the pastor.
“Last thing we need is more vision,” his wife replied, which earned her a smothered snicker from the next table over.
Half the room contented themselves with rolling their eyes and making prophecies about binders breeding in the pastor’s office. The other half, trained by long habit and Kathleen’s pleasant, inexorable smile, reached for the pen when it hovered near. Around here, you did not quite tell Kathleen no; you merely adjusted your schedule afterward.
By the time the potato salad congealed, the sign‑up sheet bore a representative sampling of the hollow: three people who genuinely thrilled at the thought of “strategic planning,” two who hoped it might lead to new carpet, several who had mistaken the sheet for the next funeral‑meal roster, and a long tail of names captured while their owners were balancing plates and could not, politely, escape.
Kathleen regarded the resulting list with professional satisfaction. It looked, to her eye, exactly as such things ought: a blend of zeal, reluctance, and mild confusion. In other words, a church.
It is Miriam, of all people, who looses the next squall. In that careful, school‑presentation voice of hers, she remarks that some churches have online giving now, “so people can, um, tithe even if they’re out of town.” The air goes tight as Tupperware. An older man mutters about “credit‑card Jesus,” earning laughter a shade too loud. Kathleen, smile polished to a soft sheen, proposes they “pray on it” and “see what the Lord provides” before adopting anything liable to bewilder the shut‑ins or, worse, embolden the youth.
Beneath all the joking resistance, though, the word “miracle” rides every conversation like humidity: a miracle donor, a miracle grant, a miracle roof that doesn’t leak on the alto section. They will plead for it with clasped hands and wet eyes on Wednesday night, then spend Thursday at Colby’s or on the cemetery path specifying that, if God does send help, it had best not arrive with drums, a projector screen, or some brisk young accountant from town explaining stewardship and “best practices” as though Pine Hollow were a franchise instead of itself.
Kathleen had never liked thunderstorms. They were uncivilized things, breaking in on the evening like a drunk relative at a wedding, upsetting all one’s careful arrangements. Still, she had lived long enough among these hills to know that objecting to the weather was as useful as objecting to gravity. One made adjustments.
She was in her small sitting room when the power blinked. The television hiccupped, froze a weatherman mid-gesture, then surrendered to black. For a moment she sat very straight in her armchair, hands resting on her knees, listening to the sudden fullness of the storm’s voice: rain strafing the windows, the dull boom that rolled down the hollow like a bowling ball in an upstairs flat.
“Well,” she said aloud, to no one in particular, “that’ll be the church.”
The next flash of lightning painted the framed photograph of Pine Hollow Baptist, Easter morning, ten years ago, on her wall with an eerie, momentary glare. In the picture the white paint looked almost respectable. The real building, she knew, would not bear such scrutiny tonight.
She rose, knees protesting, and went to the kitchen window. From her house halfway up the slope she could not see the church itself, tucked as it was in the crook of the hollow, but she knew every echo and interval of that bell like a child knows his mother’s footsteps. When the thunder cracked again, so sharp it seemed to split the air in front of her face, she fancied she heard the faint, discordant answer of metal in distress from down below.
“Please God,” she murmured, not quite a prayer and not quite an order, “let that roof hold.”
It was not that she imagined the Almighty as a celestial contractor, on call for emergency patch work. But it had been a long time since Pine Hollow had weathered anything more severe than the slow, genteel decay of dwindling attendance and deferred maintenance. A storm that came in shouting might do what years of whispered budget discussions had not.
The lights flicked again, then died properly. Kathleen stood in the dark, feeling the house breathe around her: the old refrigerator sighing to a stop, the rain drumming the eaves like an over-eager youth choir, the wind fingering the siding for weaknesses. Somewhere, something on the porch clanged wildly out of tune.
“Enough of that,” she said, more sharply than the inanimate deserved. She fetched a flashlight from its basket by the pantry door, pleased to find, when its beam cut a clean, white cone through the kitchen, that the batteries had not conspired with the weather against her. Competence, she had long believed, began with knowing where the torch was.
As she moved back toward the front window, the rain thickened into a single, roaring curtain. The glass rattled in its frame with each gust. She thought of the church’s stained-glass panes, held in place by putty older than some of the deacons, and her jaw tightened. If one went, they would all be “too expensive to replace” before the topic was halfway across the committee table.
It crossed her mind to ring Wesley. Then she imagined him, already out there, shoulders hunched against the rain, with that stubborn, apologetic look he wore whenever the building misbehaved. As if he, personally, had let the weather in. He would not thank her for mothering him. Besides, if anything truly dire occurred, word would reach her. It always did. Trouble, like gossip, ran downhill.
She stood a moment longer, the flashlight off now, watching the storm as best she could through the blur on the glass. Somewhere beneath the thunder’s long grumble she fancied she heard the bell rope judder as the wind worried at the tower. The sound, or the idea of it, settled in her chest like a small, cold stone.
“Tomorrow, then,” she told the dark room, squaring her shoulders as if someone were there to see it. “We shall see what’s what tomorrow.”
When the worst of it broke over the hollow, the rain did not so much fall as hurl itself sideways, driven uphill in a mad, glittering charge that seemed personally offended by anything left standing. It struck the church’s tin roof in furious, uneven bursts, a rattle like handfuls of gravel flung by a spiteful child, and then settled into a relentless drumming that drowned out the creek and the distant highway alike. The sanctuary windows, always a little loose in their warped frames, began to tremble visibly, the colored glass quivering against putty gone the color and consistency of old bones.
From his front step, under an umbrella that surrendered one rib with a sharp, traitorous snap at the first proper gust, Wesley squinted through the blur. The gravel lot below was already a shallow, silvery lake, waves of water chasing one another between the parked trucks. Somewhere within that roaring confusion came a high, metallic screech from the direction of the steeple, thin, tearing, unmistakable. It went through him like a knife. His stomach turned cold, and he gripped the useless umbrella handle as if it were a railing.
By the time the storm limps off toward Beckley and a gray, grudging light seeps into the hollow, the damage has the indecency to show itself plainly. From Kathleen’s kitchen window the church roof looks snagged and ragged, strips of tin flapping and clanging like torn foil tongues, each petulant gust peeling them farther back to bare wood the color of old bread. It is, she thinks, exactly what happens when one postpones a thing too long; sooner or later the thing makes its own appointment.
Down below, Wesley’s boots sink into mud as he crosses the lot, shoulders hunched, his breath puffing white in the chilly air. Even from her height she can see that from the fellowship hall door water is already lapping over the threshold, the linoleum inside buckled into soft, swollen humps like a rug over a sleeping dog. He pauses only a fraction of a second, just long enough for her to note, with a mixture of irritation and reluctant admiration, that there is no one else there at this hour, then wades forward, swallowed by the sagging doorway and the consequence of everyone’s deferred decisions.
From her window Kathleen could almost smell it, knowing that particular blend of damp cardboard, old coffee, and something electrical gone faintly wrong. In her mind she saw the rain pooled ankle-deep in the low corner by the storage closets, plastic tablecloths and Vacation Bible School posters drifting like defeated bunting, and Wesley, cuffs rolled, jaw set, wading about in it alone, hauling chairs and snatching up extension cords with muttered, inadequate prayers.
He is halfway to the breaker box (flashlight clenched between his teeth, mop bucket bruising his knee with every slosh) when a sharp, furious sizzle splits the dim like a snake’s warning. A hard pop answers it, followed at once by the rank, sweet stink of hot plastic. One whole side of the fellowship hall blinks blind; the humming soda machine coughs and falls silent. Wesley jerks back, heart battering his ribs, and swings the light to the metal panel. The beam catches a blackened smear along the edge, one breaker shuddering in a feeble dance before it gives up and drops. For a moment there is only the patter of water and that awful, thick dark pressing close, and in it the plain fact settles over him: the storm has not merely soaked their floors, it has bitten straight through the frail, overworked veins that kept the church alive.
By mid-morning the rain has gentled into a sullen drip off the torn tin, each drop landing with the maddening regularity of a leaky faucet no one intends to fix properly. In the fellowship hall, where the air carries a faint, cooked-plastic tang over the older smell of coffee and hymnals, Wesley sits hunched at the folding table that usually bears church bulletins and crockpots. Today it bears his weight. The cordless phone is tucked under his chin, its slick plastic pressing a damp crescent into the stubble of his jaw. In front of him a yellow legal pad lies open to a clean page already smudged by his wet fingerprints, the top edge curling where a stray drip found it.
He has spread out his collection of roofers’ business cards like a losing hand of rummy. The cards are soft at the corners, warped from years in his wallet, glove box, and tool bag, each one a relic from some past patch job the church could just barely afford. A cartoon hammer grins from one, a faded American flag waves from another, a third bears only a name in small print and a phone number that might or might not still belong to the living. He flips through them with the practiced care of a man who knows exactly how many times he can ask for a favor from any given name before the well runs dry.
He hesitates over each card, trying to remember whose nephew married into which family, who still takes work this far back the road, who got sideways with whom over payment. The stack is bound with a stretched-out rubber band that leaves a pale groove across the paper when he peels it off. He sets aside the cards he knows are no good, Larry Dewitt, who moved to Ohio; “Big Jim Roofing,” who died two winters ago; a company out of Charleston that laughed last time at the mileage. What remains is pitifully thin.
He picks one up, squinting at the ink bled to a pale blue, and punches the numbers with a thumb that leaves a small crescent of mud on the keypad. He holds the phone to his ear and listens to it ring out into distance, counting unconsciously with the same rhythm as the drips in the far corner. When the line kicks over to a voice mailbox he’s sure belongs now to some unrelated teenager, he hangs up gently, as though being polite might coax it into usefulness.
The next call goes to a man he hasn’t spoken to in five years, not since a dispute over a sagging gutter and who was meant to have provided the screws. While the line rings, Wesley rubs at the back of his neck, feeling the grit of dried rain and sawdust there, and rehearses a humble, careful tone that will not sound too much like begging. Between each attempt, he writes the roofer’s name on the pad in his small, cramped hand, leaving a line beside it for the number he has not yet dared to imagine.
The first card, the one with the grinning hammer, finally yields a live human voice. Wesley clears his throat, pitches it low and apologetic, and describes the square footage, the pitch, the fact that the tin has seen more revivals than most of the congregation. On the other end there is a brief, incredulous silence, then a long, low whistle that seems to travel straight down the line and settle in Wesley’s gut. The number that follows comes out in slow, almost compassionate syllables, big enough that his pen stalls in the act of birthing its third zero, the ink blooming uselessly in place.
The second man, from town, has a brighter, busier ring and a brighter, busier voice. He speaks in clipped phrases, code compliance, tear-off, “doing it right this time”, as if the present roof were a personal affront. By the time he folds in rotten sheathing, possible mold, and “bringing you up to standard,” his estimate has doubled itself like a bad rumor.
The third is somebody’s cousin by marriage, reached at last through a chain of numbers and “try this one instead.” He laughs too readily, says, “Now, for the church, I’ll see what I can do,” then hems and haws so long Wesley can hear a game show in the background. The figure he finally lands on is smaller only because it omits permits, insulation, disposal, and any pretense of warranty: cheap the way a loose tooth is cheap, right up until you yank it.
He prints each figure in slow, schoolboy block letters, circling them as if a neat loop of ink might keep them from swelling any further. The paper dips under his hand when he presses too hard on a nine; his jaw knots, then resets. Sales tax goes in the margin, a grudging little +, then another line for whatever electrician is willing to risk that panel, another for “plaster? mold?” each item followed by a hesitant question mark that looks, to Kathleen’s eye, almost apologetic. Numbers spider out from the center of the page, added then half-erased, recombined, chased down again, until the final total tilts toward the lower corner like a thing trying, sensibly enough, to climb off the paper and flee.
With the hall still breathing out wet carpet and ozone, he slips into the narrow supply closet off the side corridor, the one whose bare bulb consents to shine only if the chain is jiggled with a lover’s patience. Between leaning brooms and a tottering tower of hymnals, he muscles an overturned paint bucket into the single bare patch of floor, eases himself down until his knees crackle, and balances the legal pad on one thigh. Only then, as if witnesses have been reduced to mops and mildew, does he reach into his tool bag, fingers closing around the stiff corner of the envelope he has, all morning, treated as a harmless piece of cardboard.
The power company’s red-ink FINAL NOTICE glares up at him when he unfolds it, the shutoff date already circled from the last time he’d dared look, then stuffed back down like a sin you meant to confess and didn’t. He means to add that amount to the roof figures and the ghost of whatever an electrician will charge, but the numbers slip their borders, blur and double, until the neat columns on his pad resemble nothing so much as rain on glass. Heat climbs his throat; a tight, unfamiliar band cinches round his chest. The pen clatters from his fingers to the concrete with a small, treacherous sound. He bows his head into his hands. Not to pray exactly, but to count slow, stubborn breaths in the dim, mop-sour air, waiting for the world to steady enough that he can hoist himself back up and go on pretending this is all still manageable.
Wesley finds the envelope propped carefully against the office doorframe when he comes in from checking the sump pump, the denominational logo neat and blue against the off-white; his name isn’t on it, just “To the Members of Pine Hollow Baptist Church,” but his stomach drops all the same as he turns it over in his work-rough fingers.
For several unhurried seconds he simply stands there in the narrow hall, boots dripping a faint, guilty trail from the fellowship hall’s damp concrete. The return address sits in the upper corner, righteous and official. Someone in Charleston, he thinks, has an air-conditioned office and a printer that doesn’t smear, and enough distance from Pine Hollow to speak of “stewardship” without smelling mildew.
The flap of the envelope is sealed with a small, precise strip of glue, no more, no less; it strikes Kathleen, watching from the doorway of the kitchen as she wipes her hands on a tea towel, that this is exactly how the Board likes its churches. She has not forgotten the tone of the last email. Forwarded and reprinted by their part-time pastor with a cheery “Nothing to worry about yet!” in bold at the top, as if exclamation marks were sandbags against a flood. “Encouraging responsible planning,” the regional superintendent had called it, that gentle phrase behind which all manner of closures had quietly occurred in neighboring hollows. Kathleen, who reads denominational newsletters as attentively as other women consult horoscopes, had noticed the pattern: first “healthy collaboration,” then “strategic partnership,” then, as if it had always been inevitable, “a season of transition.”
She takes two steps toward Wesley before he can tuck the envelope under his arm like any other bill. “Leave that here a moment, would you?” she says, as though asking for the salt at Wednesday supper. Her voice is even, pleasantly mild; only the tea towel, wrung tighter between her hands, betrays a sharper interest.
He hesitates, thumb stroking the edge of the paper in a small, unconscious motion that makes her think of boys smoothing worry out of report cards. His gaze flickers past her, down the dim hall to the sanctuary where, not two days ago, buckets had sat in pious rows catching the storm’s penitential drip. If a letter ever chose its timing with malice aforethought, this one had.
“It’s just from Charleston,” he mutters, by way of apology, as though he had personally invited the superintendent to meddle. “Figure Pastor ought to see it first.”
“Pastor,” Kathleen replies, with that calm she brings out for bedpans and bad news, “will see it directly. But the Board”, by which she means herself, two other ladies, and whichever deacon is currently speaking to his brother-in-law, “shouldn’t be the last to know what’s being said about our own house.” She holds out her hand, not quite commanding, not quite a request.
There is a brief, almost comic pause in which it becomes clear to both of them that whosoever opens this envelope will, in the minds of Pine Hollow, become personally responsible for its contents. Wesley’s shoulders, already bowed by the weight of roof tin and unpaid kilowatts, dip a fraction lower. Then, with the resigned air of a man handing over the last good board in a stack of rot, he surrenders the letter into Kathleen’s waiting grasp.
She does not sit. Sitting would make this a domestic matter; standing keeps it official. Besides, the pastor’s little room, half office, half catch‑all for extra bulletins and broken folding chairs, has never quite forgiven her for rearranging it the year he arrived. She crosses the worn threshold, the smell of old coffee and toner rising to meet the starch and dish soap that cling to her blouse, and lays the envelope squarely in the one bare rectangle of the desk not already occupied by overdue notices and a plastic cross‑pen from last year’s revival.
“Best not have this lost under the choir music,” she says lightly, though she notes, with a school nurse’s eye, how the muscles in Wesley’s jaw jump. He hovers by the door as if the floorboards might give way beneath whoever stands too close to Charleston’s return address.
For a moment she considers waiting for the pastor, or at least another Board member; then she recalls the last time they had “waited,” and an entire budget year had gone missing. Order, she has learned, does not keep itself.
“Let’s see what our betters recommend,” she murmurs, reclaiming a little of her old ward‑sister briskness as she reaches (not for the dull church letter opener, which has begun to rust at the hinge) but for her own small, pearl‑handled one from her handbag. A foolish indulgence, bought years ago in a city stationer’s, yet it slides under the glue with gratifying precision. Her back protests as she bends, but she ignores it; there are worse pains than a catch in the spine. The envelope yields with a soft, decisive sound, and for an instant the whole hollow seems to be holding its breath with her.
The paper is heavier than their usual copy stock, faintly cream instead of church‑bulletin gray, smooth under Kathleen’s fingers in a way that speaks of better budgets elsewhere. The black type sits in perfect, indifferent lines, no smudge, no crooked staple. The first paragraph, all courtesy and distance, offers warm thanks for Pine Hollow’s “faithful witness over many decades,” as though they were a quaint tradition rather than a present inconvenience. It observes, in the gently patronizing manner of people with central air, that these are “challenging times for small rural congregations,” and makes respectful mention of the church’s “rich heritage” in the hollow.
Midway down the page the politeness curdles. In those careful, bloodless phrases she has come to recognize (verbs hedged with adverbs, concern wrapped in cotton wool) the letter observes that “without a concrete, sustainable plan for addressing current building needs and arrears,” the regional board must “prayerfully explore responsible stewardship options,” among them “consolidation with a sister congregation better resourced to serve the area.” It is, Kathleen thinks, the bureaucratic equivalent of a Do Not Resuscitate, written in twelve‑point Times New Roman and sent regular post.
Wesley reads that section twice, the words blurring at the edges like rain on the foyer glass, then folds the letter back along its crisp crease with more care than he gives most hymnal racks. He slides it into the middle of the invoice pile instead of the top, telling himself he’ll show the pastor, Kathleen, the deacons: after Sunday. After he’s figured how to keep the lights on long enough for there to still be a service to meet after, how to coax another week out of wiring that hums and flickers like an old man’s breath.
Wesley lingers by the back wall as the benediction dissolves into the scrape of hymnals and the rustle of skirts and windbreakers, wiping his damp palms down the thighs of his jeans as though he could polish denim into something respectable. The sanctuary is dimmer than it has any right to be for a Sunday noon, the fluorescents over the back pews dead since the first crack of thunder that morning. What light there is slants in through the stained glass in tired blues and reds, catching the slow procession of drips from the ceiling and turning them, perversely, into something almost pretty before they fall.
He has three buckets stationed where the roof is most honest about its age: a white drywall compound pail under the worst brown bloom near the center aisle, a cracked blue mop bucket by the south wall, and an old galvanized metal one that used to hold church picnic ice and now receives a steady, hollow plink that echoes beneath the last lines of the closing hymn. Each drop hits with the regularity of a clock he can’t stop hearing, keeping time with the uneven whine of the ceiling fans. They turn grudgingly on their lowest setting, blades wobbling just enough to make him nervous if he looks at them too long.
As folks shuffle past, some murmur to him. Others avoid his eye altogether, their gazes lifted politely toward the cross while their feet sidestep the damp spots on the carpet he had blotted with rolled‑up towels before service. A faint, sour smell of wet insulation is creeping in under the familiar mix of perfume and old hymnals. Wesley notes it the way he notes everything gone just slightly wrong in this building, mentally slotting it beside “furnace hiccup, choir room outlet sparking, fellowship hall door sticking in humidity,” another line in a ledger that never balances.
Kathleen does not so much step into the aisle as materialize there, one hand resting lightly on the back of the nearest pew as if she has risen by accident into everyone’s path. Her pearls sit perfectly level at her throat, a small triumph given the quiet protest of her knees. Before the first cluster of young families can make their practiced dash toward the parking lot, she clears her throat.
“If we could just gather for a quick chat in the fellowship hall,” she says, employing the same firm, unhurried tone with which she once informed anxious relatives that no, visiting hours were not optional. “Just a minute of your time.”
It is not, strictly speaking, a request. The word just hangs there like a crocheted doily laid over something sharp. Her smile is warm and immovable, leaving as little room for refusal as the aisle itself. There is a small, collective sag of shoulders, resigned sighs, a few muted chuckles, as Bibles are shut and tucked away, bulletins folded, diaper bags and purses hoisted for a journey everyone already knows will last longer than a minute.
In the fellowship hall, the air sits close and sour, a stew of wet drywall, old coffee grounds, and the ghost of last month’s casserole supper. The humming refrigerator sounds louder than usual, as though protesting the encroaching damp. Over the serving counter, a bubbled patch of ceiling has taken on the look of an overripe gourd, bulging and dimly glistening where slow droplets gather, fatten, and then slip down in reluctant intervals.
People cluster at the nearest folding tables instead of spreading out, as if proximity might lend strength. Older men plant themselves with the authority of oak stumps, thumping canes against scuffed linoleum and recounting, with evident satisfaction, the year “the creek come right up that back door” and “the Lord brought us through then, He’ll do it again,” as though the Almighty had personally sandbagged the fellowship hall.
Kathleen, easing herself into a chair near enough to hear without seeming to, catches the shiver of that phrase, real programs, as neatly as if it had been addressed to her. Their children thump sagging plastic toys against the table legs in nervous percussion. The mothers’ eyes keep straying upward to the stained tiles, then sideways to the door, already half‑measuring the drive to town.
She raps her knuckles lightly against a metal chair, the chiming ring more effective than any gavel. “Thank y’all for staying,” she begins, folding the storm neatly into “an opportunity for us to pull together.” She proceeds to “practical ideas”. Work days, cleaning rosters, and, inexorably, “another bake sale.” The murmurs tighten, nostalgia on one side, on the other a thin, watchful quiet in which younger parents count miles, dollars, and years.
The talk of bake sales, having done its faithful circuit through nostalgia, resentment, and sheer fatigue, dwindles at last into a thin, bitter quip about “selling pies till Kingdom Come.” A few people oblige it with dutiful chuckles; most let it fall flat between them like a dropped hymnbook. The silence that follows is not quite reverent, not quite sulking. It is simply exhausted.
In that pocket of quiet, the fellowship hall sounds wrong. The refrigerator’s steady buzz seems to swell to an accusatory drone. Somewhere in the kitchen, a tap develops a slow, irregular plink. Overhead, the swollen ceiling tile exhales another clear bead, which descends with tragic patience and lands in the plastic trash can below with a soft, insistent plop. Drip. Plop. Drip. Plop. Each one marks off the seconds in which no one quite dares to say what they are all thinking.
Miriam, sandwiched between a bulletin board announcing last year’s mission trip and a table piled with hymnals too warped to close properly, feels heat rise up from her collarbone to her ears. It is not her shame, precisely; nothing here is her fault. Yet the prickling at the back of her neck is unmistakable, the old, unwelcome sensation of being the only one in a room who has studied for a test no one else believes in.
She glances around and sees, with a stab of something like panic, that no one is looking at the water. Eyes fix instead on hands folded too tightly, on bulletin margins, on the scuffed toes of shoes. An older woman fusses with her purse strap; a teenager scrolls furtively beneath the table edge; one of the younger fathers studies the emergency exit sign as if it were a roadmap.
The refusal to look gathers a weight of its own. They will look at anything so long as it is not the brown‑spreading stain flowering above them, not the trash can swallowing each measured drop. The pretense feels, to Miriam, suddenly unbearable, as though the whole room is agreeing to ignore a slow leak in a lifeboat.
Miriam realizes, with a small, traitorous flutter in her chest, that if no one says anything honest the ceiling will simply go on falling in polite stages until there is nothing left but a puddle and a memory. She clears her throat. The sound is thinner than she intended, so she anchors her hands on the nearest object, an already-creased bulletin, and feels its edge cut a faint line into her thumb.
“I mean,” she begins, hearing her own voice as if from across the room, “I could… ask. About my grandfather’s foundation. If (” she swallows, steadies) “if we had a real proposal. And accountability.” The last word drops like a hymn sung one note too sharp. It startles even her; she hears the syllables in the accent she worked so hard to acquire in seminar rooms and board retreats, suddenly unsoftened by the hollow.
City-learned terms, proposal, accountability, foundation, clang against the cinderblock and folding chairs. They seem to hang in the damp air along with the faint smell of bleach and coffee, loud and foreign and unmistakably hers.
The room inhales and then forgets how to exhale. Conversation stops mid‑breath; even the children, sensing some invisible grown‑up weather change, fall still over their crayons. Metal chair legs rasp faintly as a couple of older men shift, not to rise, only to re‑settle themselves more squarely on the side of history they have already chosen. One woman’s polite smile freezes on her face as if she has just bitten into something unexpectedly sour and feels honor‑bound to chew it anyway. Around the edges of the tables, younger parents glance, quick and measuring, between Miriam and Kathleen, as if searching for a cue. A line has been drawn; they all feel it, though no one is yet certain whose hand held the chalk.
From the back, a thin, reedy voice finally dares the room: “We remember what Langley ‘help’ looks like,” an older congregant remarks to the middle distance, not quite granting Miriam the courtesy of a direct stare. Another man, knuckles pale around his Styrofoam cup, studies the calluses on his own fingers and mutters, “We’ve paid enough to that family already.” Paid enough carries with it not only the familiar history (layoffs, shuttered shops, mortgages sunk with pensions) but a more intimate ledger of small humiliations: foremen’s clipped speeches, HR letters in stiff envelopes, the long drive home past the plant gates gone dark.
Miriam feels the heat creep all the way to her ears as the room’s balance tips, gently but unmistakably, away from her. She almost explains, about corporate restructurings and separate boards and how this foundation is not that plant, then swallows it, tasting metal. Kathleen’s face remains serenely unreadable; even Wesley, by the coffee urn, busies himself aligning Styrofoam cups with exaggerated concentration, as if neat stacks might absorb the tension.
Darren clears his throat, not loudly, but with the small deliberation of a man accustomed to getting a foreman’s attention over compressor noise. The hum of the box fans and the steady plink of water into mismatched buckets fill the pause. He pushes off the fellowship‑hall doorframe with one shoulder, the motion loose and easy, and says, “Well… I’ve got gear in the truck. Could climb up there this afternoon, see how bad it really is.”
His tone is almost playful, as if he’s offering to fetch something from a high shelf for a neighbor, but his eyes go straight to the stained square of ceiling tile above the coffee table. They travel along the sagging seam, down to the cord of an overloaded power strip snaking past a puddle, and in that quick, measuring glance Kathleen recognizes the look of a man not merely being helpful but quietly appraising a site. It is how the men from the furnace company had looked, and the electrician before them: as if the church were not a sanctuary but a problem to be costed out and, if possible, solved.
Wesley stills, hand hovering over the sugar packets. Lydia’s pen, which has been tapping some private rhythm against her notebook, stops mid‑beat. Around the tables there is a faint stir, nothing so definite as assent, but the kind of attentive silence particular to people who know they cannot afford professional help and are suddenly offered the possibility of something for free: or at least for less.
Darren lets the room feel his offer a moment, then adds, with a shrug meant to sound harmless, “Been on a few crews, out in Kentucky and down near Asheville, where old places like this got a whole second chance. Churches, schools. We turned one into a community center, another into a kinda retreat place. Kept the bones, just gave ’em new life.”
The phrase hangs there, new life laid soft against the fellowship hall’s mildew and mismatched Tupperware. A couple of the younger parents, still bent over their children’s damp sneakers and rolled‑up socks, lift their heads and exchange quick, sidelong looks. Half interest, half calculation. “Retreat,” for them, smells faintly of paying customers and yoga mats, not prayer meetings and casserole sign‑up sheets. One man’s jaw works as he does, quite visibly, the arithmetic of property, potential, and gas money saved if Sunday mornings required a drive down‑hollow instead of up.
Across the table, an older woman purses her lips as if she has tasted something improper. “New life,” in her lexicon, is a matter for the baptismal pool, not the deed book.
Kathleen notes every flicker. Darren’s words fall with that studied carelessness common to men who pretend they have no designs while quietly arranging the board. He does not say what, precisely, “second chance” might entail for those presently sitting under the drip. He does not have to. The fact of his knowing other uses for buildings like this slips into the room like another leak, not yet acknowledged, already finding its own line of descent.
To Kathleen’s ear, the words “old places like this” fall with the same weight as “old people like us” so often do in policy discussions on the evening news. Phrased kindly, meant brutally. Community center, retreat space: such amiable little euphemisms, like calling a widow “independent” when what one really means is “alone.” She watches the younger parents straighten from their children’s sneakers and wet socks, eyes brightening not with piety but with arithmetic. There is the quick, involuntary glance toward the fellowship‑hall windows, as if they might already be framing brochure photographs, and then toward one another. Half‑hopeful, half‑guilty, like students caught listening to another preacher’s podcast.
They are good children, Kathleen reminds herself: these boys and girls she once helped corral for Bible school, now grown and fretting over mortgage rates and gas. Yet “new life,” in Darren’s mouth, carries a faint odor of ticket prices and outside cars filling the gravel lot. The room’s air shifts; not quite treason, not yet, but something that rhymes with it. Kathleen smooths an invisible wrinkle from her blouse and files every glance away, as carefully as any nurse charting early symptoms.
By the stacked folding chairs, Wesley feels the muscles along his spine cinch tight at “old places like this.” To other ears it may sound kindly, almost nostalgic; to his it lands like the first line of an obituary. He can see it as clear as a work order: strangers in bright vests and clean gloves knocking through the crooked wall he shimmed with scrap lumber, peeling back paneling to sneer at the wiring he has coaxed and prayed along one breaker at a time. They will not see the nights he spent on a ladder in borrowed light, or the way he learned each quirk and flicker like a person’s moods. They will only see a project.
At the far end of the table, Lydia circles “new life” once, then again, her pen leaving a dark halo around the phrase. Almost without consent from the better part of her, “adaptive reuse?” appears in the margin, followed by “case study / narrative arc,” neat as a syllabus heading. Her grant‑writer’s mind begins assembling “reimagining sacred spaces” while another, quieter mind winces at the theft.
The notion does not so much take hold as seep in, slow, discolored, and along hairline cracks nobody will own. It settles behind people’s eyes, in the way they do not look at the pulpit, in the way they study the fellowship‑hall door as if it might open onto some more practical salvation. No one names it; everyone, briefly, recognizes it.
Kathleen watched the little trio down the table with the same mild attention she might have given a tray of deviled eggs left too near the edge. Nothing dramatic, merely a situation that, unattended, would shortly end on the floor.
Miriam, poor child, had both hands wrapped round her coffee as if it were a boardroom presentation rather than the fellowship hall after Sunday service. “Structural stability and some kind of oversight,” she was saying, in the careful tone of a well-brought-up girl attempting not to sound like a tyrant. The words floated down the length of the folding table, past the abandoned casserole dishes and congealing crockpots, and arrived in Kathleen’s ear already wearing little suits and carrying briefcases.
Oversight. Stability. Liability. She could practically hear a Langley lawyer clearing his throat.
From where she sat refilling someone’s Styrofoam cup, she could see Wesley’s shoulders tighten under that faded flannel, see the way his jaw worked while he pretended to wipe at a spot on the table that had been there since VBS three summers ago. He heard something altogether different in that talk of oversight, she would wager her last jar of homemade pickle relish on it. And Lydia, Lydia had that bright, greedy look in her eye that academics got whenever someone said anything that smelled faintly of funding.
“Pilot project,” Miriam added with earnest enthusiasm, and that settled it. A pilot project, indeed. Kathleen had seen enough “projects” in her working life to know they came with clipboards, outside evaluations, and the firm expectation that the grateful natives would smile for the newsletter photographs.
She smiled herself, pleasantly, as a pair of ladies from the back pew drifted nearer, voices lowered. “Now,” she murmured, with the air of one merely remarking upon the weather, “isn’t it nice the Langleys are taking such an interest? Of course, strings always come attached to that kind of interest, darlins. Always.”
Wesley, standing between the coffee urn and the dessert table, caught the word “oversight” the way a man hears “fire” in a crowded room. It rose above the refrigerator’s steady drone, the clink of forks on paper plates, the splash of dishwater in the kitchen. A moment later came “efficiencies we could build in,” and his stomach pulled tight, a slow, familiar knot just under his ribs.
Efficiencies. He could see them plainly: men in pressed shirts from Beckley or Charleston, clipboards in hand, walking the halls he knew by heart, tapping at his patched wiring with disapproval, shining flashlights up into the roof where he’d sistered cracked rafters. They’d talk about “risk exposure” and “cost-benefit,” decide which leaks and soft spots were “worth it,” which ministries “sustainable.” All the little cheats and half-measures that had kept the place open, his rubber gaskets cut from inner tubes, his scavenged lumber, the baptismal pump he’d coaxed back from the dead twice, would be written up as liabilities in some report.
Liabilities, not lifelines. And a man who relied on them, not a caretaker but a problem.
Lydia, who had been half-listening and half-doodling little boxes and arrows on the back of an old committee agenda, looked up sharply at “pilot project.” The phrase landed with the precise, metallic click of a puzzle piece she had been turning in her fingers for months. Start small, see what works, maybe scale it if it goes well, Miriam was saying, and in an instant Lydia’s restless mind was off, mapping “Pine Hollow Baptist” into headings she already knew by heart: rural adaptation, heritage preservation, community resilience. Fundable. Presentable. Respectable. The hollow, which had refused to cohere on the page as memory or memoir, suddenly arranged itself as methodology: participant observation, longitudinal impact, narrative inquiry, all wrapped, conveniently, around her cousin’s crumbling church.
Lydia, anxious to prove useful and hearing in Miriam’s concern the faint music of a funding narrative, began obligingly to translate: “community‑based initiative,” “measurable outcomes,” “a sustainable model we could maybe replicate.” Wesley’s cheeks tightened; to his ear the church was quietly reclassified as case study and pilot site. Miriam, mistaking Lydia’s fluency for true alignment, nodded gratefully, never noticing how each polished phrase thickened the invisible wall between “experts” and Wesley’s calloused hands.
A crash of pans from the kitchen spirited Wesley away; a buzz from her phone tugged Lydia toward the parking lot. They rose with the usual soft evasions (“we’ll think on it,” “we’ll circle back”) and parted, each guarding a different conclusion. Miriam felt a fragile consensus on safer, more accountable repairs; Lydia, the happy accident of an “organic” field site; Wesley, the sick certainty he’d just witnessed the first quiet council on how to take his church (and his job) out of his hands.
On her way from the fellowship hall to the coat rack, Kathleen slowed when she caught Darren’s low voice by the front steps. The afternoon light fell in a slant through the open door, picking out the dust in the air and the scrape of boots on the mat. Darren stood half in, half out, one hand braced on the doorframe, talking to Deacon Harrell in that easy, half‑joking tone men used when they wished to say something sharp without quite being held to it.
“You can’t just patch and pray forever, not with rot like that up there,” he said, jerking his chin toward the roof.
The deacon gave the expected uneasy chuckle, the kind that affirmed nothing and offended no one. “Well, now, the Lord’s brought us this far,” he murmured, as if the Almighty had personally caulked every seam and shingled every leak.
Kathleen’s mouth tightened. The words themselves were sensible enough; she had sat up nights with rain in a pan and a towel at the fellowship‑hall door and knew as well as any man that rot did not argue with Scripture. But it was the manner of it (the tilt of Darren’s head, the casual survey of the sanctuary as if assessing a job site) that pricked. In his tone she heard not concern for the place that had baptized him and buried his kin, but the cool appraising interest of someone for whom Pine Hollow Baptist was chiefly lumber and square footage.
She paused, fingers resting lightly on the back of a pew. To her ears, “patch and pray” was not simply a remark on roofing; it was an entire philosophy dismissed in four words, the way her people had always kept things going (bit by bit, Sunday to Wednesday, casserole to casserole) reduced to a joke about rot. That he should speak so to one of her deacons, at the very threshold of the Lord’s house, told her more than she wished to know about what, precisely, he thought needed replacing.
In the cramped church kitchen, with its humming refrigerator and faint odor of old coffee grounds and onion, Kathleen measured out Folgers as if the level in the tin might answer for the level of faith in the hollow. The pot burbled and spat; steam fogged her glasses. Over the drip and hiss Miriam’s earlier phrases rose again, now unmoored from the tentative softness with which they had first been spoken: “capital infusion,” “foundation oversight,” “outside stakeholders.”
At the time Kathleen had smiled, heard a young woman trying very hard to be responsible. Now, with Darren’s “patch and pray” still ringing in her ears, those same words lost their modest hedging and settled into something colder. “Capital” no longer meant help with shingles; it meant purchase price. “Oversight” no longer suggested accountability; it suggested supervision. “Stakeholders” sounded less like congregants and more like shareholders.
By the time she wiped a brown ring from the counter with a damp paper towel, Miriam’s careful concern and Darren’s rough pragmatism had been filed together under a single heading in Kathleen’s mind: people for whom Pine Hollow Baptist was a problem to be managed, not a body to which they already belonged.
She stepped back into the fellowship hall just as the murmur of conversation rose and fell around the coffee urns. Lydia stood by the bulletin board with one of the younger women, gesturing lightly toward the faded Vacation Bible School posters.
“Any grant application would probably need a bit of rebranding,” Lydia was saying. “Updating the narrative so funders understand the value here, ”
Kathleen caught the one word that mattered. Rebranding. She missed the earnest qualifiers about “local voices” and “authenticity”; what lodged was the slick, corporate syllables. In her imagination they brought with them tri‑fold brochures, focus groups, and a logo devised in some office two counties over. Rebranding meant the hollow repackaged as content, its Sundays and funerals trimmed into a story for other people’s benefit.
By the time she settles on a folding chair near the back window, the hum of talk blurring to a low hive around her, her mind has braided these stray fragments into a single, serviceable threat. The prodigal son with contractor skills, the professor cousin with her “case study,” and the rich girl with her “capital infusion” are no longer three separate, uncertain quantities but a coordinated advance. In Kathleen’s reconstruction they are, each in their polished way, circling the same prize: Pine Hollow Baptist reimagined as a picturesque museum piece or tasteful “retreat center,” a place to flatter tender consciences from elsewhere while the ordinary, inconvenient life of the hollow is quietly ushered out the side door.
Later that afternoon, on the quiet rise of the cemetery path where talk felt half‑confession, half‑prayer, she bent her head toward her small circle: two older women in quilted vests and a deacon’s wife with her Bible still tucked under one arm. In a tone of sad inevitability rather than alarm, she laid out the story now tidy in her mind: Darren speaking of “letting it go to developers” who could “do something with all this wasted potential,” Lydia sketching a “rebrand for heritage tourists” with brochures and weekend workshops, Miriam offering foundation money that would “own the church outright” in exchange for “proper oversight.” No one asked when, or where, or whether they had heard it themselves. Heads nodded, mouths thinned, eyes hardened not with surprise but with a weary, told‑you‑so resignation. Kathleen felt, deep in her chest, the chill satisfaction of a fear made solid, a narrative that fit too well to be questioned: relief that she had been right to be wary, rather than the prickle of conscience that attends an honest, untested rumor.
In the narrow hallway by the church office, where the carpet runner had given up years ago and only bare, scuffed boards remained, Kathleen paused with a rinsed coffee mug in one hand and a roll of tape in the other. The hum of the fellowship hall dimmed behind her; ahead, the office door stood not quite shut, a thin sliver of fluorescent light cutting across the dim.
Lydia’s voice slipped through the crack, low and eager, that particular tone she used when she had found a phrase she liked the taste of. “The thing is, he’s too entangled to be objective. That’s exactly what makes it such rich material.”
Kathleen stilled. The hallway had the acoustics of a confession booth; sentences arrived bereft of the small courtesies that might have softened them. She did not hear the way Lydia’s hand motioned vaguely to encompass herself, her notebooks, the whole tangle of kin and history she meant by “he.” She did not see the wince that followed, the quick, embarrassed laugh as Lydia added, unheard, “I mean, me, too. All of us. That’s why it matters.”
What reached Kathleen was the crisp judgement, neatly framed: too entangled. Rich material. She pictured Wesley’s bowed shoulders, his back to them as he salted the front steps in winter or scraped paint in summer, and felt in those words not a scholar trying to own her complicity but a cousin weighing him like a specimen on a slide.
Inside, Miriam’s chair creaked. “Lydia,” she said, her voice troubled, “you just don’t want him exploited. Or any of them. That’s what you’re afraid of.”
Afraid of. Exploited. Them. The wall made a sieve of her meaning, catching only what could be most easily misapplied. The pronouns blurred in the plaster, the gentleness ironed out; what drifted into the hallway was a young woman’s cool assessment of nameless people as a category to be protected: or managed.
Kathleen did not, in fairness, set herself to eavesdrop. She merely found that her feet did not at once carry her forward. A caretaker “too entangled,” a community reduced to “rich material,” and somewhere, in the soft consonants behind the door, an anxious insistence on not having “them” exploited. Taken together, they arranged themselves with the tidy cruelty of a grant abstract. Pine Hollow Baptist as case study; its people as data points in search of oversight.
By the time she remembered the mug in her hand had grown cold, the tape sticking slightly to her palm, the conversation inside had moved on to deadlines and word counts. Kathleen, turning away down the shadowed hall, carried with her only the parts that confirmed what she already suspected: that others, with kinder vocabularies and better shoes, were beginning to speak of her church in a grammar that did not include belonging.
Miriam, inside, had shifted forward on her chair as if proximity could make her meaning clearer, hands open on her knees. “Lydia,” she said, and there was nothing theoretical in it, only an almost painful earnestness, “you just don’t want him exploited. Or any of them. That’s what you’re afraid of.”
She meant Wesley, of course: his mother, the hollow, the thin line between “documenting” and simply taking. In her mind “him” was particular and solid: the man who changed lightbulbs without being asked, who never took the last biscuit at a Wednesday night supper. “Them” was the congregation as she had begun, hesitantly, to love it: Miss Eula with her compression stockings, the teens dragging their feet to youth group, the widowers who lingered by the coffee urn because they had nowhere else to be.
But plaster and old wiring are poor stewards of intent. The office wall shaved off the warmth and folded her care into something flatter, more categorical. Pronouns blurred, emphasis thinned; what slipped through the crack and into the hall sounded less like a defense of one tired man and his people than a cool, outside appraisal of a population at risk of being used.
From the hallway, all Wesley catches is Lydia’s neat little “too entangled” and Miriam’s softer “exploited” braided around a blurred “he,” the rest swallowed whole by the old vent fan rattling above his head. The hum turns their voices into a study in accusation. His sleep‑starved mind does not pause to consider context or kindness; it slots the scraps into the groove already worn deep: that he is a problem, a tangle, a man folks must step carefully around. “Too entangled” becomes code for can’t be trusted with decisions; “exploited” sounds, to his ears, less like protection than proof he is some pitiable object lesson. He feels, with a hot, familiar shame, that he’s being discussed instead of addressed.
He stands there a beat too long, hand hovering over the doorknob, then lets it fall as though it weighed more than the bell. His shoulders go tight, jaw working, a faint tic in his cheek. He backs away on the bare, groaning boards, every creak under his boots spelling out the verdict he thinks he’s overheard: not consulted, but examined; not trusted, but worked around.
By the time he slips out the side door into the fading light and the smell of damp gravel after rain, Wesley has already hardened the muffled scraps into a settled fact. In his mind, the educated cousin and the rich girl have sorted him with the peeling paint and failing furnace: a variable to manage, not a man to trust. Whatever schemes they’re hatching, they plainly don’t require him except as cautionary tale and obstacle.
The fellowship hall smelled of overcooked coffee and tuna casserole, which Lydia privately considered an appropriate olfactory metaphor for every committee meeting she had ever attended. She stood by the big silver urn, thumb worrying the chipped edge of a Styrofoam cup, while Miriam refilled the sugar bowl with careful, almost apologetic teaspoons.
“…they want oversight, which is fair,” Miriam was saying in a low voice, eyes on the sugar, “but sometimes ‘oversight’ feels like a polite way of saying ‘you people can’t be trusted with your own roof.’”
Lydia’s mouth tilted. “Oh, the benevolent gaze of capital,” she murmured, half to herself, then winced at her own seminar-room reflex. “Sorry. That sounded like a PowerPoint.”
Miriam’s laugh was quick and nervous. “No, I get it. My grandfather would absolutely call it ‘stewardship’ and then hand somebody a forty‑page branding packet.”
“Well.” Lydia dug her phone out of her satchel, the habit of documenting, contextualizing, footnoting kicking in as defense. “If the foundation wants a showpiece, they can have the roof, not the soul,” she typed with a kind of brittle flourish, narrating as she went so Miriam could see she was joking and not secretly composing a ruthless think piece. “There. Gallows humor, Appalachian edition.”
She added an exaggerated eye‑roll emoji, then, after a beat, tacked on: “(Academic ethics, promise. Not here to sell anybody’s soul. Just maybe their leaky shingles.)”
Miriam leaned closer, shoulder brushing Lydia’s in a tentative conspirator’s touch. “Send that to me,” she said. “So I remember to use your line when my uncle starts talking about ‘synergy.’”
Lydia started a new thread (just Miriam and herself, for once not copying in any colleague with a title) and pasted the sentence in, thumbs flying faster now: a brief riff on conditions, on not trading “narrative control” for dollars, on how any grant had to respect the congregation’s own voice. There was comfort in couching her own unease in professional language; it made the hollow feel briefly like a case study instead of the place that had raised and resented her.
“You know,” she added, hesitating before hitting send, “we can set boundaries. Roof, yes. Soul, no. Academic ethics. Pinky swear.”
Miriam smiled at the screen, then at her. “Deal,” she said.
Footsteps and the scrape of folding chairs sounded from the doorway. In perfect guilty synchrony, they both locked the phone and slid it face‑down on the nearest chair, hands flying to coffee cups and sugar packets as if they had been discussing nothing more subversive than decaf versus regular.
Later that afternoon, when the hall had emptied to the clink of pans in the kitchen and the sigh of the drink machine, Miriam sat in her car under the dripping maple and drafted something less clever and more useful. She typed out a calm, careful follow‑up: links to two small preservation‑style grants, a screenshot of a paragraph about congregational consent, a line about not letting any outside funder “rebrand” the church out from under the people who prayed in it. It was the sort of message that would have reassured anyone actually reading for meaning rather than drama.
Lydia’s phone buzzed on the metal folding chair where she had abandoned it to go hunt down more copier paper. A mutual acquaintance picked it up to set it somewhere safer. The screen obligingly lit at her touch, not on dry grant guidelines but on the earlier, more vivid exchange. A bubble of text, half‑cropped, offered “…if the foundation wants a showpiece, they can have the roof, not the soul,” hovering above Miriam’s delighted “Send that to me.”
The girl, one of Kathleen’s perennially hopeful “maybes” for the choir, though she hadn’t darkened the loft in months, hesitated just long enough to turn curiosity into conscience. She told herself she was only making sure nothing got spilled on the phone, only glancing to see whose it was; but her thumb, like most thumbs of her generation, had a mind of its own. A flick, a scroll, a flash of words she did not entirely grasp. “Showpiece.” “Have the roof, not the soul.” It felt like catching a snatch of argument through a half‑closed door. Enough to alarm, not enough to inform. By the time she stepped into Colby’s hum of refrigerators and fluorescent light, the phrases had swollen into a warning she was almost proud to deliver.
Behind the counter, Brent wipes his palms on his jeans before taking the offered phone, squinting at the too‑bright screen. He skims the single screenshot (no lead‑in, no emojis to soften it) and feels his jaw set. “Showpiece” reads like slick brochure talk; “have the roof, not the soul” sounds like a done deal to strip the place for parts. He exhales a low whistle, more warning than wonder, and passes the phone back, the sound pitched just loud enough for the small line of customers to tilt their heads and listen.
By the time he’s rung up feed, cigarettes, and a couple of church ladies’ canned goods, Brent has kneaded the fragment into a full‑blown tale. He leans on the counter, voice pitched confidential. “City folks reckon they can turn our church into some branded showpiece,” he mutters, “carve off the roof and leave the soul behind.” The line travels outward in grocery sacks, styrofoam cups, and murmured asides at the gas pump.
In the close, stairwell air that always smelled faintly of old perfume and mildew, the young woman’s voice wobbled up and down the scale as if searching for the right key in which to be alarmed. She clutched her phone like a hymnal, thumb hovering over the dimmed screen as though the words might break loose again if she relaxed her grip.
“It was in the group chat, Miss Kathleen,” she said, the honorific sliding out by habit. “About the roof an’ all. Lydia, she said something about, um” “‘documenting the process.’ And then that Langley girl, Miriam, she put ‘foundation oversight’? And Darren, he just wrote, ‘If it all goes south we can always repurpose, lol.’ Only I didn’t see him laugh, so I don’t know.”
She offered the phrases in little bursts, shorn of any smiley faces or dancing GIFs that might have signaled levity. In their absence, each term stood naked and rather sharp. “Documenting.” “Oversight.” “Repurpose.” They rang unpleasantly professional in that narrow stairwell whose chief business had always been gossip and migraines.
Kathleen, balanced on the worn step between sanctuary and loft like a customs officer at a border, received each shard with a mild, grave inclination of the head. Her mouth shaped itself into the soft, fixed smile she used for blood-pressure readings and visiting evangelists.
“And who all saw that, dear?” she asked, as if inquiring who had attended last Thursday’s rehearsal.
“Oh, well…most everybody on the music list, I reckon. Some of the youth, too. Darren must’ve added himself, ’cause I don’t remember. She touched the girl’s forearm, a light, reassuring pressure that also served as a gentle turn back toward the sanctuary. “You were right to mention it. Best we don’t go borrowing trouble, but we won’t be blind to it either. Go on down now, they’ll be needing you for the prelude.”
Dismissed with a squeeze and a vague, “We’ll keep an eye on it,” the girl descended toward the muted clatter of hymnals and folding bulletin boards, already half-regretting having spoken yet faintly warmed by the sense of having done something properly vigilant.
Left alone in the hollowed hush, organ fan ticking as it cooled, she did what she had always done with untidy bits of information: laid them out like medication bottles and read the labels she already knew by heart. The Langley name had long been associated, in her mind, with endowments that arrived like apology notes: helpful enough, but never without a story attached. University people, in her limited but vivid experience, came armed with notebooks instead of casseroles. As for returning sons with new trucks and easy grins, she had watched enough of them barter contrition for opportunity.
“Documenting the process” slipped neatly into the academic shelf: a paper, a talk, a chapter with Pine Hollow as a poignant backdrop. “Foundation oversight” slotted into the Langley ledger: a glossy board report with photographs of rustic perseverance. “Repurpose, lol” lodged under prodigal enterprise: a building freed from stubborn pews and potlucks.
By the time she had squared the hymnals in her usual pew and nudged a crooked Bible into place, each of the three had been furnished with a motive as tidy as any discharge summary.
Once that story settles, it begins, as such stories will, to steer her responses before she has consciously named its presence. In the next committee meeting, when Lydia proposes “collecting some oral histories while folks are still around,” Kathleen does not hear tenderness toward the elderly but the rustle of tape recorders and tenure files. Her jaw firms; her reply, “This isn’t a museum, dear,” arrives draped in a polite smile that feels, to Lydia, oddly sharp. Later, when Miriam, eyes down, voice careful, offers to inquire whether her grandfather’s foundation might have emergency funds, Kathleen’s “That’s very kind of you” is neatly packaged with, “Outside boards don’t always understand our…distinctives.” The pause around the word does more work than her gratitude ever could.
Passing remarks take on darker shading. Darren’s offhand query about whether the fellowship hall could be “opened up a bit” for community meals arrives to her ear as a trial balloon for renovations with the cross politely removed. Miriam’s notion of a modest online giving page acquires, in transit, the sheen of a branded platform. Each contribution slips obediently into its assigned drawer (case study, PR piece, development foothold) until their very concern for the church feels like the first act of its conversion into somebody else’s project.
She never names names; she merely lifts her brows, lowers her voice, and remarks, “One must ask who’s really calling the shots,” while refilling someone’s Styrofoam cup. On the ridge path she observes that city boards “like a local face for their ventures,” and that “paperwork travels further than promises.” By Tuesday, offers arrive already shadowed, every suggestion half-heard as a maneuver.
The fellowship hall had emptied in its usual untidy fashion: half-drunk Styrofoam cups listing beside crumpled napkins, a smear of potato salad congealing on the edge of the serving table. The air still held the thick, sour-sweet of potluck beans and overboiled coffee. Fluorescents hummed; the soda machine clicked in its sleep.
Wesley was at the sink with his sleeves rolled, rinsing out the big metal pans in water that never quite ran hot. His movements had that slow, efficient economy of a man who had done the same tasks so often his body no longer consulted his mind. He was counting trash bags, noting a loose tile near the refrigerator, and half-listening for the sound of the old compressor that sometimes cut out.
“Wesley?” Miriam’s voice came from behind him, careful as a knock on a half-open door.
He straightened a little too fast, wiped his hands on a thin dish towel, and turned. She stood near the end of the serving table, arms folded around a yellow legal pad like a shield, her nice boots at odds with the stickiness of the linoleum. Everyone else had drifted out into the gravel and the dusk; it was just the two of them and the lingering smell of onions.
“I didn’t mean to keep you,” she began, offering a small, apologetic smile. “I know you’ve got a million things.”
“Just finishin’ up,” he said. “Ain’t nothin’.”
There was a beat in which she might have retreated. Instead, she took a few steps closer, lowering her voice as though the folding chairs might object.
“I just…” She glanced down at her notes, then back up. “I want to make sure we protect whatever you want protected: your role, the way things run here. If my granddad’s foundation or anybody else gets involved, it should be on your terms. The church’s terms.”
He heard very little beyond the words protect and role, each one acquiring, in his ear, the cool, laminated feel of paperwork. Foundation came next, he did not miss that, and with it a faint vision of men in sport coats walking the sanctuary with clipboards, asking about “usage” and “liability exposure.” It was not that she had said these things; but words, once introduced, will often bring their entire family along.
His jaw tightened. The fluorescent light picked out the chalky crescents under his eyes, the faint sheen of dishwater on his hands.
“I ain’t worried about me,” he said, too quickly. “Church’ll be all right. We got our ways.”
“I just don’t want anybody pushing you out or…changing things around you,” she tried again, feeling the sentence wobble. “You’ve held this place together. People should, well, recognize that.”
Her sincerity, which might have comforted on another day, only made the imagined board meeting more vivid: a tidy line item labeled Facilities Manager, subject to review. His role. His terms. As though what he did here could be written into a grant narrative and thus out of his hands.
He gave a short, noncommittal nod that landed somewhere south of polite. “Appreciate you thinkin’ on it,” he said, the words almost indistinguishable from dismissal. “I’ll keep things…like they need keepin’.”
The set of his shoulders had become impenetrable. To her, the tightness around his mouth read as hurt pride at being discussed as part of a “plan.” The way his gaze slid past her to the mop bucket suggested she had overstepped some invisible line between helping and meddling.
“Okay,” she murmured, backing a step. “I don’t want to interfere. Just. If you ever do want…backup, I’m around.”
“Mm,” he said, already turning back to the sink.
When the back door banged softly behind her, he exhaled a breath he had not meant to hold, and told himself he was right to be wary. She, walking out into the gravel and the cool air, hugged her legal pad closer and told herself she had, as usual, asked for too much.
By Thursday the rain had settled in for a proper stay, drumming a steady impatience on the fellowship hall roof. Kathleen had come by with a covered dish for Wesley’s mother and, incidentally, the small stack of envelopes she had noticed migrating from the church mailbox to the top of his tool chest.
Wesley was at the folding table under the bulletin board, shoulders bowed, a scattering of invoices and pink notices spread before him like a losing hand. The fluorescent above him flickered with a faint, accusing buzz.
“You look worn to a spindle,” she observed, setting the casserole down. “Why don’t we sit a spell and look over those bills together, hm? Two heads and all that.”
He did not quite meet her eye. His thumb slid a folded pharmacy receipt halfway under the electric bill before tucking the whole thing into his back pocket.
“I’ll handle what needs handlin’, Miss Kathleen,” he said, the words clipped at the edges.
It was the little flinch on handle, the practiced motion of paper disappearing, that fixed her impression. This was not simple male pride about his domain; this was, to her mind, the sheepish efficiency of a man accustomed to moving figures from one column to another without witnesses. She smiled, lightly, as though rebuked for mother-henning, and in the same moment adjusted an internal ledger: helpful, indispensable, yes. But not, perhaps, a person to be entrusted with any more authority over the church’s accounts than he already possessed.
It was, unfortunately, Lydia who chose the moment to be conscientious. The rain had paused just long enough to turn the gravel lot into a glistening, treacherous mirror; Darren was coming off the ladder, shoulders damp, tool belt clinking, when she intercepted him near his truck.
“I want you to know,” she began, breath a little short from hurrying, “I have absolutely no interest in flattening the complexity of what people like you have lived through just to make a cleaner chapter.”
Her tone meant to confer dignity; her words performed an autopsy.
Darren heard very little beyond people like you and chapter. His jaw set. By the time she added, “for the book,” he had already decided she’d written him up as a tragic blue-collar exhibit and was merely gathering confirming details.
By Sunday, the versions had settled into something like fact, repeated with the assurance of those who had not been present. Kathleen, watching faces tighten and shoulders angle away, felt the room partition itself into wary little nations. No one quite lied; they merely selected, arranged, and omitted. Explanation became suspect, sincerity theatrical. Silence, for the moment, passed as prudence.
From the reader’s vantage, the shared blindness might have been almost comical if the stakes were not so plain. Wesley, in the dim fellowship hall, counted overdue notices and prayed for any lifeline; Miriam, at her borrowed kitchen table, drafted and redrafted an email about a modest, strings-light grant; Lydia, in a rental thick with book boxes, deleted a chapter that rang too smug; Darren, in his truck outside Colby’s, ran quiet numbers on whether the building could earn its keep as anything but a church. Each, in their narrow lane, groped toward preservation, yet every attempt to shield the others from worry only nudged Pine Hollow a little nearer the edge.
After one Sunday business meeting dissolves into a familiar fog of “tightening belts” and “trusting the Lord’s timing,” Kathleen sits very still in her usual pew halfway down the aisle, hands folded on her pocketbook as if she had nowhere particular to be. It is an attitude that has never yet failed her. When the pastor says the closing prayer and the scatter of bodies begins, she rises with careful unhurriedness, adjusting her blouse, and lets her gaze travel. Not searching, merely alighting.
She does not beckon. She considers beckoning vulgar. Instead, she lifts her chin a degree when Mrs. Henson glances her way, offers the retiring deacon, Earl McGraw, the hint of a smile as he fumbles his Sunday bulletin into his jacket, and allows her eyes to rest a heartbeat longer on two other women who, in her experience, have never yet met a casserole roster they did not complete. It is quite enough. By the time the teenagers have thundered out and the last of the polite lingerers have drifted toward the fellowship hall, her little constellation has rearranged itself to the back pew as naturally as if the Holy Spirit had drawn them.
They sit, not exactly conspiratorial, Kathleen would never tolerate the word, but decidedly apart. Voices are pitched low in that peculiar register that insists it is not whispering. Mrs. Henson remarks that if anyone thinks the power company accepts “thoughts and prayers” in lieu of payment, they are welcome to test the theory on their own house first. Earl, with a dry cough, observes that “some folks vote for new carpet like we’re running a megachurch.” The others nod, pleased to discover themselves aligned on the subject of reality.
Kathleen does not say much at first. She allows them their indignations, notes who speaks of “we” and who of “they,” and files each phrase away. When the talk turns, as it must, to “how things really are” and who will still be here “when choices get hard,” she offers only a small, composed sentence here and there, just enough to tilt the conversation. No one uses the word “committee.” They are, after all, merely concerned members, sitting in the Lord’s house after a meeting that had failed to meet anything at all. The fact that, as they rise at last, each has the faint, braced look of having accepted a private commission is, to Kathleen’s mind, only a sign of their good sense.
In the ensuing weeks, that loose knot hardens into habit. Without anyone having proposed it, they discover themselves orbiting the same back-corner territory after every service, paper cups of weak coffee warming their fingers, pocketbooks nudged up against the hymnals. Envelopes emerge, some church stationary repurposed, some old utility bills pressed into second life, along with folded notebook pages, corners softened from being opened and re-opened in private kitchens.
Numbers are not so much spoken as exhaled. “If we did two Saturdays instead of one…” “Last year’s auction brought in near three hundred…” “Light bill was what, in August?” They run fingers down imaginary columns on their laps, subtracting propane deliveries and adding in hypothetical blueberry pies. Quilt raffles, gun raffles (reluctantly), chicken-and-dumpling suppers, car washes “if we can get the young folks to hold a hose”: each idea is placed on the table, turned, and weighed like a questionable melon.
Someone, usually Mrs. Henson but occasionally Earl when he is feeling particularly Presbyterian, will murmur about “protecting what’s ours” in a tone of mild martyrdom. Within earshot, bulletin-straighteners and hymnbook-reshelvers go momentarily still, backs angling toward the sound while faces arrange themselves into studied blankness. By the time they resume their puttering, the phrase “what’s ours” has stretched to cover not only the light bill, but the right to decide how it is paid.
When Wesley approaches, it is never as a man summoned to council, only as the caretaker materializing in his proper orbit. He comes with a rag already in his back pocket, a smear of caulk on his wrist, or fresh mud worrying the cuffs of his jeans from some fix out back. Kathleen, or whichever of the core is nearest, lifts her face to him with unfeigned warmth. They ask, very particularly, about the leak over the choir loft or the furnace filter schedule; they listen with grave attention as he sketches what is sagging, rusting, or about to fail.
Then comes the practiced turn. “We’ll take it from here, dear,” someone says, kind as a nurse easing away a chart, and the manila folder with the actual budget figures remains closed on the pew between them, its brass fastener resting beneath Kathleen’s lightly folded hand. Wesley, thanked and already half-turned toward the mop closet, is left with the sense of having reported up the chain, without ever having seen the chain itself.
The small exclusions accumulate like dust in the hymnbook racks. Younger congregants who venture up with talk of concerts or online campaigns find the subject turned, with gracious speed, to casseroles and nursery duty. Miriam’s tentative query about “outside grants” earns her a kindly smile and a remark on dangerous “strings attached.” Even Wesley, stooping to gather abandoned cups, notes how ledgers vanish beneath purses and bulletins the instant his shadow falls across the pew, though no one ever utters the indecency of saying he is not to be trusted.
In whispered kitchen conferences and phone calls that begin with “just checking on you, honey,” the phrases harden like cooled gravy. They are now “the ones kept this place afloat through worse than this,” set against “folks blow in here with plans.” No one is “against change” (perish the thought) they are merely against “losing what makes us us.” It is a distinction so fine that, in practice, every notion arriving from outside their quiet orbit is received as foreign, provisional, and faintly dangerous until one of their own repeats it in safer wording a week later.
Most days they began with something small and concrete. Fluorescent tubes hummed above, making the linoleum look more tired than it already was.
Lydia talked about consent forms and interview protocols; she used the word “positionality” once and immediately apologized for it, scribbling it out. Miriam nodded, fingers hovering over the keys, trying to render Lydia’s careful clauses into sentences that might pass unremarked in a Langley family inbox. “We want to honor existing community narratives,” Lydia would say, and Miriam would type, “We hope to support local families in sharing their stories.”
Kathleen, passing through on some errand of dish towels or committee rosters, took them in with a single, practiced glance: the laptop, the legal pad, the earnest forward lean of two women quite sure that paperwork was the key to reality. She did not interrupt; she never did. It was not in her nature to disturb people while they were busy constructing castles on paper. Instead she adjusted the thermostat, gathered two abandoned dessert plates from the next table, and allowed herself one small inward sigh.
Lydia’s pen tapped against the pad. “We’ll start with folks who want to talk,” she was saying, “open sign-ups, nothing forced.” Miriam dutifully typed “voluntary” and “nonintrusive,” then paused. “Do you think,” she asked, half to Lydia and half to the humming lights, “that people will actually come?”
“Oh, they’ll come,” Kathleen thought, stacking the plates. “Everybody in this hollow wants to be heard. They just don’t much care to be studied.” But aloud she only remarked, in passing, that Mrs. Lawson had boxes of photographs if anybody thought to ask her proper, and went on toward the kitchen, leaving their phrases to multiply in her wake.
As the sun tilts down behind the cemetery hill and the colors from the stained glass slide, slow and ecclesiastical, across their table, Lydia’s ideas begin to shed any pretense of modesty. What started life, in her first notes, as “one locking filing cabinet” swells into “a properly climate‑controlled digital repository”: she even brackets “eventual server space?” in the margin, then guiltily draws a line through it. A single corner display case, once imagined for yellowing revival flyers, becomes, in three quick rectangles, a rotation of “curated exhibits” that might “draw in school groups from Beckley, maybe even regional interest, if we did this right.”
Her pen darts, connecting boxes labeled “Church,” “Community,” and “University” with ambitious arrows. Under her breath she tries out “collaborative knowledge production,” hears how it would land in the fellowship hall, and blacks out “production” until only the safer “shared knowledge” survives.
Beside her, Miriam, less given to arrows, lists in looping script: “cozy reading area,” “story nights,” “summer youth media lab,” and, more tentatively, “visiting artists (small, local).” Where Lydia reaches outward, Miriam keeps adding cushions and lamps, as if the grand design might be smuggled in under the heading of comfort.
Whenever the scope swells past what could be said with a straight face at a business meeting, one of them tugs it back with a phrase they have begun to use like a talisman. Lydia underlines “supporting existing ministries, not replacing them” three times, as though the paper might later be produced as evidence in her defense. Miriam, sensitive to the way “center” and “programming” will clang in certain ears, proposes “Heritage Room” for all official purposes, promising it would “barely be noticeable during regular services. Honestly, Kathleen probably wouldn’t even. Wouldn’t feel crowded.” Together they rehearse, with the earnestness of children planning an alibi: “just a side room,” “no changes to worship,” “church‑led, not some outside takeover, we swear.”
The more they talk, though, the more the proposal tilts from preservation toward transformation. Lydia lays out a sample schedule on a yellow sticky and pins it beside a crude floor plan of the church. Miriam, thinking in budgets and deliverables, adds neat columns for “Grant Funds,” “Matching In‑Kind Labor,” and “Potential Langley Foundation Support,” her headings marching straight through the sanctuary. In their sketch, Sunday service occupies a corner box while “programming” fans out through weekdays and seasons, the quiet add‑on quietly assuming the center of gravity.
By the time they pack up each evening, they’ve persuaded themselves it’s still modest, practically invisible. Lydia slips away pages littered with “anchor institution,” “regional draw,” “creative economy pipeline,” assuring herself such phrases are merely bait for distant reviewers who will never set foot in the hollow. Miriam, meanwhile, saves a draft that dares to describe the church as “an ideal hub for integrated cultural and spiritual life, fostering intergenerational engagement.” She stares at the sentence until her cheeks heat, then obediently highlights “hub” and “integrated,” replacing them with “welcoming” and “supportive” before any attachment goes out. Passing the darkened sanctuary, both women lower their voices without thinking, repeating that it’s all “nonintrusive, respectful, church‑led”: even as the neat little boxes in their diagrams quietly relocate Pine Hollow Baptist from being simply a place of worship to the hollow’s unofficial cultural center, with Sunday service occupying only one square in a much larger grid.
The confusion begins, for Kathleen at least, not with some thunderclap revelation but with a small act of housekeeping.
Wesley has left the copy room door ajar again. She notices it in passing, as she straightens hymnals and rights a stack of plastic cups someone has seen fit to balance on the edge of the sink. The fluorescent light inside hums like an irritated wasp. She considers shutting it off, electricity is not free, and she has been mentioning that for years, but the little whine of the machine draws her in.
On the table beside the copier lies a sheaf of paper, skewed as if someone had been interrupted mid-sort. The top page bears Lydia’s brisk, confident bullets: “programmatic uses beyond Sunday worship,” “rotating interpretive displays,” “pilot nonprofit tenancy scenarios.” The language has that glossy feel she associates with universities and grant panels, phrases that roll easily off tongues that do not have to live with the results.
She turns the page and finds, to her surprise, Darren’s handwriting beneath: block letters marching down a yellow estimate sheet: “Phase II: convert annex to flexible community space,” “demo interior non‑load‑bearing,” “potential rental units (TBD).” The words sit uneasily beside Lydia’s tidy abstractions, like two different conversations stapled together by some absentminded clerk.
For a moment she tells herself it is nothing. People write things. Young people, especially, enjoy drawing boxes on paper and calling it vision. Yet as her eye catches “beyond Sunday worship” and then, in Darren’s scrawl, “tenancy,” a small coldness settles at the base of her neck.
Wesley’s name is there too, half‑legible in a margin note. That is something. Still, she cannot quite picture him saying “programmatic uses” with a straight face.
She slides the packet into the back of the church directory, where loose minutes and outdated prayer lists already live, telling herself she will bring it up in due course. “What exactly do y’all mean by all this?” is, she decides, a reasonable question for a woman merely trying to keep her church from turning into some sort of exhibit.
It is later, in the fellowship hall, that the paper on the piano appears to her not as clutter but as an offense.
The planning group has dispersed in a pleasant little flurry of folding chairs and half‑finished coffee, their “brainstorm” still hanging in the air like the steam off the crock‑pot. Kathleen lingers, as she always does, to restore the room to something resembling decency. She stacks Styrofoam cups, caps the sugar canister, and nudges a hymnbook back into line on the rack of the battered upright.
That is when she sees it: one sheet, abandoned where the soprano section’s music would normally rest. No church logo, no familiar committee header: just a bold, self‑confident phrase halfway down the page: “Adaptive Reuse: Reimagining Sacred Spaces as Multi‑Purpose Heritage Sites.”
The very typography feels smug. She reads “reimagining” as “forgetting,” “multi‑purpose” as “anything but worship.” The surrounding sentences blur into a tasteful gray fog of “visitor experience” and “interpretive potential.” There is a tiny asterisk at the bottom, some reference to a project in another county, but she does not bother with it. What lodges is the sense that Pine Hollow Baptist has been quietly entered in a contest it never agreed to join.
Her jaw sets. The piano lid comes down with a measured, final little thud. She folds the page once, twice, neat as a discharge summary, and slips it into her purse beside her checkbook and pill organizer.
If certain parties wish to discuss “heritage sites,” they may do so. But first, she thinks, there will be a brief, kindly word at the next meeting about remembering what this building is actually for. As delivered, of course, by someone who has scrubbed its floors.
In a rented room above the old hardware store, with the creek noise just loud enough to feel like privacy, Miriam worries another email into submission. On her screen, “significant leverage point for rural cultural investment” shrinks to “meaningful opportunity to support an existing community anchor.” She winces at herself and adds “if appropriate” twice, then deletes one. The line about “possible acquisition structures to guarantee long‑term stability” makes her stomach tighten; she leaves it as a question, a timid, blinking thing at the paragraph’s end.
Hours and counties away, under recessed lighting, her grandfather’s foundation advisor skims until that phrase catches his eye. “Underutilized rural property with historical value,” he types into a note, and, thinking of pipelines and precedents, forwards Miriam’s email to a real‑estate colleague who loves the words “mission‑aligned” and “pilot site.”
In the fellowship hall, where the coffee smell still clung to the cinderblock, Darren spread his spiral notebook between a plate of stale cookies and the church’s chipped saltshaker, tapping the neat columns of numbers for Wesley’s benefit.
“Look, you don’t need any big outside savior,” he said, voice low but assured. “We do the roof and structural now, worry about cosmetic and ‘community center’ stuff later, right? I can float my labor till y’all get your ducks in a row.”
From the doorway, unseen, Kathleen took in the two bent heads, the casual authority in Darren’s tone, the way Wesley’s tired hand rested on the page as if already signing something away. To her ear, “float my labor” rhymed too neatly with those other phrases and she felt, with that same small coldness at the base of her neck, that while her people talked of sweat and discount lumber, some other, polished conversation about their church was already well underway elsewhere.
In the weeks that followed, no one quite said what they meant, which suited some temperaments better than others. Wesley, hearing scraps of “leverage” and “heritage,” backed further into his vague talk of “just keeping the lights on.” Kathleen, with a small, glittering smile, began to remark, always lightly, always twice removed, on “when they turn us into a museum, dear,” as if rehearsing disbelief before it became necessary. Miriam, catching the fractional chill in certain older women’s greetings, sanded every mention of “project” down to “little idea,” a softening that, in turn, made distant foundation staff read her as strategically coy. Darren, told at Colby’s counter that “the Langleys might be fixing to buy the whole hill,” only grew more insistent that his phased‑repair plan was the plain, local‑sense answer. By the time this tangle had passed through three potlucks and a funeral luncheon, it had become impossible to say who aimed to save Pine Hollow Baptist and who, precisely, was suspected of selling it off, except that almost everyone was quietly sure it was someone else.
Kathleen, who had not meant to hear so clearly, found her attention wandering back to the coffee urn at just the moment Wesley’s name was spoken. He stood with his shoulders bowed slightly toward the sink, rinsing Styrofoam cups with a diligence that would have befitted crystal. Each cup received the same brief, efficient scouring, as if he might rub out not only the lipstick rims but the conversation behind him.
“Wesley, what you think of all these new plans?” called Mrs. Ledbetter, in the tone of one offering a man an opinion he could later be held to.
He did not turn. “Oh, I just try to keep the roof dry,” he said, half‑laughing, half‑coughing, the words flowing out with the dishwater. “Y’all can do the big picture.”
The table nearest him chuckled, relieved to have been given permission to take their own view more seriously than his. Kathleen saw the way his hand tightened briefly around a cup before dropping it into the rack, knuckles whitening, then smoothing again as he reached for the next.
“Now, Wesley, you sell yourself short,” murmured another woman. A kindness issued, Kathleen thought, at precisely the distance required not to endanger the speaker’s place on any future committee. He nodded without looking up, the small, automatic bow of a man accustomed to accepting praise like he accepted criticism: as something to be outlasted.
The laughter from the hallway rolled in again, bright and overlapping. Wesley’s mouth bent in a shadow of a smile timed to it, though he could not possibly have heard the joke’s content over the faucet’s hiss. Kathleen noted, with a familiar mix of irritation and fondness, that for all his talk of “just the roof,” he had already stacked the rinsed cups by size, wiped the counter twice, and nudged the trash can closer to where people would stand. It was, she reflected, a very particular kind of powerlessness that reordered a world by half inches and paper goods while other people arranged its future in sentences.
By the time the remark completed its customary circuit, from Lydia’s mouth to Darren’s ear to Colby’s counter and back again, it had shed all nuance and picked up several useful barbs. “Professor Gentrify” became, somewhere between the canned-goods aisle and the post office steps, “he called her a city colonizer right to her face.” Lydia’s own chirpy defense of “archiving stories” was compressed into “she said folks here don’t even know the lingo,” which, while not an exact quotation, had the advantage of being far more entertaining.
Thus revised, the tale arrived at Wednesday night Bible study, where it was chewed over with the green beans and underlined verses. In the women’s circle, gray heads bent over Corinthians, tongues clicking softly.
“Well, I don’t know what all that means,” Mrs. Ledbetter pronounced, “but it don’t sound respectful.”
“It’s that college talk,” another supplied, satisfied to have named the contagion.
Across the table, a younger mother half‑hid a grin behind her Styrofoam cup. “Honestly,” she said, feigning apology, “sounds like they’re just talking how people do online now.” In that small, smiling aside, she placed herself, without quite daring to say so, closer to the sharp, speedy world of quips than to the softly disapproving circle in which she sat.
At the next committee meeting, when the talk had lapped three or four times around “opportunities” and “branding,” Kathleen let her voice fall almost lazily into the pause.
“Some of us were here before buzzwords,” she observed, smiling at the table rather than at any particular person.
It was meant as a feather; it landed like cutlery. The room went courteously still. Lydia’s pen, already in her hand, lifted a fraction higher.
“That’s precisely why your stories deserve archiving,” she replied, tone bright enough to sting, the pen now hovering over her notebook like a microphone.
A few members exchanged quick, side‑eye glances, mouths twitching but not quite daring to laugh. Wesley, in his folding chair by the wall, head bowed over the legal pad, wrote down only, “discussion of history project.” His pen skipped once: he noticed it, no one else did. The silence between the phrases refused to fit in the margin, but he felt it anyway, a pressure change in the room, like weather rolling in behind closed windows.
By midweek, the exchange has been retold enough times to harden into shorthand: “Lydia with her fancy phrases” set neatly against “Kathleen and her old‑time ways.” At Colby’s General & Feed, Brent chuckles as customers recap the spat, seasoning it with his own line about “college folks always wanting to pin you in a glass case like a bug.” Each repetition trims context, sharpens insult, and quietly enrolls the speaker on one side of a quarrel that, in its original form, had barely been born.
By the time the choir has stacked their folders and the crock‑pots have been uncovered, those accumulated stories have quietly rearranged the room. Lydia discovers herself drifted, as if by tide, to a table of college‑age congregants and a few curious teens; her older aunts, aprons neatly tied, are suddenly indispensable in the kitchen. Their smiles reach her, their chairs do not.
Darren, meanwhile, is met in the doorway with hearty backslaps and a chorus of, “So, big man, when you bringing in that city money?” The laughter has teeth; the admiration comes pre‑packaged with a warning label. Somewhere between jest and jurisdiction, a line is being drawn.
From her seat by the serving window, Kathleen watches the subtle clustering with a cool, assessing gaze. It is not merely temperaments sorting themselves, she sees, but proposed futures: one table talking grants and podcasts, another talking bake sales and repair rosters. The hollow, without quite meaning to, is beginning to vote with its folding chairs.
In the fellowship hall after service, the coffee table had somehow migrated three feet toward the door and acquired, without anyone quite authorizing it, a small congregation of its own. A loose knot of teenagers and twenty‑somethings hemmed Darren in at the urn, their paper cups sloshing dangerously close to the edge as they leaned in.
“So how hard’d it really be,” one of the boys demanded, “to run some cords up the ridge? Like for real, not just talk.”
“Could you do it without the county pitchin’ a fit?” another chimed in. “My mama says they’re watchin’ everything now on account of that brush fire.”
Darren planted one hand on the table to steady the encroaching tide of youth and amusement, and with the other, commandeered a stack of napkins.
“You don’t start with ‘stealin’ anything,” he said, though his grin made nonsense of the reprimand. “You start with not burnin’ the church down. After that, it’s just voltage and common sense.”
He sketched a crude outline of the ridge, the church boxy at the bottom, little x’s for imagined speakers. A girl in a faded band T‑shirt leaned in so close her hair brushed his forearm.
“But could you, like, bounce Wi‑Fi up there?” she persisted. “Mama’s got one of them hot spots from town; what if you had a big ol’ antenna? Like that thing on top of the Dollar General.”
“Lord, listen at you,” someone muttered in delighted scandal. “Pine Hollow Live, comin’ to you from the graveyard.”
There was a ripple of laughter. Even the word “graveyard” came out half‑thrilled, half‑daring providence to object.
Darren let their energy wash over him, the questions tumbling faster than he could answer: about generators and permits, about “getting a soundboard like they got at First Baptist,” about whether he knew anybody with “connections” to bands that might actually come.
“Y’all think I been buildin’ nightclubs out there on I‑40,” he said, but he did not step back. The warmth of their attention was rarer than he cared to admit. Out on the road, a man with his tools was hired help or, at best, a subcontractor. Here, for the span of a few napkins, he was a man with a plan.
Kathleen, from her post by the serving window, noted the little island forming around him: youth, caffeine, and a sketched‑in future all clustered where the percolator had once been a purely domestic altar. She saw too how easily his laugh, easy and slightly dangerous, filled the space where older voices might once have counseled caution.
At the center of it, Darren bent his head over the flimsy paper, drawing arrows and boxes, giving shape to a thing that, so far, cost them nothing but imagination. The napkin buckled under his pen, but nobody seemed to mind.
Wesley paused just inside the fellowship‑hall doorway, toolbox knocking against his knee where he’d misjudged the step. From there he had a clear view of the makeshift planning session at the coffee table: Darren’s bent head, the kids’ bright, upturned faces, the flutter of napkins like a little storm.
A part of him, small and stubborn, warmed to see anybody that worked up over the place. For years, “fixing things up” had meant him alone under the crawlspace with a flashlight whose batteries he could not quite afford. If they wanted to dream about wires and speakers instead of leaks and mildew, well, maybe that was something.
But each time the talk turned practical their eyes slid past him the way you look past a coat rack. Darren became “the man knows what he’s doing,” and Wesley the scenery.
“Wes, you’d be the man to wire it, huh?” someone called across, almost as an afterthought tossed over a shoulder.
He shifted the toolbox and tried on a smile.
“Code’s changed a lot. Costs money for permits, inspection. And breakers ain’t cheap,” he said, voice thinning at the edges.
If any of them heard the word “permit,” it dissolved under Darren’s next easy story about rewiring a bar in Knoxville. The kids laughed, bodies angling back toward the storyteller, and Wesley’s own words seemed to fall straight down to the scuffed linoleum at his feet.
He stood a moment longer, feeling the familiar mix of relief and ache that came when a job passed him by: lighter in the hands, heavier in the chest. Then he turned toward the back hall, where the mop closet door still stuck in winter and a toilet in the men’s room ran just enough to matter to the next water bill.
On the far side of the room, Miriam sat at a folding table with a paper plate of cooling casserole, briefly encircled by a halo of courteous questions about her “ideas for the church.” For a moment she was a novelty; then the mood sharpened.
“So,” said one deacon’s wife, leaning in with a brightness that did not quite reach her eyes, “your granddaddy’s foundation gonna actually sign on the dotted line, or just pat us on the head and send a brochure?”
There was a ripple of knowing laughter, thin and expectant. Faces turned to Miriam as if to a spigot.
She felt heat climb her neck. Words about “application processes,” “boards,” and “no guarantees” tangled on her tongue. With every sentence, she felt herself reduced. Not a person at a church supper, but a possible conduit, or a disappointing blockage, for money she did not own and could not promise.
Lydia’s voice took on that brisk, lecturing cadence Wesley remembered from her high‑school valedictory, all “deliverables” and “stakeholder engagement.” The jargon impressed precisely half her audience and alarmed the rest. Kathleen, tray balanced, caught the phrase “pilot program in the fellowship hall” and saw, with a small inward chill, three teenagers swivel on their chairs, eyes bright, as if a syllabus outranked a signup sheet.
By late afternoon, she had contrived a “little chat” in the church office. Just herself, two deacons, and Mrs. Jimison with her spiral notebook. Where repaired gutters and a pie‑auction calendar could be considered in peace. They were halfway through penciling dates when Earl Lawson, who never wasted a silence, remarked, almost pleasantly, “Well, maybe we oughta see what Lydia and that grant talk turns up first, hadn’t we?”
The sentence lay on the desk between them like a fine crack in old plaster: not much to look at, but you knew what it meant for the ceiling. Kathleen’s smile did not so much tighten as hold, the way you held a bandage while the tape was fetched.
“Of course,” she said. “Only, y’all recall the furnace never saw a grant application. It saw cookie dough, and the ladies out freezin’ in that Food Lion parking lot, and Wesley haulin’ tables at five in the mornin’.”
There were nods, dutiful as amens at the end of a prayer, but she could feel the air lean elsewhere, toward words like “cycle” and “proposal” and “foundation,” which sounded, in that cramped office, like magic spells spoken in some higher tongue. The men’s eyes flicked not to her neatly ruled list of repair needs, but to the vague middle distance in which a check might or might not appear.
When the meeting broke, she walked home the long way, past the gravel lot where Miriam’s little import sat beside Darren’s broad‑shouldered truck like a visiting college girl on the arm of a rough cousin. Both vehicles were empty now, but it was their absence that stung: conversations already carried on in other rooms, to which she had not been summoned.
For the first time in years, she felt the familiar assurance of her “tried‑and‑true” work (bake sales, quilt raffles, rummage tables sorted by her own hand) set not against indifference, which she knew how to manage, but against something far worse in a hollow: novelty. Shiny, risky promises with PowerPoint words attached.
She adjusted the strap of her handbag on her shoulder, back straightening against the little dart of indignation.
“Well,” she told the quiet road, “we shall see what lasts longer. Yard‑sale money or talk.”
By the next Wednesday night, Colby’s General & Feed might as well have been stamped in red on every cardboard box that crossed the church threshold. Brent arrived ten minutes before prayer meeting, reversing his spotless pickup to the fellowship‑hall door with the practiced ease of a man who liked his entrances witnessed.
“Got y’all a little somethin’,” he called, voice pitched just loud enough to carry into the sanctuary where the early‑arrivers rustled bulletins. He hefted a case of off‑brand disinfectant like it were gold bullion. “Don’t you worry now. Church comes first.”
He said it to Wesley, but also to the two deacons hovering by the coffee urn, to Mrs. Jimison straightening the sign‑up sheet, and, by echo, to whoever might repeat it later over supper. His hand landed companionably on Wesley’s shoulder, steering him toward the tailgate.
“Reckon y’all been needin’ some fresh mops, huh? And look here, rollers, trays. Figure once that big money lands, you’ll be glad we’re ahead of the game.”
Wesley murmured thanks, already wondering where to stack the surplus in the overfull supply closet. One of the deacons said, “That’s real good of you, Brent,” in the tone reserved for public prayer requests and obvious self‑advertisement. Brent only smiled, a man embarrassed by his own generosity, and made sure to leave the tailgate down a moment longer than necessary so folks could see the branded boxes.
Much later, after the sanctuary lights were off and the last “night now” had faded from the gravel lot, Brent sat alone in his cramped office at the back of the store. The fluorescent hum was harsher here; the air smelled of fertilizer and stale coffee. He pushed aside a stack of unpaid invoices and woke up his computer, waiting for the ancient browser to sputter into life.
He did not open his own supplier’s portal first. Instead, he navigated to a discount wholesaler two counties over, the sort of place he loudly derided when customers mentioned “cheaper in town.”
“Traitors,” he liked to joke at the counter, hand over his heart. “You buy local or you’ll miss me when I’m gone.”
Now he clicked through their online catalog, squinting at unit prices, comparing gallon to gallon, dozen to dozen. A church‑ready blue latex, three dollars cheaper than his usual. Bulk packs of ammonia in a brand that would never see the Colby’s shelves. Too ugly by half for the front of the store, but just fine once the label was peeled off and the box pitched.
He grunted under his breath as the subtotal crept up. Shipping. Sales tax. Credit‑card fee.
“Lord,” he muttered, half prayer, half curse, as he pulled his wallet from his back pocket. He hesitated a beat over the card, interest already nipping at the edge of his credit line, then typed the numbers in anyway. The church came first, or at least the story of the church coming first did, and stories had their own kind of interest.
While the confirmation page loaded, he took a pen and a yellow pad and began another calculation, the one that soothed him. Wholesale cost plus freight, plus a thin sliver for his trouble, ballooning gently into the “church tab” price that would appear, vague but respectable, when the treasurer next asked for an itemized statement.
“Bridge credit,” he said aloud, testing the phrase that had pleased him in conversation with Wesley. “Just till that foundation check hits.”
He could see it already: a neat line in the ledger under “Misc. Supplies,” nobody quite remembering whether this or that box had been outright gift or “blessed discount.” Gratitude blurred such distinctions marvelously.
On the screen, the order confirmation chimed. Brent leaned back, rocking his chair on two legs, and allowed himself a small, satisfied smile. Tomorrow he would arrive at the church with another load and another loud assurance that Colby’s was “frontin’ it all.” Tonight, the only witness to his sacrifice was the blinking cursor in the corner, waiting patiently for him to close the tab.
Kathleen did not, strictly speaking, “call a meeting.” She telephoned.
By four o’clock the next afternoon, Mrs. Jimison’s Buick and the Lawson brothers’ dusty sedan were angled in her drive, as inevitably as migration. In the kitchen, the good pound cake, baked in her oldest tube pan, the one that never failed, rested already sliced on her floral platter; the percolator burbled on the counter like an amen.
“I purely hate to trouble y’all,” she began, once everyone had a cup, which was her customary preface to troubling people. “Only, with all this…foundation talk floatin’ about, I’d feel better if we went into Sunday’s meetin’ with our heads together.”
No one objected to feeling better.
Between seconds and thirds of cake, the conversation walked itself, under gentle guidance, to a conclusion. Earl, she suggested, might be the one to “very reasonably” move that any “outside proposals” be tabled pending further prayer and discussion. His brother could second. Later, if asked, Kathleen would describe the afternoon as “just catchin’ up with old friends,” and mean it. As far as she was concerned.
On Tuesday evenings, when the building had emptied of fellowship and coffee odor, Kathleen liked to make a last, “just in case” circuit. Lights, doors, thermostats (things Wesley attended to as naturally as breathing) were, in her view, still improved by a second pair of eyes. That night, stepping into the fellowship hall, she saw his back first: shoulders slightly hunched, head bowed over the open supply cabinet as though in prayer.
She nearly spoke (some trifle about bleach fumes) then stopped. There was a small, intent stillness about him, the sort people had when they thought themselves unobserved. His hand disappeared into the petty‑cash drawer; a slip of paper was folded, laid with a care bordering on reverence among the paper clips. He closed the drawer, scrubbed a palm over his face, and turned away, not seeing her in the shadow by the coat rack.
Kathleen remained where she was until the outer door clicked behind him. Only then did she cross to the cabinet and, without opening anything, lay her fingertips on the metal handle as if taking its temperature. There would be, she decided, a more convenient hour to examine the state of the church’s small economies.
Those small evasions multiplied like ants in sugar. A deacon who denounced “beggin’ from strangers” of a Sunday drove to Beckley on Tuesday to ask his banker cousin, in a tone of idle curiosity, how liens on church property actually worked. A choir alto who extolled “old‑time ways” to Kathleen hemmed Lydia in by the coat rack, voice low, to inquire whether “one of them culture grants” might, strictly for the sake of outreach, stretch to proper matching robes. A young couple who, in Bible‑study discussion, praised Darren’s dream of concerts and Wi‑Fi slipped by Colby’s the next day to murmur that of course they were “with him” if it came to keeping the place strictly sanctuary. By week’s end, public loyalties and kitchen‑table hedges had parted company in nearly every household.
By the time flyers go up announcing a “special business meeting,” nearly everyone carries some private exception to their public principles. Brent polishes a speech on sacrificial giving while penciling future invoices in the margin of the bulletin. Kathleen, pen poised over her legal pad, drafts an agenda in which Miriam’s emails vanish as neatly as a stain under a doily. Wesley, locking cupboards with exaggerated care, manages not to look at the petty‑cash drawer at all, as if it were a person he had disappointed. Around them, half the congregation practices lines about “unity” and “trusting the Lord,” each mentally attaching an unspoken clause: provided my plan prevails. When the fellowship hall finally fills (metal chairs squealing, cheeks pink from heat and anticipation) the air is already crowded with these hairline fractures, invisible but load‑bearing, needing only a motion, a second, and two or three pointed questions to crack loud enough for everyone to hear.
The pastor’s “let’s start with a word of prayer” lands not so much upon a still congregation as upon a shifting, restless organism: side conversations knot and unknot, bulletins are folded into nervous fans, and the squeal of metal chair legs on linoleum drowns his first “Dear Lord.” Heads bow in uneven sequence, some only out of habit, others bent together in last-second whispering that masquerades as piety. One small child near the back announces, in a stage whisper that carries beautifully, that it’s hot. By the time the pastor reaches “in Jesus’ name, amen,” the room’s air has thickened with humidity, perfume, and the tart, metallic scent of anxious bodies; what little reverence there is hides behind damp collars and clenched jawlines.
Kathleen has always believed that hesitation invites confusion, so she is on her feet before most people finish lifting their chins, the legs of her chair scraping once, decisively. She smooths the edge of her clipped packet with the flat of her palm, papers aligned to an almost moral standard, and offers a “Thank you all for coming out this evening” in a tone more reminiscent of hospital roll call than of church-fellowship warmth. It is not, strictly speaking, gratitude; it is attendance taken aloud.
From her spot near the front, she can see everything she needs to see. The older pew families have settled together in clumps, their faces already armed with patient skepticism. The younger ones, those who come and go according to soccer schedules and second shifts, hover closer to the coffee urn and the exit. Miriam is further back than usual, beside Lydia, who holds a bulging folder like a shield. Darren leans against the far wall, arms crossed, the very picture of a visiting relative prepared to be unimpressed.
The pastor, damp at the temples and visibly relieved to have surrendered the floor, steps aside with the air of a man handing off a precarious tray. Kathleen draws a slow, measured breath that only slightly catches on the thickness of the air, and lifts her packet as though the neat stack itself could impose order.
She begins, as she always did on the ward, with the most critical systems. “The roof first,” she says, tapping the top page with one blunt fingernail. “Section by section, not some grand replacement we can’t afford. We stop the worst of the leaks before winter, then move to the wiring. Brought up to code as best we can without tearing out half the walls.” She does not glance toward the stained-glass windows when she says this, but several others do.
Murmurs settle. Numbers steady people, she has learned. “Cosmetics last,” she continues. “We repaint only where the plaster’s actually failing. Hallway first, nursery if we have enough left in the cans. No hired crews unless the law requires it. We organize workdays. We’ve done it before.”
Her hand, resting on the back of the nearest chair, tightens slightly on the next sentence. “And we keep the sanctuary just as it is,” she says. “This room is our testimony.”
That, at least, lands. The older families nod, reassured; someone near the back snorts something about not needing a coffee bar to talk to the Lord. The pastor, seizing the first island of agreement he’s seen all evening, steps forward with visible gratitude and asks if there are any questions, though Kathleen has not yet quite lowered herself back into her chair.
Lydia does not so much raise her hand as spring halfway to her feet, the legs of her chair catching on the linoleum with a protesting scrape. “Respectfully,” she begins, voice thinner than she’d like, “fixing what’s broken won’t fix why the pews are half empty.” The packet in her grip trembles; one sheet slides free and flutters to the floor, which several people notice and no one mentions. She talks too fast, racing herself. State humanities grants, partnerships with the university, author talks, oral history nights that would “bring in new faces and honor our stories instead of just preserving the wallpaper.” A few younger congregants lean forward. Across the aisle, a deacon’s wife murmurs to her neighbor that she doesn’t see how poetry readings are going to pay the electric bill. The word “grants” prompts an audible, skeptical “mm-hmm” from one of the older men near the coffee urn; someone else asks, not quite under their breath, who exactly decides which stories get “honored.” Lydia flushes, hearing every sideways comment and yet unable, now that she has started, to sit back down.
Lydia, halfway through explaining matching funds, falters when someone asks who will “babysit all that paperwork.” Before she can answer, a dry clearing of the throat rides over her syllables. Darren, shoulder flat to the cinderblock, observes that they are all dancing round the same bonfire. “We don’t have the people or the money to pretend this place ain’t changing,” he says, no heat in it, only fatigue. In broad, contractor’s strokes he sketches a building that works seven days a week: weekday daycare in the Sunday-school rooms, AA and NA meetings in the evenings, maybe a modest gym or workshop where the unused choir robes now molder; rent from outside groups helping cover heat and lights that do not flicker every time the refrigerator kicks on. The word “gym” makes one older man snort into his Styrofoam cup, but two young mothers by the door glance at each other, calculation and hope briefly outrunning propriety at the prospect of reliable childcare.
Within minutes, the fellowship hall resembles three separate meetings held at once. Up front, Kathleen’s circle of veterans and board members repeat words like “stewardship” and “continuity,” as if varnish were a sacrament. Around Lydia, a loose ring of teachers, teenagers, and the musically inclined argue sign-up sheets, sound equipment, and whether the fire marshal will faint. By the back door, Darren leans on the cinderblock, answering in weary detail about permits, liability, and how many days a week “community center” can mean without the tax man calling it a business. The arguments fray and tangle; “update” slides into “uproot,” “opportunity” into “outsider money.” The pastor’s small wooden gavel clicks twice, then a third time, lost beneath the roar just as Brent’s chair scrapes decisively backward.
Brent did not so much interrupt as ascend. He planted his broad hands on the back of his folding chair and levered himself up with the unhurried confidence of a man used to owning both his floor space and his customers’ time. He allowed the three arguments in progress to crash and overlap for one beat too long (like a radio left just off-station) before pitching his voice into the muddle with that practiced, genial drawl Pine Hollow had been hearing over bags of feed and church-supper hot dog buns for twenty years.
“Now, look here,” he said, aiming his smile in a generous arc that could have been mistaken for modesty by those not acquainted with him. “We can sit here and talk this thing to death, or we can put a hammer to a board.”
The phrase, pleasingly simple and manly, did immediate work. Several of the older men straightened, as if physically relieved to be invited back onto familiar ground: lumber and labor rather than “vision casting” and grant cycles. Brent tipped his chin toward the water-stained ceiling tile above the fellowship-hall serving window, the one that had sagged ever so slightly since the last hard rain.
“Colby’s General & Feed,” he announced, with the same cadence he used for “All fertilizer twenty percent off this week,” “will front whatever lumber, nails, and sealant y’all need to get started on basic repairs right now. This week. No need to wait on some committee three counties over to decide if we’re worth helping.”
The relief moved through the room in a soft, grateful rustle. Someone let out a low whistle; a woman in the back said “Well, bless the Lord,” and the pastor, catching the cue, echoed, “Amen, praise the Lord for willing hearts.” Wesley’s name traveled in murmurs and glances toward the maintenance corner, as though Brent had produced not merely merchandise on credit but air for Wesley’s lungs. Kathleen, who had spent the afternoon attempting to translate “prudence” into something like excitement, felt her ribs loosen around a long, careful breath she had not intended to hold. For one blessed instant, the meeting’s chaos narrowed itself to a single, concrete offer: wood, nails, sealant. Things that did not argue back.
Wesley’s hand went, almost of its own accord, to the bill of his cap, touching it in a small, automatic nod of thanks. The motion was so well-practiced it might have been a muscle twitch rather than a choice. Inside, though, the word front snagged like a fishhook. He heard it as ledger columns, as another penciled line on somebody else’s notepad with his name at the top, as one more quiet obligation breathing down his neck. Lumber today, explanation tomorrow. His stomach pulled tight, a familiar, sour knot forming under his ribs.
Kathleen did not permit that knot any public existence. She stepped into the opening with the smoothness of someone who had long since learned to take a man’s offer and translate it into a providence she could live with.
“Well, now, that is what I call stewardship,” she said, her voice lifting just enough to catch the wandering attention of three separate conversational clusters. “The Lord provides through willing hands and local hearts, not just wishful thinking on paper.”
A murmur of assent washed around Brent, and he stood in it, broad shoulders squared, as comfortably as if it were the warm air from his store’s heater in January. His chin tucked, just so, in a show of humility that did not deceive Kathleen for an instant. He was tallying every “thank you,” filing it alongside every sack of feed gone out on credit.
Even Darren, at his post by the back door, shifted his weight and gave a fractional dip of the head. He looked. Not impressed, exactly, but taking measure. To Kathleen’s eye, he was running mental lines from Brent’s promise to his own rough sketch on the cinderblock wall: whether this sudden generosity undercut his talk of a seven-day building or could be folded neatly inside it, two men’s plans sharing the same set of two-by-fours.
Brent let the room’s appreciation swell and ebb before he shifted his weight, softening his grin to something almost bashful. The slight rock back on his heels signaled, to those who knew him, that the second shoe was about to drop, and that he meant them to notice how gently he set it down.
“Now, I surely don’t mean to step on anybody’s toes,” he began, the disclaimer smoothed by years of use, “but I keep hearing a whole lot about grants and ‘cultural programming’ from outfits that don’t exactly shop at my store or sit in these pews.”
His gaze made a slow, innocent-seeming pass along the right-hand rows and paused, too casually, near Miriam before drifting back toward the pulpit.
“Just seems fair to ask,” he continued, tone warming with reasonableness, “how much of these big plans hangs on money from big-city foundations that might not understand how we live out here, day in, day out. ‘Cause once folks like that get their name on your sign, they generally like a say in what gets sung under it.”
The words hung there, then caught, like burrs on wool. Two of the older men in the amen corner nodded, one muttering that “outside money always comes with a leash,” while a grandmother drew her pocketbook tight against her middle as if a grant might reach in uninvited. Across the aisle, a ponytailed youth volunteer fired back, “Those ‘big-city’ scholarships are why half of us even got to college,” earning a sharp, mortified glare from her grandfather. Kathleen felt her face tighten; she shared more of Brent’s wariness than she cared to admit, but his choice to fling it into the center of the room as if it were common sense rather than tinder offended her sense of order. Beside the aisle, Lydia’s pen froze on her legal pad, every tendon in her ink-smudged hand tightening at the old, weary script of “outsider” and “insider” being hauled out once again, now weaponized with a smile and a store logo.
The name rose of its own accord, like a bad taste: Langley. It did not need speaking so much as it needed confirming. A woman near the back hissed about the factory Miriam’s grandfather had “restructured” into oblivion; a younger man shot back that the same name shone over the high school’s science wing. In an instant, doctrine yielded to genealogy and economics. Land swaps, shuttered shifts, Christmas baskets left on porches, and fat college checks were tossed together into one uneasy stew. Miriam’s cheeks burned; she half-lifted her hand to protest that the foundation was not hers to command. It made no difference. Brent had already tilted the table. The room was suddenly taking a vote, not only on whether the Langleys were saviors or scavengers, but on whether Miriam herself sat there as neighbor or as advance scout for a boardroom she had never entered.
From the back row, where the less-committed and more-critical generally roosted, a stocky man in an off-the-rack blazer began an undignified wrestling match with the pew and his own knees. Kathleen, who prided herself on knowing every branch and graft upon the hollow’s family tree, required a beat to place him: Langley by marriage, not by blood; more often seen in the comments section than in a choir loft. He braced one hand on the carved end of the pew, puffed, and rose, the effort reddening an already ruddy neck. A stapled packet shook in his other hand, staples glinting under the fluorescents like the teeth of some small, ill-tempered trap.
“Folks deserve to know,” he announced, louder than the room required, “what’s being said about us in offices up the road.”
The phrase “offices up the road” carried all the menace that “principal’s office” had held in childhood, and about as much precision. Kathleen saw three different women in the back-left quadrant stiffen simultaneously; one clutched her handbag, another her husband’s arm, the third her own throat. The man held his papers aloft as though he had just descended the mountain with them, and their thin, betraying flutter only sharpened the impression of revelation.
Miriam’s spine went very straight; that much Kathleen noticed from across the room. The girl’s knuckles tightened around the edge of her folding chair, the way one braces against turbulence. Lydia’s pen resumed moving. He was not, by any charitable measure, a practiced public reader. The first page slipped sideways; he fumbled it, caught it, then performed the little male ritual of clearing his throat twice for emphasis. When he finally bent to the text, he did so with the over-enunciated care of a man determined to prove he had, in fact, graduated high school.
“Subject,” he read, drawing out each syllable as if it might bolt, “‘Strategic acquisition of underutilized rural faith properties.’”
The word “acquisition” clanged through the rafters like the bell on a storm collar. Somewhere behind Kathleen, one of the amen-corner men muttered “Lord have mercy,” but whether as prayer or commentary, she could not say.
He pressed on, tripping only slightly over the next line: bullet points about “consolidating impact” and “rationalizing redundant sites.” Each phrase sounded to Kathleen less like English and more like surgery performed with a spreadsheet. Around her, the sanctuary seemed to gather those terms into its tired siding and bowed floorboards and reject them in silence.
“‘Pilot site… strong candidate… given on-the-ground family presence,’” he continued, reading now with growing relish, having discovered his audience was captive and suitably horrified.
There was a sharp intake of breath, several, in fact, at “family presence.” Kathleen did not have to turn her head to feel the collective look slide toward Miriam like a draft. It was a particular kind of gaze, native to small places: not openly hostile, not yet, but assessing, as if checking whether the girl seated among them had quietly grown a second, corporate head.
“I’ve never seen that,” Miriam said into the hot stillness. The words were perfectly audible to Kathleen, and instantly lost to the room. A whisper of “insider” shivered down the right-hand aisle. Someone else, less inventive, tried “plant,” and it stuck more easily, being familiar from television thrillers. People who had hugged Miriam at the last potluck now regarded her with a new, chilly curiosity, like a casserole one suddenly suspects of having been prepared in an unlicensed kitchen.
Kathleen, who knew too well how swiftly favor turned to suspicion when money and land exchanged glances, felt the old, cold knot twist under her ribs. The papers in the man’s hand might as well have been matches; he held them carelessly near a room soaked in ten years of quiet, accumulated worry, and the first flames were already licking along the edges of the Langley girl’s good name.
He lost hold of the first page halfway out of his packet, snatched it back with a little grunt, then arranged the stack on the pulpit-less music stand someone shoved toward him, squaring the corners as if the gravity of the information depended upon right angles. The sanctuary waited through the paper-shuffling and the soft, mortified cough of his wife behind him. He performed the obligatory double throat-clear, one dry rehearsal, one for effect, and then bent to the text with the ponderous care of a man determined not to be outwitted by punctuation.
“Subject,” he announced, peering over his bifocals, “Strategic… acquisition… of underutilized rural faith properties.”
Each word arrived separately, like reluctant parishioners, and sat there in the stale air. “Acquisition” in particular seemed to scrape the paint as it went by. He continued, lips pursed, through bullet points about “consolidating impact” and “rationalizing redundant sites,” the jargon flattening whatever it touched. To Kathleen it sounded less like charity than inventory control. Around her, shoulders tensed, arms folded; every sleek corporate phrase dropped with dull, insulting weight into the already sagging room.
When he finally labored his way to the buried line (“a promising pilot site, given on-the-ground family presence”) the words seemed to strike not ears but bone. A bodily shiver ran through the sanctuary; metal folding chairs gave a chorus of uneasy creaks as people shifted, as if the floor itself had tilted. Someone near the back repeated “pilot site?” in the same tone one might reserve for “infestation.” Another hissed, “That’d be us,” as though identifying a rash. Kathleen felt her lips press themselves into a hard, bloodless bar, the expression that had silenced more than one committee squabble. Her gaze moved, precise as a ruler, to Miriam: taking in the girl’s whitened knuckles, the too-earnest posture, weighing afresh what “family presence” might be worth: or cost.
Miriam half rose, her chair screeching, notebook hugged to her like a shield. “I’ve never seen that, no one showed me any of this, ” she managed, voice cracking on “never.” The protest went thin at the edges, snagged and shredded on the gathering murmur. Men she’d ferried to physical therapy regarded the hymn numbers instead; two widows she’d sat with through chemo treatments angled their knees and shoulders away, as if mere nearness might render them parties to whatever plot was being read aloud in her name.
“Insider,” someone mutters near the side aisle; “plant,” comes back from the choir loft, and the labels hop pews faster than Miriam’s protests can follow. In less than a minute the young woman who rinsed their coffee urns all winter and learned their grandbabies’ names is recast as the foundation’s advance scout. Potluck-hugging seniors narrow their eyes, quietly shelving her alongside the email’s cold, acquisitive prose and the men in suits they imagine wrote it.
Darren, hearing Miriam get shredded from three directions at once, lifts his chin and leans forward over the back of the pew as if bracing against a wave. “Can we just slow down a second?” he calls toward the front, pitching his voice over the cross-talk. It is not quite a shout, but it has the flat carrying quality of a man used to hollering across job sites and truck yards. “Y’all are talking like it’s all or nothing, fund us or sell us, and that’s not the only way this can go.”
The room does not exactly quiet; Pine Hollow Baptist has never done anything so theatrical as silence on command. But a few of the louder mutterers fall off mid-sentence, and the hiss of side conversations drops from boil to simmer. Enough heads turn in his direction that he takes it, with the gambler’s optimism that has served him both well and ill, as permission to go on.
Kathleen, halfway between the front pew and the aisle microphone, feels a familiar tightening between her shoulders. Darren Willoughby presuming to mediate propriety from the back row is, in its way, as improbable as the Langley email falling out of the sky; yet here they both are. She restrains the impulse to remind him this is a duly-called business meeting and not a tailgate. He has, irritatingly, caught the room.
Wesley, still hunched near the end of the second pew, does not lift his head but his fingers pause in their restless smoothing at a frayed spot in the padding. Miriam, colour high in her cheeks, fixes her eyes on her notebook, as if steadying herself not by Darren’s intervention but against it. Up in the choir loft, Lydia’s pen stalls over the margin of her agenda, her expression sharpening from anthropological interest to something more personally intent.
Behind them, Brent Colby tips his chair back an inch, arms folded, watching Darren with the mild, proprietary curiosity of a shopkeeper seeing someone else step behind his counter. A low “here we go” travels along the left wall like an electrical short. No one, Kathleen notes, actually answers Darren’s request to slow down. They merely hover. Half ready to pounce, half willing, for the moment, to listen.
He braces his hands on the pew rail, knuckles gone the color of old candle wax. “I’ve been on jobs where churches like this, smaller, older, holding on same as y’all are, couldn’t keep the lights on no more,” he says, the words measured but carrying. “We didn’t just bulldoze ’em soon as the tithes dipped. We turned a couple into shelters: beds in the Sunday school rooms, kitchen doing hot meals. One over in eastern Kentucky, they got an after-school spot now, tutoring, ball in the fellowship hall instead of it sitting empty all week. There’s even this little coworking place we did down in Tennessee (Wi‑Fi, desks, folks starting quilting businesses, lawn care, online selling) paying enough rent to keep the heat on and the roof tight.”
He glances toward the front, then up at the stained glass, as if to remind them he is talking about buildings with pulpits and plaques, not reclaimed warehouses. “Point is, a building doesn’t have to die just ’cause a congregation shrinks. There’s ways to keep it serving people, keep it ours, if we’re willing to think a little different.” A few younger faces lift, tentative interest kindling; several older ones go still, eyes flattening like doors closing.
“Closed,” repeats Deacon Rowe from near the front, his voice thin but sharp as a saw blade. He shoves himself upright with both hands on the pew, joints protesting but temper lending him strength. “That’s what you said. Closed churches.” The word seems to thud against the low ceiling and fall, unwelcome, into every lap. “You always did talk big about what you’d do with this place if ‘the old guard ever got out of the way.’ Don’t stand back there actin’ surprised.” He tips his chin toward Darren, cloudy eyes suddenly keen. “Sounds to me like you’ve had your eye on this property a long time, boy. Long before you learned all them fancy words for shutting a church down.”
Darren’s jaw works, a small tic in the muscle by his scar. “That was twenty years ago,” he begins, hands lifted in a half‑plea that looks uncomfortably like surrender. “I was a dumb kid mouthing off (trying to impress) ”
“A dumb kid who near got us sued,” Rowe snaps, colour mounting in his papery cheeks. “Running off with that out‑of‑town crowd, slapping ‘Pine Hollow Baptist’ on flyers nobody here ever saw fit to approve, ‘raising money’ nobody could ever lay hands on, and joyriding the youth van till you wrapped it round a guardrail.” A few heads nod, remembering the late‑night phone calls and the whispered word “liability.” Rowe leans harder on the pew. “And now we’re to believe all this talk about ‘repurposing’ ain’t just you finally cashing in on the notions you had about this hill?”
The murmurs sharpen into barbed questions (“What ever happened to that special offering?” “Didn’t the insurance go up ’cause of that wreck?” “You think we forgot, Darren?”) voices overlapping, gaining courage from one another. He tries to answer, voice roughening as he insists the money went where the bulletin said, that the van kissed the guardrail but never “wrapped” it, that he was reckless, not crooked. Yet in the echoing sanctuary each explanation arrives half a beat late, sounding to certain ears like polish, like preparation. By the time someone in the back hisses that he’s “just back to carve up what other folks kept alive,” his talk of community hubs has curdled, in the room’s collective imagination, into a neat little blueprint for stripping the church for parts and selling the bones.
Kathleen rises a little too quickly, chair legs scraping in protest against the scarred linoleum, and for a blink she is annoyed with the chair instead of the people. She lays two fingers on the back of it to steady herself, then on the front of her blouse, smoothing the already‑flat cotton as if the right pressure might iron the whole evening true. Her pearls are cool against the side of her neck when she straightens them by habit. When she speaks, the pleasant Sunday‑school lilt she has cultivated for forty years has drained out, leaving the clipped, unmistakable authority that once sent junior doctors scuttling down fluorescent halls.
“We are airing an awful lot in front of guests and family,” she says, and it is less gentle caution than triage note. Her gaze sweeps the pews, lingering just long enough on each cluster to remind them she knows precisely where everyone sits in every sense. “And I will just remind us that our house has to be in order before we invite anybody in to look at our books.”
The phrase our house lands with the dull weight of a hymnbooks stack, heavy in a room hammered together by men now buried on the hill and polished by women whose wrists never quite healed. Kathleen hears the small intake of breath from somewhere to her left, someone taking that “our” as a comfort, and knows at the same moment that others will hear it as possession, as if she were straightening not only her blouse but the deed itself.
She ought to stop there, but can feel the narrative slipping, threads pulled loose by old gossip and new money.
“We are airing an awful lot in front of guests and family,” she says, and this time the words come out flatter than she intends, more ward nurse than Women’s Circle chair. Her gaze travels the pews in a slow, appraising pass, noting who stares at the floor and who stares at Darren, who has their arms crossed and who has already begun silently composing a Facebook post. “And I will just remind us”, the gentle phrase buckles slightly under the strain in her voice, “that our house has to be in order before we invite anybody in to look at our books.”
Our house drops into the sanctuary like a hymnbook slid off a pew: soft in sound, hard in implication. Some (the ones who have scrubbed these floors on arthritic knees, who have baked for funerals out of their own dwindling cupboards) straighten a little, hearing shared stewardship. Others, recalling every time Kathleen’s raised eyebrow rerouted a committee vote, taste in that our a hint of proprietorship: her tidy hand on the thermostat, on the sign‑up sheets, now, perhaps, on the ledger itself.
A boy’s voice cracks the air from the back. One of Brent Colby’s weekend clerks, all bravado on store credit. “What’s that supposed to mean, Miss Kathleen?” he calls, too loud for the rafters, and two older women on the third pew whip their heads round and hiss his name like a rebuke and a prayer combined. He ducks, grinning foolishly, but the damage is done: every head has tipped a fraction toward her. The colored light from the side windows lays a bar of red across her jaw, and in that strip of glass‑stained flesh the smallest tremor betrays itself. Kathleen feels it, the tell‑tale quiver, and despises it. There is nothing for it now but to go forward.
She slides her hands to the back of the pew in front of her, fingers lacing over the worn varnish as if it were a lectern, not a barricade. “There have been…questions raised about the building fund and petty cash,” she says, each noun set down like a tray. “Nothing proven, nothing I’m accusing anyone of, of course.” The courtesies march out on schedule. “Only that any irregularities, however small, could frighten off serious partners.” The word hangs there, irregularities, gleaming like a dropped instrument in an operating theatre, no gentling phrase capable of disguising its edge.
The sanctuary seems to contract as the room’s instinct for scandal triangulates; heads turn almost in unison toward the side wall where Wesley has been trying to disappear behind a stack of hymnals and the mop‑closet door. He has made a life of being useful and unnoticed, slipping in and out like a draft, now, in the sudden, pricking silence, that long‑cultivated invisibility peels away, leaving him exposed under a hundred appraising, wounded stares, as if they have all just discovered the church has a nervous system and he is the raw, pulsing nerve.
Kathleen does not mean to look at him, but her eyes obey the same law as everyone else’s; they find him as if tugged on a string. Poor man, she thinks, and then, less charitably, fool. If he would only keep still. If he would only stay in his proper place, behind things.
But Wesley straightens, or rather, he ceases to crouch, and for the first time in years occupies his full, unremarkable height in the space instead of folding himself around a task. The hymnal skids from his damp fingers and thumps against the pew, a small, indecorous sound that makes several people flinch harder than the word irregularities had done.
“She’s talkin’ about me,” he says, not looking at Kathleen but somewhere in the vicinity of the center aisle carpet, as if confessing to the patterned stains. The words drag like something heavy over gravel. His voice, usually a soft murmur suited to boiler rooms and back steps, comes out raw, hoarse with disuse in public. “About the petty cash.”
There is a single, collective inhale. The boy in the back mouths something soundless. One of the older men, who has not shifted his expression in twenty minutes, lifts his chin by half an inch: the local equivalent of a start.
“I, ” Wesley swallows. His Adam’s apple jerks like a hitch in the plumbing. “I’ve took from it. More than once.”
No one, Kathleen observes with professional detachment, ever says I have misappropriated funds. They say I’ve took.
He lifts his hands, palms open and empty as if to prove he has nothing on him now. “It was. It was loans. I meant to put it back. I kept a little book of it an’ all.” A nervous, almost apologetic glance flickers toward the storage closet as if the notebook might step out and corroborate. “But it’s: it’s been more than once.”
The phrase lands heavier the second time, as if repetition confirms its moral weight. Somewhere to Kathleen’s left, a woman’s voice, thin with disbelief, whispers, “Wesley?” as though the name itself were an argument against the charge. He has, after all, changed their lightbulbs and plunged their toilets and sat through their husbands’ last hospital nights. One does not easily reconcile such services with the vocabulary of theft.
Across the aisle, Brent Colby’s eyebrows ascend to a height of wounded rectitude that would have done credit to any Victorian patriarch. It is a very fine expression, and Kathleen, who has seen him extend credit to half the hollow on terms that bind tighter than chains, has to repress the urge to roll her eyes.
Wesley seems to shrink under the combined force of outrage and baffled loyalty. The flush that began at his collar has crept up to the rims of his tired hazel eyes. “I ain’t, ” he begins, then stops, evidently at a loss for what he is not. A thief? A villain? Someone who lives beyond his means, when his means have hardly stretched to a second-hand truck and a roof patched with donated shingles?
“I just, ” He gropes, and for once there is no tool or rag or screwdriver to fill his hand. “My hours got cut over at the mill. Mama’s pills went up. An’… the church bills…” His gaze flicks, almost involuntarily, toward the narthex where the bulletin board hangs, permanently cheery in faded construction-paper borders. “Power. Water. I figgered I could: float it a week or two ’til somethin’ come in.”
The word float, applied to money, sounds to Kathleen’s ear both dangerously hopeful and entirely apt. Money floats, she thinks; people sink.
“You’re sayin’ you used church money, ” one of the deacons starts, but the sentence never quite finishes itself; it dissolves into a rustle of programs and an indistinct mutter that has less to do with doctrine than with the sudden, queasy recognition that the benevolent building around them has been kept upright by means they did not authorize, because they could not bear to look too closely at the arithmetic.
The first ripples of outrage stutter rather than swell as he pushes on, words tumbling over one another like loose nails in a coffee can. “It weren’t for…for foolishness,” he says, dragging the syllables. “Weren’t for no boat, no…Bass Pro card.” A strained little laugh surfaces from somewhere and dies at once. “It was my house note when they cut my hours at the mill. They said it was temporary, but that was six months back.” His gaze skates off to the exit sign as if calculating how fast he might reach it.
He talks faster, as though speed might outrun shame. “An’ when the church power got behind, y’all remember when the lights flickered all through revival?, that wasn’t just a storm. That was two months late. Water too. They sent them pink notices, then red, then them little cards you gotta sign for.” A few people shift, recalling unopened envelopes on their own kitchen tables. “I couldn’t. “I couldn’t stand the thought of Wednesday night prayer meetin’ dark and cold. So I… I floated it. I kept us lit.”
His hand goes to his back pocket as if of its own accord, fingers clumsy, and he drags out a wad of envelopes gone soft at the edges from being handled too often in the dark. The little stack unfolds in his shaking grip. Red‑stamped FINAL glaring up from the power bill, a pink disconnection notice from the gas company, a credit‑card statement with a hardware receipt angrily circled in blue ink. He studies the papers as though they are his accusers and he must look them in the face, not the people. “That card’s topped out ’cause o’ this place,” he says, voice rough. “Roof patch. New breaker. So nobody’d get shocked, or froze out. Weren’t for me. Weren’t for…extras.”
The sound in the sanctuary changes key, from sharp indignation to something lower, more nauseated. People begin studying their own shoes with sudden fervor, as if the answers might be ground into the scuffed varnish. Somewhere behind Kathleen, a woman gasps, “We didn’t know it was that bad,” and another, with more heat than volume, says the finance committee “should’ve seen somethin’,” which summons at once a rustling, prickly exchange between deacons and choir mothers over whose job it ever was to read past the first page of a treasurer’s report. Kathleen, listening, notes with weary clarity that everyone prefers to argue about supervision rather than admit they have collectively declined to be supervised by reality.
The overlapping blame swells, not so much a chorus as a flock of arguments flying in all directions, when the fluorescents overhead crackle and dip. One tube gives a fierce, insect‑mad buzz before winking out entirely; a jagged bar of shadow slices the pulpit and first three pews. The room flinches as one. Voices leap, splintering into accusations and half‑formed motions, the pastor’s face gone the color of paste as he hammers his gavel for adjournment no one quite grants him. From the kitchen doorway, over the scrape of folding chairs and the hard report of doors, the tinny radio (ignored all evening) cuts through with a severe storm alert, its flat, official cadence riding the retreat like a judgment that has at last remembered their address.
It had been every woman’s experience, in Kathleen’s observation, that when a man said something was “not your problem,” he invariably meant it had been her problem for some time, only without the benefit of information. From her place a few yards down the slope, where the path kinked between two laurel bushes, she pretended to study the date on a leaning stone and very carefully did not listen.
The pretense was not successful. Voices carried up here, even when people thought they were keeping them low. The hollow made confidences into public property as surely as it did cooking smells and sirens.
“I’m not grading you,” Lydia shot back. Her voice had that thin, high edge Kathleen associated with Wentley temper and university committee meetings. “I’m your cousin. I’m standing in front of foreclosure notices, apparently, and I had to hear it from a shut‑off notice taped to the fellowship‑hall door?”
Wesley flinched, one hand tightening on his cap brim. “That was supposed to come down ’fore anybody saw.”
“Well, it didn’t,” Lydia said. “You could have called me. E‑mailed. Smoke signal. Something.”
He gave a short, humorless breath. “Last I checked, you were busy ‘contextualizin’’ us.” The word came out with awkward care, as if he’d practiced it in private. “Writing your book. Interviewing folks like they was ghosts in a museum.”
“That is not. “I was trying to make sense of what’s happening here.”
“From Beckley,” he said. “From Morgantown, from wherever. Roll in every couple months, take your notes, head back to your apartment with good internet.” The anger was a thin skin over something softer, and it kept tearing as he talked. “You never once asked what the light bill was.”
Kathleen, who did in fact know the light bill within ten dollars in any given month, shifted her weight and felt her knees complain. One could hardly blame him. One could also not entirely acquit the girl. As usual, the truth had divided itself neatly between parties and left her in the tiresome position of holding both halves.
Rain scent thickened, the first cold pinpricks spattering against her blouse. Lydia pushed her glasses up with an ink‑smudged knuckle. “You think I left to study you like bugs.”
“I think,” Wesley said slowly, as if choosing each word from a shelf of things he would rather not touch, “you left. That was your right. But don’t come back now talkin’ like you been here, when you ain’t been the one standin’ in the church office wonderin’ which bill’s gonna wait and which old lady gets her heat turned off.”
There it was. Kathleen closed her eyes briefly. She had not known the precise configuration of his juggling, only that he always looked thinner when the propane ran low and the copier quit at the same time, but the outline was entirely familiar. Men like Wesley believed martyrdom was cheaper than conversation.
“Wes,” Lydia said, softer now. “How bad is it?”
“Bad enough.” His tone tried for finality; his shoulders betrayed defeat. “But I’ll handle it.”
Of course he would. Of course he had. Kathleen straightened, feeling the ache up her thighs as a small price for what she was about to spend of herself. There came a time when even the best‑laid invisibility had to be set aside.
She brushed a fleck of damp grass from her slacks, fixed her expression to mild curiosity, and stepped up toward them, as if her appearance on the ridge at that precise moment were an act of God and not of long practice in arriving where she was most needed (and least wanted) just in time.
Wesley kept his eyes on the ground, watching the wet grit give under his boot heel, the rain darkening his laces and the cuffs of his jeans. His flannel had gone from merely worn to clinging, the plaid plastered against the sharp knobs of his shoulders. “Ain’t your problem,” he muttered, the words aimed at the lichen rather than at Lydia, and shifted as if to slip past her on the narrow path.
She didn’t move. The hollow left him no room to go around without brushing her coat, her insistence, her history. After a beat he lifted his gaze just high enough to catch her chin, not her eyes, and Kathleen saw that thin, surprising edge of anger under all the familiar exhaustion.
“You left, remember?” he said. “You got out. You don’t get to sweep back in with your questions like you’re grading a paper.”
Each word came out clipped, as if costing him, each syllable a small recoil. His hands, however worked helplessly at the brim of his cap, bending and unbending it, betraying all the strain his voice tried to flatten.
Lydia flushed. “I have been here,” she said, more loudly than the space required. “I’ve been studying all this for years, actually.” Her hand made a vague sweep that took in the church roof just visible through the trees, the tilt of the graveyard, the surnames repeating in stone around them. “The hollow, the church, the families, ”
The declaration hung there, sounding, to her own ear, perilously like a syllabus.
A gust came nosing up the slope, setting plastic carnations bobbing and untying a loose curl of ribbon from a metal cross. Somewhere a piece of faded funeral silk clacked softly against its wire stem.
“Studying,” Wesley repeated, with a bark that wasn’t quite laughter. “You come in for a weekend, ask your little questions, scratch in that notebook, then go. Meanwhile I’m down there countin’ which bill can go late without the power cut, and which sister can’t sit through Sunday in the dark.”
The words seemed to surprise him as much as her; having loosed them, he sagged against the stone, as if the lichen and granite were all that held him up. In a low, scraping undertone he spoke of skipped suppers and “stretchin’” cans so the Wednesday lights stayed on; of final notices folded small and rubber‑banded in his glove box like a stash of losing lottery tickets; of “just a little” from the church petty cash slid across to a red‑stamped envelope at his own mailbox, with the pious lie that he’d put it back when tithes picked up. Each confession fell between them with the dull, incriminating weight of gravel tossed on a coffin lid. Lydia’s fingers, so used to closing around a pen, only twitched; the notebook in her hand sagged, then hung forgotten at her side.
“I was trying to, ” she began, and even to her own ear it sounded thin, like a student padding an answer she no longer believed. “The work was meant to help. The book. “From here, Lyd, it looked like you drove up, pointed your camera, then drove away. We were something to be looked at, not stood with.”
Thunder rolled somewhere beyond Pine Ridge, a low, delayed judgment. Lydia’s careful theories scattered; what rose in their place were shabby motel rooms, quick interviews in church basements, her car already idling toward the interstate. For the first time, every visit rearranged itself: not a return, but a passing through with the windows up.
Miriam didn’t even think to grab her jacket. One moment she was standing in the fellowship hall with the taste of coffee gone sour in her mouth; the next she was shouldering through the swinging kitchen door, the fluorescent glare and smell of dish soap hitting her like a slap.
“Sugar, you alright?” someone called over the hiss of the faucet.
She didn’t answer. Her boots skidded a little on a patch where the mop hadn’t quite dried, then thudded down the back steps two at a time, past the metal rack of folding chairs and the bulletin board with curling flyers for last year’s coat drive. The sounds of cleanup, cutlery chiming in plastic tubs, a pot scraping clean, low chuckles about who’d taken too much dessert, rose and fell behind her like a conversation she had no right to overhear.
The tiny office between the kitchen and the storage closet had never looked like much: faux-wood paneling, a file cabinet that listed gently to one side, a desk burdened with donation envelopes and a printer that always needed ink. Tonight it was sanctuary enough. The door stuck against the rug, then gave all at once with a soft wooden crack that made her wince. She shut it quick, palm flat against the hollow core, as if she could keep the whole building out with that small pressure.
Inside, the air was cooler, tinted blue by the humming overhead tube that flickered every few seconds, like the room couldn’t quite decide whether to be lit. Stacks of worn hymnals leaned precariously against one wall; an unplugged beige desktop tower squatted under the desk like a retired workhorse. Someone had left a Styrofoam cup half full of coffee, a thin skin forming on top. The normalcy of it, the utter smallness, made her chest hurt.
She dug in her bag for her phone, fingers clumsy, breath too loud in the cramped space. Wesley’s face rose unhelpfully in her mind. The way he’d just looked past her in the fellowship hall, not unkind but already gone, eyes narrowed at a folding chair with a bad leg, at a drip darkening the ceiling tile near the serving window.
“Later,” he’d murmured, and she hadn’t been sure if it was a promise or a dismissal.
It was the tiredness that lodged under her ribs now: the set of his shoulders, the resignation she had mistaken for stubbornness. The sting behind her eyes that had started as shame flared, to her own surprise, into something hotter and far easier to breathe around.
Anger, she realized. Not at him.
Her thumb found the “Langley Foundation – Director” contact before she had fully decided what she meant to do. There was a tremor in her hand she tried to blame on the chill in the room. For one suspended second she saw herself as her grandfather might: dramatic, impulsive, phoning in from some quaint little mission field.
She hit “call” before she could tidy the impulse into something more reasonable.
The buzzing ring filled the cramped office, insistently loud against the muffled clatter beyond the door and the soft, intermittent drip in the ceiling. On the second ring it cut off.
“Miriam,” came the director’s voice, brisk and polished, already upholstered in efficiency. “This is a surprise. Is everything al. Is Pine Hollow on a list?”
Her voice bounced off the paneled walls, too big for the narrow room. She could almost see the woman on the other end straightening in her ergonomic chair, glancing at a clock.
There was a pause measured in boardroom seconds. Then came the careful cadence Miriam knew from press releases and donor luncheons, repurposed now for family: “Miriam, I think there’s been a misunderstanding. We’re just exploring potential partnerships with faith-based community hubs. “Faith-based community hubs,” Miriam repeated under her breath, as if tasting something gone off.
“Don’t spin me,” she said, more sharply than she’d ever spoken to anyone on the foundation payroll. “Tell me straight: is there a document. Yes or no.”
On the line, the director’s tone thinned. Paper rustled; somewhere, keys rattled against a keyboard in a hurried, unconvincing ballet. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped, the polish worn at the edges.
“There is an internal strategy memo,” she conceded. “It’s nothing finalized. You’re overreacting.”
The question came out of her before the call had properly connected, the words tripping over one another in their haste.
“Is it true you’re lookin’ at buyin’ up rural church properties?” The paneling caught and flattened her voice, made it sound harsher than she’d meant. “Is Pine Hollow on a list?”
On the other end there was a small, offended inhale, quickly upholstered. “Miriam,” the director began, that cultivated New England calm fitted over a core of steel, “this is… unexpected. I think there’s been a misunderstanding. We’re just exploring potential partnerships with faith‑based community hubs. Faith‑based community hubs. Pine Hollow, boiled down to a bullet point in a PowerPoint she could suddenly see: stock photos of steeples, a smiling child with generic brown braids, captions about “impact.”
Her throat tightened; the old Langley instinct to smooth, to rephrase, rose and met something that would not budge.
“Don’t spin me,” she said, and this time the words came out flat, almost quiet. “Tell me straight. Is there a document. Yes or no.”
On the line, the practiced patter faltered. Somewhere in a glass office, she imagined a hand moving from headset to mouse, a posture adjusting as if for turbulence.
“There. “There is an internal strategy memo,” the director admitted at last, lower now, the polish scuffed. “It’s nothing finalized, Miriam. You’re overreacting.”
“Send it,” Miriam said. The echo off the paneling startled her; there was, unmistakably, a hard edge she did not recognize as her own.
“I really don’t think it would be helpful for you to. Then we can all talk together about misunderstandings.”
On the other end, air thinned. The fluorescent tube buzzed like an insect trapped in glass.
“Fine,” the director said eventually, the word clipped. “I’ll forward you the draft, but Miriam, you have to understand this is all very preliminary. You’re reading far too much into. Miriam drew the phone from her ear. Across the screen slid the subject line, neat as a verdict: “FW: Strategic Acquisition – Rural Community Assets (Internal).”
She stares until the words blur, the tidy fonts and careful indentations resolving into nothing but a gray block of contempt. Her thumb hovers over the screen as if she might smudge the memo out of existence. Embedded in congregation. Promising internal advocate. The phrases scrape at her like grit under a contact lens, making it suddenly hard to see the room around her at all.
Under the office’s harsh light, the fellowship hall’s homey clutter. The crocheted “God Is Love” wall hanging, the chipped mug that says “World’s Okayest Pastor,” a dented file cabinet listing slightly under baptism certificates. Looks suddenly flimsy, like stage dressing in someone else’s feasibility study. Miriam’s cheeks burn, heat prickling her scalp as she scrolls through phrases that reduce the hollow to market categories: “declining faith-based participation,” “high emotional attachment / low economic productivity,” “opportunity to repurpose while preserving narrative value,” “mitigate reputational risk via legacy framing.” This, she realizes with a nauseous lurch, is how they’ve been seeing her year here. Not as a confused granddaughter trying to figure out who she is, but as a live data point, an asset in place. Every potluck she stayed late to clean up after, every Sunday she sat shoulder to shoulder with widows and kids in scuffed sneakers, every careful conversation with Wesley about “what the church needs”. It’s all been quietly tallied, converted into “embedded relationships” and “on‑the‑ground narrative buy‑in” on a slide deck. For the first time, she understands that when her family asked, “So, how’s your little church project?” they weren’t humoring her; they were measuring the ground under the building and, by extension, under her.
Kathleen thanked him at the door with the same composed half‑smile she had offered to doctors’ rounds, social workers, and unannounced relatives for forty years. “You were right to come,” she told him, and even managed to pat his sleeve in a way that suggested reassurance rather than alarm. Only when his tail‑lights had disappeared past the forsythia and the storm door clicked back into place did her hand, still on the knob, begin to tremble.
The quiet in the front room was not the familiar, companionable hush of late evening. Television off, kettle cooling, the refrigerator’s hum steady in the background. It felt thicker, as though his halting phrases had settled over the furniture and rugs, changing their weight. She stood very still on the braided oval mat, one hand sliding from the doorknob to the back of her armchair, and heard, inside her head, the words spoken again in his dry, apologetic voice: “runs right along the top edge of the cemetery.”
The syllables nudged at images she had carried for years without ever examining: children in stiff Easter clothes racing up the ridge path; casseroles balanced on covered dishes as mourners climbed past the last row of stones; Wesley’s bent figure in winter, scattering salt on the icy steps that led up behind the fellowship hall. All that unquestioned procession of grief and fried chicken and hymn‑singing had, in her mind, rested on solid, consecrated ground, “ours” in a sense that required no paperwork.
Now the slope behind the church seemed to tilt a few degrees, as if some quiet fault line had shifted under the moss and graves. The idea that a strip of that hillside might have been swapped like a length of fence, without minutes or maps, lodged itself under her breastbone, small and sharp. It was not merely the land that felt uncertain. It was the long habit of assuming she knew, better than most, how things in this hollow properly fit together.
Moving on habit rather than decision, she crossed to the glass‑front bookcase and knelt with a small, involuntary wince, one hand braced on the shelf. The lower pane still bore, in its corner, the cloudy crescent where one of the children’s stickers had once been; she found herself rubbing at it with her thumb as if that, too, might finally come off. The dented metal biscuit tin waited behind a row of devotional paperbacks, its lid still faintly smelling of old shortbread when she prised it up.
She had not opened it in years. The air inside felt dry and stale, as though even the dust were tired. Rubber‑banded bank statements sagged against her palm, her late husband’s yellowing pay stubs curled at the edges. Beneath those lay folded receipts from lumber yards, photo‑copies of tax maps, letterhead from a surveyor in town. At the very bottom, wedged like an afterthought, a brittle envelope marked in his careful block letters: “LANE / HILLSIDE – TO SORT.”
She eased herself backward onto the carpet, knees protesting outright now, and began to spread the papers on the coffee table in neat, nurse‑like rows, aligning corners, smoothing creases, as if tidiness could conjure order from what they might tell her.
By one o’clock the hands on the mantel clock had begun to blur into one another, but she kept at it, pushing her bifocals up with the side of her finger until they sat crooked on the bridge of her nose. Parcel outlines overlapped like poorly patched quilts; lot numbers marched off the edge of one photocopy and failed to appear on the next. Here, in her husband’s square, unhurried hand: “swap w/ Willoughby for access,” as if exchanging consecrated ground were no more consequential than trading shifts at the mill. No date. No witness. Just his familiar, maddening confidence in ink. She traced, with the blunt end of a pen, the faint pencil stroke running above the tiny rectangle marked “Pine Hollow Baptist Cem,” following it as though it might, if only she were patient enough, loop back into certainty. Instead it wandered off the page and into memory: men’s voices drifting in from the porch while she rinsed supper plates. It occurred to her, with a small, cold clarity, that the drawer where she’d put them might have been entirely imaginary.
Outside, the rain shifted from patter to a steady, unembarrassed drumming, as if the sky had decided on something she had not. In its rhythm she heard her own past certainties from budget meetings and cemetery committees, “Oh, that ridge path is church land, I checked on it, we’re fine”, and felt the phrases curdle. What, precisely, had she checked? A half‑remembered conversation over meatloaf, a deacon’s offhand “far as I know,” her husband’s easy, infuriating “I took care of it, Kathy, don’t fret.” In the hollow, a thing repeated often enough became indistinguishable from a recorded fact; she had built her confidence on that local gospel. Now, with parcel numbers refusing to marry and whole inches of the hillside simply unaccounted for on any page before her, she saw, with a chill that had nothing to do with the weather, how much of her supposed knowledge had rested on the fragile authority of “everybody knows.”
By the time a gray, reluctant dawn seeps through her lace curtains, the coffee table is a paper mosaic and her shoulders ache from hunching. She braces her palms on her thighs, breathes once, and lets the admission come all the way through: on the matter of the ridge and the graves above it, she does not know. Not for certain, not in any way she could defend beyond “well, we always said.” The realization is a small, sharp humiliation, her, of all people, having mistaken assumption for fact, but beneath the sting lies something steadier: a sober clarity that this quiet, messy truth will have to be spoken aloud, even if it means surrendering the comforting picture of herself as the one who always understands how things really are.
The bell over the door had given up its half‑hearted jangle nearly an hour ago. Out beyond the plate glass the world was nothing but water and warped reflections: his own neon beer signs smeared into pale ghosts, the gravel lot gone to a shallow gray pond where the paint lines floated, faint and useless. Inside, the store held its tired brightness. Fluorescents humming over rows of dog chow and antifreeze, a faint, perpetual chill from the coolers breathing along the back wall.
Brent stood at the register with his readers halfway down his nose, thumbing at the calculator as if determination might fatten the numbers. The tape curled out in a thin, accusing ribbon. “Rain like this, folks stay home,” he said, more to the air than to her. “They’ll come in tomorrow, once it lets up. Church down there in a pickle, too. Gonna need a little extra slack, help ’em through.” He gave the keys a final tap, tore off the tape, and smoothed it with his thumb, as if stroking a skittish animal.
He could hear how it wanted to sound, and so he gave it that practiced warmth he saved for customers and preachers: half invitation, half benediction. “What I’m thinkin’,” he went on, eyes still on the figures, “we just open things up a bit. Extend some tabs, forgive a bit here and there. Let folks know Colby’s is gonna see ’em through this rough patch. People need to feel like somebody’s lookin’ out for ’em when everything else is comin’ apart.”
He glanced up at her then, the easy smile already arranged on his face, the one that said good neighbor, not desperate man with a line of credit. “That’s what you do in a community,” he added lightly. “You step up. You help.”
She did not answer at once. She took a deliberate sip, made a face at the lukewarm coffee, then set the cup down with care, as if even that small clatter might give him the satisfaction of a reaction. Elbows on the counter, she watched his thumbs work the calculator like rosary beads, the little machine already knowing its prayers. When she spoke, it was in that mild classroom voice that had once fooled him into thinking she was still his little girl.
“And what,” she asked, eyes on the receipt tape, “do you get back out of all that… helping?”
The word sat there between them, too polite to be accusation, too pointed to be idle. He felt his shoulders tighten before he could stop them.
“Nothing, honey,” he said, the endearment automatic, the laugh too quick. “That’s the whole point. You do for folks ‘cause it’s right. I always did for you, didn’t I?”
She nodded once. “You did. Like that transfer my junior year, when I was about to be dropped from classes.” Her gaze slid to his face. “Funny how it turned up every time we argued about me not moving back. Or about my boyfriend. Or Christmas.”
Color crept up his neck. “Now that’s not fair. I was just remindin’ you what it costs, raisin’ a kid alone. You don’t just. “Right. I remember. Because you made sure I did.” She turned her cup slowly, fingers whitening on the cardboard. “Those checks were never just ‘for school,’ Daddy. They were… line items. Entries. Debts.”
He frowned. “I never asked you to pay me back a dime.”
“You didn’t have to,” she said. “You collected in other ways.”
The store seemed to contract, the aisles drawing in close, as she went on. She did not raise her voice; it was the steadiness that made each example land like a pin in a map. From those late‑night “talks” about tuition, how many times he’d circled back to the sacrifice of those checks, she traced a straight line to the bright sponsor banners with his logo shouting over every Little League outfield, to the church raffle baskets he “donated,” his name tucked in every corner like a receipt. Free hams at Christmas that came with a little speech, pantry boxes that purchased another story about his big heart. “It’s always the same,” she said quietly. “You help, and then you hold it over people. You make sure they remember who they owe, and that it’s you.”
He feels the practiced joke die in his throat. Instinct rises in the old, loud shape. Hands spreading, eyebrows up, the protest already queuing: I’m just trying to do right, everybody needs somebody. What comes out instead is smaller, pinched. “That’s not fair, you don’t know what it’s like keepin’ this place open.” The words go skittering down the long aisle of canned beans and dog chow, thin as the receipt tape curling by his elbow. Her gaze doesn’t waver. In it he catches, with a slow, queasy recognition, the same little flinch he’s seen in folks on tabs when he clears his throat and reminds them what they owe. For a beat he sees himself not as benevolent provider at all, but as the man standing calm behind the hook and line.
The humming coolers fill the space his excuses used to occupy. His shoulders sink, the genial tilt of his mouth slipping toward something smaller, plainer, more like a tired man than a benevolent merchant. He does not apologize but his talk thins, and he lets the notion of “taking care of everything” die unsaid. In the quiet, her words arrange themselves into a ledger he cannot unsee: fear itemized as kindness, affection tallied as obligation, every tab a leash coiled neatly in his own hands. No quip arrives to rescue him. What settles instead is the flat, unfamiliar awareness that if he keeps loving people on these terms, he will finish the work of driving them all away.
The storm drives everyone else out early, car doors slamming in the gravel and red taillights vanishing in smeared streaks down the county road. Kathleen stands a moment in the fellowship‑hall doorway, arthritic hand braced on the frame as she surveys the scattered hymnals, the damp tracks of shoes on the linoleum, the two figures still moving about as if the evening were not already over.
“Don’t you stay and drown yourselves,” she calls, with the practiced briskness of one who will not admit to concern. “Lights’ll trip if that leak gets any worse. Lock up behind you, Wesley.”
Wesley, already reaching for the breaker box, gives his usual noncommittal nod. Miriam murmurs something. Kirby, really”. And Kathleen grants her a tight little smile that says both I believe you and I do not for a moment. Darren only lifts a hand in half‑salute from the far corner, metal chair in his other grip. The gesture is so boyish she has, absurdly, a flash of the lanky, furious teenager he was, slamming out of a deacons’ meeting twenty‑odd years ago.
Then the door shuts on a gust of wet air, and the hollow swallows her headlights one curve at a time. Inside, under the humming emergency strips, the room falls to the grey, flattened light that makes even birthday banners look like hospital décor. Rain hammers the tin roof in uneven volleys, drumming loudest where it has found the soft spot over the kitchen. Each heavy run ends in an impatient plink, plink into the mop bucket Wesley has stationed beneath the brown‑edged bulge in the ceiling, as faithful to its appointed place as any parishioner to a pew.
Darren is still at his self‑appointed penance among the folding chairs, sleeves damp and rolled, forearms marked by old white scars that catch the light when he moves. His motions have the competent thoughtlessness of a man who has broken down more rooms than he has built homes: flip, fold, lean, repeat. It is work that could have been finished ten minutes ago. It is also, Kathleen’s experienced eye would note, work done at half speed. A man who truly wished to be gone would have stacked those chairs with a clatter the moment the benediction was said.
Miriam lingers by the coffee urn, though the power‑saving switch has clicked it over to lukewarm and no one has asked for a last cup. Her good boots are planted in the faint reflection of the exit sign, her hands fussing pointlessly with a stack of cardboard cups. The way she watches the rain, head tipped, lower lip caught briefly between her teeth, reminds Kathleen of certain younger nurses on night shift, loitering at the charting desk when their rounds were technically done, hoping a particular doctor might come back down the hall.
If Kathleen had still been in the room, she would have noted all this, Darren’s unnecessary industry, Miriam’s inexplicable attachment to bad coffee, Wesley’s careful busyness with the breaker box, as part of the quiet inventory she kept of Pine Hollow’s emotional furniture. But she has gone, and the fellowship hall is left to the weather and to those three; or, more precisely, to two and a half, for Wesley, once the switches are set and the leak judged not yet catastrophic, will recede as he always does to the edges. The main performance, such as it is, belongs to the ones who do not yet know they are about to speak honestly.
When the scraping of chair legs at last dwindles to an occasional, apologetic squeak, Darren lets the last one settle with exaggerated care and straightens, boot coming to rest on the folded stack of tables like he means to hold the whole contraption in place. He blows out a breath between his teeth and tips his head back, following with narrowed eyes the brown halo blooming along the ceiling seam.
“First time I stepped in here,” he says, as if continuing a conversation she has not yet heard, “I walked it like any other job.” His hand sketches the rafters. “Counted joists, eyeballed clear span. Figured how much metal roof I’d need, what I could get for the whole thing if somebody wanted it turned into…somethin’ else.”
The confession hangs there, uglier than he seems to have expected. He shifts, fingers drumming his boot heel, and adds, more halting, “Only. What kept naggin’ at me wasn’t what a buyer’d pay. It was thinkin’ about some kid mad as sin at the world, like I was, needin’ somewhere to go that ain’t a bar or a back road to go get stupider on.”
The words land too bare in the low room, so he huffs out a laugh that is mostly self‑defence and lets the rest tumble after, rough‑edged. All that talk he’s been doing, “projects,” “plans,” “vision”, half of it, he says, has been armor he threw on somewhere around eighteen and never quite learned how to take off. It sounds like blueprints, but it’s mostly just a way to keep folks from noticing he hasn’t the faintest notion whether this hollow, or any other stretch of ground, is a smart place to wager what’s left of his life. His knuckles rap the table, a slow, restless tattoo, as he admits that watching Wesley grind himself down for this place has only made him less sure he can stand still without hardening into another man trapped by his own well‑meant choices, righteous and miserable and rooted past all sense.
Miriam, by the counter with a damp dishtowel twisted between her fingers, says, too fast, that he’s not the only one living off performance. This “year in the hollow” she sold her people on, slideshows, talking points, “impact projects”, was meant to be a tidy philanthropic arc with artfully rustic photos. Instead she’s been crying in grocery lots, dreading their emails, and, worst of all, wanting to stay in a place her grandfather’s men have already reduced to a line on a spreadsheet, a potential acquisition, as if her Sundays here were just leverage in a portfolio.
For a while they let the rain talk for them, the loose kitchen window shivering in its frame, both of them oddly naked without the parts they came in playing: his the can‑do man who can flip anything, hers the gracious Langley test‑driving a harmless little project. In the shared, pricking quiet, Miriam hears herself say she does not know how to walk into a room in this hollow without her last name going first and announcing her before she opens her mouth. Darren, staring at the scuffed floor, admits he does not know how to stand here as anything but a man on his way to somewhere else, all his tools kept gassed up and pointed for the state line. The knowledge settles between them: not buyer and asset, not fixer and problem, but two runaways orbiting the same sagging roof, half‑afraid, half‑hungry to see if this might be the first place either of them tells the plain truth and lets it stand.
Miriam does not wait for daylight, or for her courage to arrange itself into something more presentable. By the time she turns off the lane, the hollow is a single, sodden breath of dark, the church windows no more than dull, irregular glimmers where lightning has passed and left its echo. Wesley’s truck squats in its usual spot, beaded with rain, looking as though it has been abandoned there for years. She kills her engine, sits an instant with both hands locked on the steering wheel, then hears the wind worry at the eaves and decides that hesitation is just another luxury of her class.
She goes in by the side door she has learned is less likely to stick. The metal handle is slick and cold beneath her palm; the vestibule smells of wet wool and old floor polish. The sanctuary beyond is nearer to black than gray. Whatever emergency lighting the church once boasted has given out with quiet practicality, and the only defiantly working illumination is the hard, narrow beam of a headlamp moving low near the front, and a small flashlight, its casing half‑cracked and held in place by a folded bulletin, casting an anemic cone across the nearest pew.
The familiar space is altered by shadow. Pews rise and fall like the ribs of some sleeping creature; the colored glass yields nothing but darker patches against the storm. Somewhere, water ticks methodically into an unseen bucket. Miriam feels the floor flex faintly under her first step and stops, her eyes not yet adjusted, her heart making a disconcertingly audible case for retreat.
Wesley speaks without turning, his voice as flat and courteous as if she were a deliveryman at the wrong back door. “Watch your step; floorboard’s loose there.” It is the same warning he has given a hundred times, to children racing in for Bible school and to pallbearers carrying more than a man’s weight, and it is offered now with no more ceremony for a Langley than for the rest.
She hears herself before she can compose anything gentler. The apology comes out raw and breathless, catching on its own corners. She did not know, she says. Did not know about the “strategic acquisition” phrase, would never have chosen those words for anything living. She only saw the memo because she lost her temper for once in her good‑girl life, crashed a conference call she was meant to smile quietly through, and demanded to see what they were saying about “her” project. Nobody on that call, she says, even asked what it would mean to the people whose great‑grandmothers scrubbed these floors, whose surnames shine in the stained glass in reds and blues.
Wesley’s hands, midway through the familiar shuffle of hymnals into neat, invisible stacks, go still. The plastic headlamp strap gleams across his hair; his knuckles blanch around the worn green covers.
“Well,” he says at last, almost mildly, “I can’t say I’m shocked.” He figured, from the moment she appeared with her careful smile and questions, that she was here to “check on her investment.” Driving back from that meeting, shirt plastered to his back, pride in tatters, there was a minute, a whole long curve of the road, when that even sounded like mercy. Let the rich girl take it. Let the place close on somebody else’s signature. Let the choice belong to people who count buildings the way they count stocks, and let him be done.
The words land between them heavier than thunder, and he flinches, hearing how small they make them both.
They sound different, spoken into the dim, damp air, than they ever did pacing loops in his head. Hearing himself admit he was almost relieved to hand the whole mess off to her money makes it plain what he has done with her: turned her into a walking answer, a last‑minute grant in better boots, something to be applied to a deficit and then forgotten. It is, he realizes with a sour jolt, the same trick the church has long played with him, “Wesley’ll take care of it”, as though he were a tool on a shelf, not a man with opinions and an end point. Miriam flinches because she knows that story too, the one where a family, properly addressed, at last converts into the ethical benefactors she keeps needing them to be.
Rain settles into a softer insistence on the tin above, a kind of rough lullaby. They stand in it, in the dark and the smell of damp carpet and old glue, and Miriam says, more to the pew backs than to him, that she had come hoping to prove she might be something other than a Langley line item. “I thought if I worked hard enough, if I made casseroles and scrubbed dishes and learned everybody’s names, maybe they’d have to see me as more than leverage.”
Wesley’s gaze fixes on the familiar shine worn into the end of the pew by his own shoulder. “Truth is,” he mutters, “I’ve been halfway praying for a bailout. Somebody from outside to walk in with a check big enough I could quit robbing my sleep and the petty cash, and it wouldn’t be me that locked the doors. Just…happened to me, instead.”
Neither fantasy quite survives the quiet that follows. Her picture of a family that might finally honor a boundary, his of a clean, painless bailout, feel thin against the scarred wood under their hands and the tired creak of the rafters. What’s left is smaller and sharper‑edged: no promised check, no ordained savior, only the unsettling prospect that any future this church has will rest on ordinary people choosing one another without costume or title. When Wesley finally clicks off the headlamp and they push the heavy door into the wet dusk, they do not step out as benefactor and caretaker awaiting some decision from elsewhere, but as two more neighbors starting up toward the cemetery hill, carrying a harder question: what, exactly, are they willing to put their own names to, and beside whose.
Kathleen had not, in all her years shepherding committees and casseroles, expected to find herself sitting on a rough plank with damp seeping through the seat of her slacks like any unprepared visitor. Yet here she was, knees protesting the angle, hands folded on the sensible coat spread beneath her as a token barrier against the evening chill. It was not, she decided, an altogether inappropriate penance.
The arrangement of bodies on the benches interested her more than the agenda they conspicuously lacked. There was Wesley. On the bench below, not hovering in a doorway or half-vanished into the shadows of the fellowship hall, but planted squarely among the others, shoulders angled in as though he belonged there. People’s eyes went to him now and again, attentive, measuring. For once, no one tried to press a task list into his hands. She felt a small, unfamiliar twist of guilt that this looked like a novelty.
Miriam had come without her usual trappings of helpfulness: no glossy brochures peeking from a bag, no quiet mention of “the foundation.” Instead she shared her jacket with Elsie McGraw, whose paper-thin shoulders had long ago outpaced any cardigan’s protection, and allowed herself to be wedged between two Wentley cousins who had made an art of arching an eyebrow at the name Langley. From her vantage point, Kathleen could see the girl’s throat move when someone mentioned “outside money,” but Miriam kept her chin up. It was a start.
Lydia’s arrival, notebook clasped but not flourished, provided a different sort of interest. The younger woman had, on previous visits, worn her learning like a shawl: draped just so, the better to remind herself she need not freeze. Tonight she tucked it closer. She chose a place near the back, beside old Deacon Hollis rather than the cluster of college-aged nieces who might have flattered her with questions. When she sat, she angled her body toward him, not the imagined reader in her head.
Darren came last of that little set, boots scuffing gravel in a way that seemed half apology, half declaration. He paused as he reached the circle, gaze flicking over the benches as if expecting to find a seat reserved for prodigals with unclear intentions. Finding none, he took the narrow gap beside a man who had once given testimony against him in a business meeting. Kathleen watched their shoulders brush, the faint stiffening and then, almost imperceptibly, an easing. No lightning struck; the oak remained impassive.
When Brent settled himself, it was without his usual air of proprietorship, as though the whole hollow were an extension of his checkout counter. He did not stand. He did not clear his throat in that way that preceded a “quick word.” Instead he lowered his bulk onto the outer bench, accepted a thermos from someone whose tab he carried, and, to Kathleen’s mild astonishment, asked, “Mind if I sit here?” first.
It occurred to her that the oak, with its crooked limbs and weathered bark, had seen every variety of funeral, quarrel, and quiet reconciliation this community could produce. It might, she reflected drily, be the only witness in Pine Hollow that did not prefer one outcome over another. She, alas, was not so neutral.
Still, she had come. She had chosen a place not at the head of anything but midway along the top bench, where she could feel the warmth of a teenage girl’s restless elbow on one side and the rhythmic tap of Deacon Simmons’s cane on the other. There was no microphone to adjust, no order of service for her to hold like a shield. She folded her hands and, for perhaps the first time in years, gave herself up to the uncomfortable discipline of simply being one of many.
Miriam had arrived without clipboard or branded tote, stripped of the small armor her family name usually required. She carried only a narrow-beamed flashlight, which she clicked off as soon as she reached the circle, and a folded denim jacket that ended up spread across the knees of Mrs. Cottle, whose thin cardigan had clearly lost the battle with the damp. When the older woman murmured that she was “all right, dear,” Miriam only adjusted the jacket more firmly and stayed where she was.
She might have slipped naturally into the empty space beside Wesley, where her usefulness and his quiet competence could have formed their usual, comfortable axis. Instead, she edged herself into the narrow gap between two Wentley cousins who had, not six months before, stage-whispered about “Langley money” in the potluck line. Their hips touched; no one apologized. Each time the lantern light flared across faces turned toward some new speaker, Miriam made herself keep her gaze level, hands empty in her lap, willing her presence to register as one more neighbor instead of a check waiting to be written.
Lydia stood just beyond the wash of lantern light long enough to feel conspicuous and, therefore, ridiculous. Hovering was a habit of hers: academically adjacent, emotionally adjacent, never quite implicated. Tonight, with the wet grass licking at her shoes and her aunt’s profile already turned politely away, she made herself step forward and claim a narrow space on the bench like anyone else.
Instead of building her customary little citadel of legitimacy, a stack of books, a laptop balanced as both shield and credential, she slid her satchel beneath the plank. Her notebook, traitorous comfort, she closed and laid flat on top, palm pressing it down as if pinning a restless animal. No pen uncapped, no margin headings forming. The absence of lectern, projector, or whiteboard exposed how often she had relied on props to translate herself into a room, as though she required simultaneous interpretation from Lydia to Lydia. Here, under the oak and in sight of family names etched on stone, there was no syllabus to hold between her and other people’s eyes.
She inhaled, counted silently the way she did before beginning a lecture, and then did nothing at all: did not clear her throat, did not announce a framework or propose “some guiding questions.” She angled her knees toward Deacon Hollis instead of toward some invisible audience, let the weight of his quiet presence anchor her. The page under her hand stayed blank, rough against her skin, promising not to devour these neighbors into material.
Darren, who had spent a lifetime perfecting the art of standing just outside any given circle, chose the far end of a bench by instinct and then, almost in defiance of it, eased himself inward. In another setting he might have made a joke of it, marked his own displacement before anyone else could. Here he simply shifted until his broad shoulder brushed Brent’s sleeve on one side and the wool of his old Sunday school teacher’s coat on the other.
The touch of them, former accuser and former example, living and breathing and not, as it turned out, on fire at his proximity, sent a brief, absurd urge to bolt skittering through him. Behind, the graves carried names that had muttered about him in kitchen corners; below, the church roof caught the last of the lantern glow, a silhouette of all the business meetings where his absence had been as loudly discussed as his presence once was. Old grudges and half-remembered sermons tugged like burrs at his cuffs.
But the arrangement of the evening refused him his usual script. There was no moderator with a gavel, no neatly typed agenda for him to derail or ignore. The dim, shared light flattened distinctions of boot brand and Bible edition; the lack of official order meant that, for once, no one seemed poised to call the question on him. In that unstructured hush between creek noise and someone else’s cleared throat, he discovered a small, unfamiliar margin inside himself where staying did not immediately require a plan. No angle on the building, no quiet calculation about resale value. For the space of a breath, he allowed himself the ungainly luxury of imagining a return measured in work put in, not property signed over.
Brent arrived later than most, cooler still zipped, store logo turned discreetly toward the shadows as though angling the embroidery could soften its implications. There was no front row laid out for sponsors, no donation barrel to lean on while he dispensed jokes and samples. Deprived of his usual fixtures, he slid into a gap where there was simply space, boots taking the same cold damp as everyone else’s. Without a counter to prop his elbows and persona on, his patter thinned to a few false starts and a swallowed anecdote. The open ring of faces, the graves climbing behind them, the ridge line dark and indifferent above, exerted their own quiet pressure; it was a place that made performance feel smaller than it sounded in his head. For once, he discovered, listening required less energy than managing his image, and he let the balance tip that way.
She began, unfashionably, with introduction rather than thesis. “I’m Lydia Wentley,” she said, as if there might be any doubt, and then, more quietly, “Wesley’s cousin. Marjorie’s girl.” The second identification landed better; two or three faces softened on the name, lines of distant kinship and casseroles faintly re-drawn.
“I left,” she went on, not hurrying over the word as she usually did in faculty bios and grant narratives. “For school. For work. For, ” Her voice stumbled there, catching on the edge of the more impolite reasons. She let the catch hang a moment, let them hear it, and then pushed through. “For a life I didn’t think was possible here. And I stayed gone longer than I should have.”
There was no apology worded, but there was one present, compact and unmistakable, in the space between clauses. She did not wrap it in rhetoric about “fieldwork” or “returning to one’s roots.” She did not introduce the evening with a title. Instead she looked down the rough line of benches, at shoes damp from the same grass as hers, at Deacon Hollis’s careful listening frown, at Mrs. Kirby’s unreadable, upright poise.
“I’ve written about this place from far away,” she said. “I don’t want to do that anymore. If this happens, it only happens if y’all want it, and it happens the way you say it should. Not as my project dropped on you from some office in Beckley or up at the college.”
Her digital recorder, veteran of conferences and oral history panels, lay zipped in her satchel with its red light dark. She had set the bag at her feet with deliberate clumsiness, half open so that the glossy little machine was visible if anyone cared to look, and just as deliberately untouched. The only thing in her hands was an off-white church pen with “Pine Hollow Baptist: Building in Faith” printed along its side in faded blue, the clip a little bent from years on sign-up sheets. Wesley had fished it out of a coffee can by the fellowship hall door and passed it to her without comment.
Under her thumb the pen’s plastic seam was cheap and reassuring. It would, she suspected, leak if mistreated. On her lap, a yellow legal pad lay obstinately blank: no pre-written questions, no tidy headings. The absence of her usual devices, laptop, microphone poised, the screen that made a shield, was as conspicuous to her as a missing limb. It meant that whatever was said next would have to be carried in memory and trust for a while before it earned its way to ink.
Instead of unfurling a set of “protocols,” as she had once rehearsed in the car, she stayed with kitchen words. “It’d look like talking,” she said. “At your tables, in your living rooms. Me listening more than I talk. Some nights down in the fellowship hall, coffee on, whoever wants to tell a story telling it. Nothing goes anywhere till it’s been back in this circle twice.”
She sketched it in small, practical pieces: afternoons with a pot of beans on the stove and a recorder in plain sight; story nights where grandkids could drift in and out, coloring at the next table; pages run off on the church copier, names and details read aloud before a single sentence left the hollow.
Then she started naming names, not as specimens but as hosts. “If she’d be willing, Mrs. Kirby. Deacon Harris. Miss Eula from up Lawson’s Spur.” She let each name rest, giving their owners room to refuse. Then she stopped and turned the list outward. “And who am I leaving out? Who don’t get listened to enough round here?” The question hung there, not rhetorical but waiting to be filled.
When someone asks about the ridge, she doesn’t hedge or reach for jargon. The piece of land old Mrs. Lawson left to the church, she says, would be folded into a plainspoken community trust, drawn up by a local attorney folks already know from wills and land lines, and read out loud, line by line, at a congregational meeting where anyone can stop the reading and ask what a word means. No college letterhead at the bottom, no foundation logo in the corner, no clause tucked three pages in that lets some outside board in Charleston or Richmond decide who sets foot on that path, when the gate is open, or what, if anything, ever gets built up there.
The question, when it came, had an edge on it sharp enough to have been honed over years. “You fixin’ to write us up for some book?” Deacon Hollis asked, and the old distance between her and the hollow rose up like fog. Lydia did not flinch. She nodded once, slow. “I still hope to write,” she said, “but not about you without you. Not one word with anybody’s name on it that they wouldn’t be willing to sit beside in print. If it ever lives between covers, it’s because the folks in it could point to a page and say, ‘Yes. That’s mine, and I can live with it.’”
Instead of retreating into jargon, she flips open the legal pad on her knees and, in front of everyone, begins to draft a covenant in the same language they use over funeral dishes: nobody’s story leaves this hollow without the teller’s clear say-so; any book or article must be brought back here, read aloud, fussed over, amended in plain sight; any money, should such an unlikely windfall appear, goes first to the church light bill and the ridge trust, not her bank account or her CV. When she is done with the first rough lines, she doesn’t clutch the pad like a shield; she reaches it toward Deacon Hollis. “You mark what’s missing,” she says, offering him the pen, “because the only way my name goes under this is if yours does too. And anybody else’s that wants in.”
Miriam cleared her throat once, the sound small under the oak’s spreading limbs, and folded her hands over the spiral of wire digging into her palm. “I need to own something,” she said, looking not at Wesley or Kathleen but at the scuffed toes of her boots. “I set something in motion that I shouldn’t have. The visit from the Langley foundation (the one folks have been hearing whispers about) that’s not happening.”
There was a slight stir along the benches, the collective equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Kathleen, who had long since learned that good news rarely came in such a preface, watched the younger woman’s face rather than her words.
“I called the office last night,” Miriam went on. “Left a message, then called back this morning until I got an actual person instead of a polite recording. I told them not to put Pine Hollow on any schedule, not to send a team down to ‘assess needs’ or ‘explore opportunities.’” She let the quoted phrases hang in the air, their capital letters almost audible. “Whatever happens here, it won’t be rolled into some Langley Rural Engagement Initiative with my grandfather’s name on the cover page and pictures of your children in the brochure.”
Her fingers tightened on the notebook. “I know some folks would call that a foolish choice. Walking away from big money, from experts who could fly in, make charts, and tell you what your own roof is doing.” A dry, almost self-mocking smile tugged at her mouth. “But when I heard myself say, ‘No, thank you. Not this time,’ it didn’t feel like I was giving something up. It felt like taking something back. Like…breathing out.”
She lifted her eyes then, meeting a scattering of looks, some wary, some simply tired. “I don’t want you in anybody’s glossy report,” she said more quietly. “Not as a success story, not as a problem to be solved. If I stay involved, it has to be on terms that don’t turn this place into somebody else’s project.”
“So if there is money from me,” she said at last, “it’s not a project. It’s not a wing with anyone’s name on it, and it’s not a new fellowship hall with a plaque you have to walk past every Sunday to feel grateful. It’s a bucket under a leak, only with a bank account instead of a dishpan.”
A faint ripple of laughter loosened the air.
“I mean something very small and very boring,” she went on. “A little emergency pot for the things that won’t wait for a fundraiser: the furnace that dies in January, the breaker that keeps tripping, the soft spot in the roof that turns into a waterfall over the organ. That’s all.”
She named a figure then. What she could move, today, from her savings without asking any Langley to approve. It was, by the standards she’d grown up with, hardly more than a rounding error; by the standards of Pine Hollow’s light bill and propane deliveries, it might as well have been a thunderclap. Conversation stopped. Even the leaves overhead seemed to hush.
“And it doesn’t buy me a vote,” she added quickly. “It just buys you a little time.”
Before anyone can accuse her of strings, she lays them out herself, line by unflattering line. The money, she says, will be fenced in tighter than any Langley trust: a written rule that she may not, under any circumstance, decide on its use alone; a promise that quarterly statements, every deposit, every withdrawal, will be printed and thumbtacked to the fellowship-hall corkboard beside the bake sale sign-up sheet. No check goes out without two signatures that are not hers and not anyone whose Christmas bonus depends on her grandfather’s goodwill. The fund, she repeats, is to answer first to the church board and then to a separate committee made up, preferably, of the folks who argued loudest against taking outside help at all.
When a man at the far end of the last bench asks, flat as gravel, what the catch is this time, she doesn’t protest that there isn’t one or invite them to trust her heart. She says, instead, that she doesn’t much trust her own blind spots, or the reflexes she was raised inside, and that the whole tangle of rules she’s just described is there to keep her from sliding back into them unnoticed. If her last name makes people’s shoulders come up around their ears, she adds, that is precisely the sort of unease she wants in the room where every bill is read aloud and every leaky pipe and breaker box is argued over before a check ever gets signed.
A few heads lift at that, surprise softening into something more like calculation, and Miriam feels the faintest give in the room. She presses the advantage only as far as seems decent: proposes they name, today, at least one person who has never trusted a Langley farther than the mailbox to sit on the committee, plus someone who has counted church offerings since before she was born, and a younger congregant who is not afraid of spreadsheets or saying “this makes no sense.” Every receipt, every email, every bank statement, she says, will pass through their hands first; if they tell her no, the money simply sits until they do not. Then she stops, hands folded around her knees, and lets the silence test whether they believe her enough to make her accountable instead of ornamental.
Kathleen pushes herself up from the rough bench with both hands, a small wince tightening her mouth before she smooths it away. Her knees complain (of course they do, after an hour on unpadded wood with the air turning damp) and for a breath she simply stands there under the oak, letting the ache settle into something she can ignore. Her fingers rest, almost of their own accord, on the back of the bench where Wesley sits. The plank is sun-bleached and splintered in places; she feels the grain under her palm, the faint tremor in her own hand, and wills it still.
The late light catches in her silver hair as everyone waits to see if she is about to reclaim the reins she has so carefully loosened over the afternoon. A faint breeze comes up from the hollow, stirring the paper programs some of them still hold from Sunday and the artificial flowers on the newest graves. It presses her blouse lightly against her ribs, cools the flush that has crept up her neck. She is aware, in the peculiar double-vision she has cultivated over decades, of how she must look: upright, composed, precisely the figure who rises when something needs to be set straight.
She feels every eye on her, Miriam’s anxious and too bright, Lydia’s narrowed in wary curiosity, Darren’s hooded, Brent’s speculative, the older women’s appraising. Even the younger ones, half-distracted by phones in their pockets, have stilled. Somewhere beyond the tree line a truck grinds its way down the county road, but up here the sound is muffled; the only immediate noises are the creak of shifting bodies on benches and, closer than she would like, the faint rush of her own breath.
Once, not so many years ago, she would have cleared her throat and begun to arrange matters. To “help them think it through,” as she liked to put it, which usually meant coaxing the room toward the decision it ought to have wanted in the first place. The habit rises now like an old hymn on the tongue. She could frame what has been said, soothe away the sharper edges, remind them of prudence and decorum and the denominational guidelines in that binder in the church office that only she seems to read.
Instead she keeps her hand on the bench, the contact with the worn wood and with Wesley’s solid presence below it anchoring her. She can see the side of his face from this angle, the hollow at his temple, the new lines at the corner of his mouth. He does not look up at her; his eyes are fixed on the narrow strip of packed earth between his boots, as if the verdict on his own character might be written there in the dust. That sight pinches something in her chest harder than the arthritis ever has.
She swallows once, feeling the dryness in her throat (a ridiculous time to be short of spit, she thinks with a flicker of old nurse’s irritation) and decides, quite consciously, to let the room keep its hold on the reins. If she is going to stand, she will do it for a different sort of work. She draws a slow breath, not the commanding one she uses at budget meetings but a steadier, smaller intake, and lets the silence stretch just long enough that it belongs to everyone, not only to her. Only then does she open her mouth.
When she does speak, the sound of it startles her a little, it is so much smaller than the voice she has trained for fellowship-hall announcements and budget reports. It is clear enough, but the steel has been taken out of it, and what remains feels oddly bare. She says Wesley’s given name first, “Wesley”, letting it sit there in the air like any other man’s, not tucked up safe inside “Brother Morton” where feelings may be patted and passed over. Then, before the old habit of softening can take her, she names what she has done. Those questions she raised about petty cash, that missing receipt she pressed him over. She calls that suspicion wrong, not unfortunate or regrettable, and says aloud that she knows, perhaps better than most, what it costs here to have your name even slightly smudged. In a place where stories travel faster than the mail and less accurately than the weather report, once a doubt is spoken it seldom entirely dies. She says she has no wish to be the one who set that in motion over him, not after all the years they have watched him carry keys and burdens both.
There is a faint stir then, a shifting of weight, a cough held back, as if some of them are testing the strange sight of Kathleen Kirby placing herself, however briefly, on the side of the accused rather than the accusers. She does not reach for any excuse about being tired, or worried, or “only doing her duty.” Instead, with a small, visible effort, she leaves the blame where it belongs: on her own eagerness to guard the church’s purse while forgetting the worth of the man who has been watching over its doors.
She does, at last, turn toward him, not grandly but enough that there is no mistaking whom she is addressing. In a tone nearer to confession than commendation, she simply states what most of them could have recited themselves if asked and yet somehow never had: that when pipes burst at two in the morning and the men with titles were nowhere to be found, it was Wesley who came with a wrench and a flashlight; when breakers tripped ten minutes before a funeral, no one thought to ring the pastor, they rang Wesley; when snow needed shoveling, when doors needed opening, when alarms went off for no good reason, “we didn’t call the pastor, we called Wesley.” She calls that relentless, unremarked labor “a kind of pastoring”: not in the laying-on-of-hands sense, but in the dogged, everyday stewardship that has kept the place warm, lit, and standing when sermons and committees, by themselves, would have left them out in the cold.
Then, instead of proposing yet another oversight board with herself discreetly at the center, she quite consciously alters the frame. She moves that the facilities committee be re-formed with three equal partners: Wesley, bringing his ground-level knowledge and battered keys; Deacon Harlan, who has signed every check this church has written for thirty years; and Tasha from the choir, who can read an online invoice, isn’t afraid of a spreadsheet, and actually answers her email. The chairs, she specifies, should rotate among them on a clear schedule, so that no one person, least of all her, sets the agenda, holds the binder, or decides which problems are important enough to reach daylight.
A low rustle moves through the little company, surprise here, wariness there, and in more than one face a weary sort of relief, and several pairs of eyes travel from her to Wesley, as if his expression might tell them how bold they are allowed to feel. Kathleen does not hurry to fill the opening with balm or footnotes. She lowers herself back onto the bench, laces her fingers over the neat leather of her purse so they will not betray her by fussing, and remarks, almost lightly, that however they choose, she means to live with it. When the scattered hands are counted and the motion passes by a margin wider than she had permitted herself to imagine, the breath she releases is not quite a sigh and not quite a prayer, and even those on the back row can hear it.
Darren rose more slowly than a man his age ought to, thumb worrying the brim of his cap as if there were something written there he meant to rub out. For a moment he hovered in the partial shade of the oak, half in and half out of the little ring they had made, then seemed to think better of it and stepped forward until he could see every face and be seen in turn.
He cleared his throat once, the sound rasping in the open air, and one could almost feel the quip forming: the self-deprecating line, the shrug that would let them all off the hook. He let it die unsaid. When he did speak, it was without preface or ornament, the words dropping heavy and unadorned between them.
“When I come back down this road,” he said, not quite meeting anyone’s eye, “I didn’t just come to sit in a pew and sing ‘Just As I Am.’ I ran the numbers. On all of it.”
That verb sat oddly in his mouth, more boardroom than hollow, but no one corrected him.
“I looked at this place the way fellas in hard hats and clipboards look at it when they pass by. What the land’s worth now folks from out of state are buying up ridges. What the building would bring, split up into whatever pieces you could sell.” His hand tightened on the cap brim. “Figured if the church went under, I’d be first in line. Finally be the one buying instead of getting bought out.”
A small, involuntary movement passed through the group, as if several people had realized at once that a thing they had half suspected was, in fact, the thing. Kathleen felt it like a shiver in the bench slats but kept her gaze level, watching how he bore the knowledge of their flinch.
“I ain’t proud of it,” he added, and there was just enough of the old defiance in his tone to make clear that pride and confession were not simple opposites for him. “But it’s true. I had it all sketched: what kind of offer I could make if the board got desperate, how I might talk Daddy into backing me, who I know in Beckley that’d help me line up inspections and papers.”
He lifted his head then, long enough to take in the oak, the tilting stones beyond, and the church roof just visible through the leaves. “That’s what was in my mind when I rolled back in. Not revivals. Not homecomings. Just…what the place would fetch.”
He did not trouble himself with euphemisms or the prettified language of “development.” In the same flat tone, he laid out, step by unlovely step, what he had imagined: calling in a couple of men he knew from jobs in Tennessee, fellas who could throw up tongue‑and‑groove and shiplap fast enough to photograph well for city people; stripping out the pews and selling the decent lumber; knocking through the back wall of the fellowship hall to make one long, marketable space with “rustic event potential.” Maybe at first it would be short‑term rentals for hikers and leaf‑peepers; if that took, perhaps a branded “retreat center,” the kind that promised silence and soulfulness at two hundred dollars a night and never asked where the soulfulness came from.
He let the ugliness of it sit a moment before he named what had disturbed him. The graves just beyond the oak. The names chiseled on stone that matched the ones in the pew racks. The faded children’s handprints in cheap latex along the basement corridor, each little palm circled in marker with a year.
“Can’t square it,” he said finally, voice roughening. “Not if I’m standing here saying I mean to stay. Not if I’m gonna walk past your people up that hill and sleep easy.” He flicked one quick look toward his father, found no clear answer there, and dropped his gaze to the scuffed toes of his boots, as if they were the only witnesses he could presently endure.
Instead of the glossy prospectus he had once imagined sliding across some banker’s desk, he produced a creased sheet of notebook paper, lines smudged where his thumb had rested. It was nothing more than a hand-scrawled list each figure circled, then totaled, then underlined twice. That was all, and yet it was as naked as any confession. He proposed they buy at contractor rates under the church’s own name, no middleman, no percentage. His own labor he set at a plain day wage, written there in ballpoint as if to keep himself honest. “Every invoice goes on that bulletin board,” he said. “You all watch every nail I drive. I don’t lay a hand on anything that ain’t on paper, with three of you signing off before a check ever leaves the treasurer’s box.”
“I can’t change why I left, or what folks said after,” Darren added, and this time the words dragged, rough as gravel. “Judge me on this, not on what I ran from.” The plea hung there between him and the older men on the back benches like a board laid across a gap. His father’s jaw worked twice, as if starting a sentence and swallowing it back down. The hush that followed was not any sort of embrace, arms stayed folded, mouths tight, eyes sharp and appraising, but it did not close over his head, either. Instead people leaned in, shoes nudging the dust, as though they were testing the grain of his offer the way you’d heft a beam and listen for hidden rot.
It was one of the girls balanced on the splintered edge of a bench who broke the spell at last, blurting out whether she could learn to swing a hammer instead of just toting shingles like always. The question was bold and a little apologetic at once, as if she half-expected to be laughed back into her place. Darren’s answer, an unguarded bark of laughter that shook some of the set from his shoulders, met her exactly where she stood. “Long as you listen and mind the safety rules, there’s room on that scaffold for anybody wants to learn,” he said, not as a favor but as plain fact. A couple more teens exchanged glances and mumbled their own interest; an older deacon’s slow nod took them all in together, as though trying on the picture of young bodies on the roof beside this once-errant son. The circle shifted, just slightly: knees angling, shoulders turning, a gap opening where plans might fit, the talk tilting from whether there would be a future to how, exactly, they meant to build it.
Brent cleared his throat once, then again, as though the first attempt had lodged halfway and needed dislodging by sheer persistence. His hands were laced so tight the skin over his knuckles had gone a worrying shade between white and blue. For a man who could usually make talk flow as easily as the coffee at his store counter, the pause itself was an admission.
“I reckon I ought to start where it really started,” he said at last, looking not at Wesley or Kathleen but at some middle distance just over the oak’s lowest limb. “That whole ‘bridge credit’ mess I came in here with? That wasn’t just me tryin’ to be neighborly. That was me scared half to death of losin’ my grip on Colby’s and wantin’ to make sure if anything good happened up here, my name was stapled to it.”
Without the polished wood and barcode scanner between him and his audience, there was nowhere to rest his weight but his own two feet. The genial patter he used on tourists and tired mothers, Wouldn’t you rather get the big bag? and Now your daddy used to swear by this brand: crumbled. In its place came something slower, rougher, like a man dragging words up from a well he’d kept lidded.
“I liked the sound of folks havin’ to come through me if the lights were gonna stay on,” he went on, a crooked half-smile acknowledging the ugliness. “Liked knowin’ my little notes in that ledger book meant you all had to look my way. Felt…less left behind, I guess, with everything changin’ and big-box stores and kids leavin’.”
He did not dress it up as strategy, nor try to baptize it as concern. “It’s a bad habit I got,” he said, almost clinically, as if reporting a symptom to a nurse. “Turnin’ help into a string I can tug on later. My daughter could tell you about that,” he added, the brief hitch on the word daughter doing more work than any confession of remorse. “So if I’m gonna offer anything now, it’s got to be without strings, or I’m just feedin’ the same beast that’s eatin’ at me and at you.”
He set out the substitute offer in terms even the most suspicious among them could trace with a finger. No tabs, no private ledger in his back room, no quiet side understandings. Any break he gave on roofing nails, wiring, paint, or plywood would be written right there on the printed price sheet he promised to tack up on the church bulletin board and on the corkboard by the feed bins at his store, where half the hollow already paused to read lost-dog notices. The discount would run for a set spell, three months, say, six at most, “so we don’t all get lazy and call it normal,” he said, more to himself than to them.
He added, in a voice gone oddly formal, that he was willing to put in writing, with the pastor’s signature if folks liked, that no sale under that program could ever be turned into a lien or claim on the church’s land or building. “You won’t ever owe me more than what it says on your receipt,” he finished. “And if this sits wrong in your craw, you say so, and we’ll just let it drop. I won’t pull my tithe, and I won’t pout and take my nails and dog food and potluck cornbread mix and go home.”
When talk widened to the shape of the thing they were, improbably, agreeing to build together: keep the sanctuary as a church, name the ridge as common ground, turn the fellowship hall into something halfway between a classroom and a front porch, Brent’s name rode the same current as Miriam’s modest fund, Darren’s labor, and Lydia’s penciled timelines. It did not loom larger.
Kathleen, who only weeks before would have translated his offer into a fait accompli with a few gracious phrases, merely inclined her head and asked, “And who exactly is keeping the books on these discounts, Mr. Colby?” Others followed: how long would they run, what if Colby’s hit a bad season, could another supplier join in later? They spoke as customers and fellow stewards, not clients on their knees.
When the time comes to choose, the air tightens like it does before a storm; folk shift on the splintered benches, eyes skittering from the dim church roof to the ridge line and back to one another’s guarded faces. Someone, Kathleen cannot later recall who, remarks, almost offhand, that anything touching Colby’s will answer to the same new transparency rules as grants and contracts. Brent’s jaw works once before he gives a stiff, almost relieved nod, as if grateful to have the terms spoken aloud. Then hands rise: first a scattered few, then more, until the bare majority shows itself in the open, undeniable as the creek’s path below.
The realization sits oddly companionable beside Kathleen on the bench. This, then, is what shared reins look like: not decorous unanimity but a series of small, public yesses and noes that bind each giver as tightly as the church they mean to save. It promises no miracle, only the exhausting mercy of having to answer to one another.
It was, in Kathleen’s private estimation, quite an odd sight.
The first Saturday after the vote, she came round the corner from the kitchen, carrying a box of mismatched work gloves, and nearly walked straight into it: the folding table not merely erected but prepared. Someone (surely not Wesley) had thought to lay out the clipboard, line up sharpened pencils in a chipped mug, set a Styrofoam cup of coffee on a folded paper towel to keep it from spotting the metal, and add, with a touch of what she could only call whimsy, a roll of blue painter’s tape like a place card.
Wesley himself stood two steps off, hands in his pockets, looking at the arrangement with the wary suspicion of a man confronted with an unearned kindness. Kathleen paused where she was, just beyond the fringe of the gathering bodies, and waited for the inevitable: his eyes seeking hers, a muttered, “You’d best handle this, Ms. Kirby.” He had been handing her the invisible gavel for years.
Instead, she watched his shoulders lift and settle. No grand squaring, just a very small decision made in the tired muscles of his back. He stepped behind the table as though taking up a burden left out for him, cleared his throat once, and called, “Alright, folks, if we can gather in a bit?”
The room obeyed. Not perfectly; this was Pine Hollow, not a parade ground. But conversations thinned, hammer handles stilled, and faces, her own included, tilted toward him. The voice that followed was not loud, but it was level, and to Kathleen’s mild alarm contained no trace of appeal to her for confirmation.
He spoke of gutters and back steps, of the furnace filter and the cemetery path, with the calm of a man reciting a weather report whose outcome he could, for once, partly shape. When Mrs. Hanley attempted to interject about fresh silk flowers for the communion table, he listened, nodded, and replied, “Not this morning, ma’am. We’re starting with what keeps the doors open.”
The slightest murmur passed through the circle. Kathleen, who had long considered herself the unofficial arbiter of what did and did not “keep the doors open,” felt the words land with a curious mixture of resistance and relief. He did not look to her for rescue. He simply wrote something on the clipboard, as if that settled it.
“Teen crew,” he went on, “I need three of you on the cemetery path, rakes, gloves, watch your footing. Darren, if you don’t mind taking the back steps with Deacon Miller and Brother Ray? That top riser’s about had it. And, uh, Mr. Pritchard, I’m grateful, but we’re not touching wiring today. You’d help us a heap more with trim paint.”
The teenager with the tragic mustache actually grinned at being addressed as “crew.” Darren gave a short, ironic half-salute and moved toward the rear door without the old stiffness that used to accompany any church request. Mr. Pritchard, inveterate meddler in wires, subsided with only a token harrumph.
Twice more, Kathleen heard that quiet “No” from Wesley’s mouth, attached to projects of undeniable charm and negligible necessity. Twice more, the earth remained uncracked beneath his boots. People merely adjusted, like chairs around a table that had been moved six inches and, after a brief protest, found to fit better.
She set her box of gloves down at the side, no longer on the head table, she noticed, and began opening it for the line that was, unmistakably, forming in front of him and not her. Later she might resent this reconfiguration; for now, she allowed herself one small, wry satisfaction.
“Well,” she murmured, more to the humming fluorescent lights than to anyone in particular, “it seems we have ourselves an operations man.”
And then, being a practical woman, she fell in beside his system rather than in front of it, and watched with a sharp, not unkind eye how the hollow rearranged itself around a man who, at long last, had stepped out from under the table.
It was not magic, merely method, but in Pine Hollow the two were often confused. The line in front of the folding table lengthened, and Wesley (Wesley, of all people) did not dissolve beneath it. He glanced up, took stock, and dispatched his first petitioners with an authority so mild it might almost have been mistaken for suggestion.
“Eli, Cody, Jayden: y’all take these,” he said, sliding three pairs of gloves across to the lanky boys hovering at the edge. “Rakes are out by the shed. Head up the cemetery path, clear what you can, and if it looks too steep, you don’t play hero. You holler.”
The boys straightened in that awkward, pleased way particular to fourteen-year-old shoulders newly entrusted with anything more dangerous than a hymnbook.
“Darren,” Wesley went on, “if you’d grab Deacon Miller and Brother Ray, I’d be obliged. That back step’s loose as a baby tooth. Let’s start there ‘fore somebody ends up testifying from the emergency room.”
He received three nods, one grunt, and the faintest of smirks: and all three men actually moved.
When Mr. Pritchard advanced, eyes already on the ceiling fixtures, Wesley’s hand landed, astonishingly firm, on the older man’s elbow.
“I know you’re rarin’ to get at that wiring,” he said, with the respect due a man and the caution due a live wire, “but not today, sir. We’re keepin’ it simple. Trim paint’s laid out by the south wall; that’s where we truly need you.”
“But these fluorescents, ” Mr. Pritchard began.
“No, sir,” Wesley repeated, softer but no less definite. “We’re not doing that today. We’re fixing what keeps the doors open first.”
There was a moment, the sort Kathleen, from her post with the glove box, had come to recognise, when the hollow held its breath to see if the earth would object. It did not. Mr. Pritchard, thwarted yet oddly dignified with a clear task and a brush, went off toward the paint.
Twice more before the line thinned, Wesley heard his own voice pronounce that small, astonishing “No,” and each time the ceiling failed to fall, the congregation merely flowed around the obstacle, as water will when someone has finally had the sense to place a proper stone.
The line had just begun to fray into little clumps of conversation when one of the Wentley cousins, emboldened by audience and caffeine, called across the hall, loud enough for every hammer and rake to hear, that they might as well “ordain Wesley Pastor of Pipes and Wiring and be done with it.”
Once, that would have sent Wesley’s gaze skittering for the nearest exit. Or for her, which was nearly the same thing. Kathleen saw the old prickle at the back of his neck, the half-startled hitch in his shoulders. But the laughter that followed was warmer than the hollow’s usual brand of teasing; it had in it the sound of people naming a fact.
“Long as the congregation tithes in duct tape and lumber,” Wesley answered, grinning outright as he wiped his hands on his jeans. The room rewarded him with another round of chuckles, not mean-spirited but companionable, and (most telling to Kathleen’s eye) no one rushed in to soften the jest or steer it away.
He let the noise crest and ebb, then bent his head to the clipboard again, pencil poised. The joke, like the table, had not crushed him. It had only settled around him, as if the hollow were trying on, for size, the notion that a man might lead from behind a sheet of lined paper and a roll of blue tape.
By dusk, the tally on Wesley’s clipboard was more generous than his own expectations: gutters cleared, downspouts mended, the worst of the gravel ruts filled, a short in the fellowship‑hall outlet identified and taped off instead of prayed over, a temporary brace tucked under the soft sanctuary step. His final walk‑through was almost ceremonious. He rattled the back doors, checked the stove knobs, flicked off the humming fluorescents, and, reaching automatically for the bulging trash bag by the kitchen door, found his hand intercepted.
“Got it, Wes, go on home,” said Cody Wentley, taller now than seemed quite respectful. Already swinging the bag up onto his own shoulder. Wesley opened his mouth with the usual protest and heard, to his own faint surprise, nothing come out but, “Alright. Thank you.”
Instead of going home, he drifted back into the dim sanctuary, where the colored light from the stained glass pooled in tired puddles on the worn carpet. Kathleen, lingering in the doorway with a box of half‑used candles, watched him choose the third pew as if by habit. He balanced a cheap spiral notebook on his knee and, after a long pause, wrote “Five‑Year Plan” at the top in block letters, as though neatness might confer authority. The first items came slowly, his pencil pressing hard: “1) New furnace before next winter. 2) Roof patched proper, not just tar. 3) Wiring inspected by someone licensed.” Each line seemed to cost him something, an admission that the building, and its caretaker, might deserve more than improvisation. Then, in the margin, cramped and slanting, as if he meant it to be overlooked even by God, he added, “4) Take a weekend away: somewhere with no leaks.” He underlined it once, the gesture almost defiant, then shut the notebook with a soft slap and slid it into his back pocket, as though a man could carry such hope as quietly as a pocketknife.
The first Tuesday she set up in the fellowship hall, Kathleen had not intended to linger. Tuesday nights, in her private calendar, were an interval between obligations: freezer‑meal inventories, pill boxes refilled, a quiet half‑hour with the paper while the six‑o’clock news scolded the world. They were not, by any reasonable design, meant for watching a young woman in a neat denim jacket lay out a command center on one of Pine Hollow’s wobblier folding tables.
Yet there Miriam was, sliding a sleek silver rectangle from its padded sleeve as though the fellowship hall were accustomed to such things. The old refrigerator hummed its disapproval in the corner, and the fluorescents above flickered in syncopated anxiety, louder than either of the human voices trying not to echo off cinderblock walls.
“I’m sorry, it’s slow out here,” Miriam said, holding her phone aloft like an offering to some invisible altar. “The hotspot keeps dropping.”
Wesley, at the same table, had already arranged his own arsenal: three grease‑smudged repair manuals, a cigar box of receipts that had never met a proper ledger, and the church’s aging desktop printer, which looked personally offended by the laptop’s arrival. He leaned in toward the screen she angled his way, blinking at a PDF as if the letters might rearrange themselves into something hospitable.
“Community Facilities. “Eligibility guidelines.”
“Might as well be written in Greek,” Wesley muttered, not quite under his breath.
“Federal,” Kathleen supplied from the kitchen doorway, before she could stop herself. “Which is worse.”
Two heads turned; she lifted the box of plastic cutlery in her arms as if to justify her presence. They were not, she observed with faint irritation, in need of cutlery.
“I can…put these away and be out from under your feet,” she added, in what she hoped was a tone of airy unconcern.
“You’re not in the way, Mrs. Kirby,” Miriam said, quick and earnest. “Honest. We’re just: trying to figure out what half this means.”
Miriam’s finger traced down the glowing page. “Let’s see. ‘Applicants may include local governmental entities, nonprofit corporations serving rural populations…’ That’s you all, right? Nonprofit?”
“Non‑something,” Wesley said. “Depends what day you catch us.”
He squinted again. “‘Capital improvements,’” he read aloud with care, the phrase sitting uneasily in his mouth. “What’s that when it’s at home?”
“Big stuff,” Miriam said. “Buildings, systems. Like…a new furnace.” She glanced toward the ceiling as it coughed out a reluctant puff of lukewarm air. “Or insulation that isn’t just. “Reckon we’re rich in that, at least.”
“And ‘hazard mitigation,’” she went on, scrolling. “That’d be…wiring that won’t burn you all up in your sleep.”
“That’d preach,” Wesley said, which for him was nearly giddy.
Kathleen, stacking forks into the drawer with more precision than plastic deserved, allowed herself one small inward concession. There was something unexpectedly respectful in the girl’s translations. No talking down, no pitying uplift, just the plain conversion of foreign coin into local tender. And Wesley, who would once have stood at a respectful distance from such technology as from a live snake, was leaning in, forearms braced on the table, not cowed but intent.
“‘Matching funds,’” Miriam read. “That means they’ll pay part if the church can pay part.”
“We can match in casserole dishes,” Wesley said dryly. “Don’t reckon that’s the currency they’re after.”
“It isn’t always money,” Miriam countered. “Sometimes it’s labor, or in‑kind stuff. We can list volunteer hours. Your hours.”
Wesley snorted. “Don’t do that. Government’ll come out here with a stopwatch and tell me I been slacking.”
But his hand, Kathleen noticed, had found a pen. While Miriam talked, he began, almost shyly, to write in the margin of a crumpled utility bill: dates, hours, jobs done. As if someone had suggested that what he did, day in and day out, might count for more than habit and obligation.
Week by week, a rhythm took on the dignity of a standing appointment. Miriam would perch her laptop at one end of the wobbling table like a visiting specialist, clear her throat, and read aloud the bureaucratic incantations. Then, with a kind of patient cheerfulness, she rendered “capital improvements” into “new furnace that doesn’t gasp,” “structural integrity” into “floor that won’t pitch Mrs. Haddix into the aisle,” and “hazard mitigation” into “wiring that won’t burn us up while the choir’s on verse three.” Wesley, for his part, became curator of an unlikely archive. From cigar boxes, grocery sacks, and the depths of the supply closet, he exhumed dog‑eared folders of past bills, pink‑edged shutoff notices, and his own cramped pencil notes: “patched leak again,” “borrowed from petty cash, paid back.” Laid out in rows and columns, date, amount, purpose, outcome. The debris of his scrounging acquired, to his faint bewilderment, the shape of a ledger. “We can call this ‘in‑kind maintenance,’” Miriam said, tapping a cell with her cursor. He stared at the screen a moment longer than politeness required, as if testing the notion that his years of improvisation might be entered under some heading more dignified than “making do.”
On the evenings when the printer had finally spat its last page and the grant portal declared itself satisfied, Miriam would close the laptop with a little exhale and follow Wesley out to the parking lot, where his truck waited like an elderly relative determined to be of use. She took the passenger door’s peculiar lift‑and‑shove in stride by the second week, notebook balanced on her knees as they rattled down to Colby’s and then on to the discount mart in town. Between the end cap of dented cans and the aisle of store brands, he initiated her into his mother’s private liturgy: which labels meant “tolerable,” which were “only if it’s the end times,” which gelatinous soups could be redeemed with enough potatoes. By the third trip she no longer had to ask. Her hand went automatically to the right shade of green on a generic label, to the off‑brand cornflakes that “don’t turn mush so quick.” Once, without comment, she slipped a box of herbal tea into the cart. Plain packaging, nothing that shouted health food. “For your back,” she murmured when he frowned at the unfamiliar name, then looked quickly away, as if the wrong sort of concern might spook him worse than any price tag.
The drives back lengthen in the talking. Once lists and receipts are put to bed, their words stray into other reckonings: the summers he mowed around his father’s stone for gas money, her first bewildered winter under city fluorescents, the small treacheries by which each of them has managed to leave or stay, miles away in their minds while their bodies never quite departed.
One late night, rain ticking soft against the windshield at the four‑way stop by the old feed mill, the truck gives a little shimmy over a pothole and her hand slips, lands square over his on the gearshift. She does not snatch it back. The wipers drag a slow, weary arc; they both stare straight ahead, faces composed, every nerve acutely aware of the shared weight and warmth between their palms. The empty intersection holds its breath with them. When at last the light changes and the truck lurches forward, his fingers tighten almost imperceptibly under hers, and they drive on into the wet dark, two dutiful people behaving as if nothing whatsoever has altered.
By midweek, Lydia had, in the manner of all successful occupations, stopped asking whether she might use the space and begun behaving as if no other arrangement were conceivable. The rickety metal chair in the fellowship hall’s back corner scraped a protesting groove in the linoleum; the wobbly card table, long exiled to holding lost‑and‑found mittens and outdated VBS curriculum, now bore her laptop, a legal pad dense with arrows and question marks, and a teetering stack of printed pages banded in rubber and peril.
The overhead fluorescents hummed with the sulky persistence of appliances long past their prime. Every so often one would flicker in a half‑hearted bid for drama, only to think better of it and settle back into its usual jaundiced glare. The ancient copier against the wall, persuaded out of semi‑retirement by Kathleen’s firm hand and Wesley’s surgical application of tape and toner, chugged along in counterpoint: grind, whir, a heroic clank, then the slow emergence of another transcript of a kitchen‑table interview, another porch conversation coaxed onto paper.
Lydia fed it pages with a practised air, as though she had always divided her time between faculty meetings and temperamental church machinery. The machine rewarded her with faint gray ghosts of voices: a “you know how it was back then” half‑caught in the margin, a “don’t put that part down” preserved in spite of itself. She leaned over the warm sheets, circling phrases, bracketing dropped g’s and double negatives like a woman trying to decide whether to apologize for them or let them stand as they were, sturdy and unconcerned with her tenure file.
Around her, the fellowship hall continued its ordinary life at a slightly muted distance. The refrigerator in the kitchen door muttered and sighed. Somewhere nearer the sanctuary, a vacuum cleaner droned and cut off; Wesley’s footsteps crossed and recrossed the hallway with the quiet assurance of a man who knew precisely which breaker could be tripped without plunging the entire building into darkness. Voices drifted in occasionally (someone hunting for a serving spoon, a child being shooed away from the baptistry curtain) and paused, curious, at the sight of Lydia’s paper fort. A few of the braver souls ventured close enough to ask, “That one of them stories?” and leave, faintly pleased, when she said, “It’s yours.”
Most afternoons it happened as if by unwritten appointment. Sometime after the worst of the day’s heat and before supper pots began to rattle, Kathleen would appear first, pocket calendar and reading glasses in hand, claiming the straight‑backed chair as though it were a committee meeting called to order. Miriam slipped in more quietly, setting her tote bag down as if it might apologize for being from a different world. Then, according to the day and the state of their joints, came two or three elders: Mrs. Riffe with her oxygen tubing and sharp opinions, Deacon Harold with his slow chuckle, occasionally old Brother Lawson peering over bifocals held six inches from his nose.
Lydia spread the fresh transcripts along the folding table between the battered coffee urn and the scuffed hymnbook cabinet, pages weighted with salt shakers and a chipped sugar bowl. They took turns reading, one line at a time. “Now I never said it like that, honey,” Kathleen would object, tapping a phrase. “Put ‘hard times,’ not ‘economic downturn.’ We don’t talk like the six o’clock news.” Others chimed in: “That ought to be ‘Papaw,’ not ‘grandfather’… You missed where I said I near about quit church over that.” Ballpoint pens hovered, then descended in looping blue and black, crowding her careful margins with arrows, corrections, emphatic underlinings, and the occasional “NO” written with relish.
She listens more than she explains. When a sentence dressed itself up in words that sounded like a grant proposal, she watched their mouths tighten or their eyes go politely blank and, without protest, drew a single neat line through the offending phrase. When a scrap of their own speech made somebody bark out a laugh or reach for a tissue, she circled it once, then twice, while Kathleen’s finger tapped the margin. “There. That’s it. That’s how we’d tell it.” In time, the defensive lecture that rose automatically in her throat began to feel foolish even to her. Instead she caught herself saying, “All right, then. How would you put it?” and waited, pen poised, for their answer.
On clear evenings she pockets the recorder, fills a dented thermos with coffee from the fellowship kitchen, and takes the ridge path alone, her breath puffing white when the air turns sharp. She stops where the graves thin and the trees fall back, settles on a cold rock, and lets it all spool onto tape: not only the told stories but the long, companionable silences between thoughts, the creak and answer‑creak of branches, a dog barking far down‑hollow, the uneven clang of the church bell below. When a train blows its mournful horn on the distant line, she notes the way even the dead ground seems to listen.
Back in her rented room over Colby’s, she pins the marked‑up pages to the wall in crooked rows, the fellowship hall’s blue ink and coffee rings turned into a kind of wallpaper. She types until the screen blurs, sentences unspooling in a cadence that sounds unnervingly like home (less citation and thesis, more porch talk and prayer‑meeting memory, sharp with gossip and softer with grief) so that for the first time, when she reads a new chapter aloud into the recorder, she can hear not only her own careful voice but the faint echo of the names on the stones behind the church answering her back, as if granting, or withholding, their consent.
The first afternoon he backs his pickup into its old spot by the fellowship hall, Kathleen watches from the kitchen window under the respectable pretense of rinsing coffee urns. It is, she tells herself, an entirely practical curiosity. Men who arrive with toolboxes generally mean either repairs or trouble, and Pine Hollow has had more of the latter than the former.
Darren’s truck takes the turn as if it remembers the ruts. He eases it in beside the sagging lilac bush his mother planted twenty‑odd years ago, straightens the wheels with unnecessary care, and sits for a moment with his hands on the steering wheel. Even from this distance, she can see the small exhale he gives before he opens the door, as though bracing for a blow that does not immediately arrive.
A couple of middle‑school boys are already stationed at the far edge of the gravel, where boys of that age and uncertainty always seem to materialize whenever there is heavy machinery, smoke, or the faintest scent of disrepute. They have chosen a spot that allows them to claim coincidence if questioned, and have armed themselves with loose gravel, which they kick in a performance of bored indifference while their eyes follow every movement he makes.
Darren drops the tailgate with a practiced thud and begins to spread out his equipment, the battered leather of his tool belts looking, to Kathleen’s experienced eye, more honest than any pressed shirt on a Sunday morning. The boys’ conversation, thin, cracking, and full of bravado, falters when the gleam of his square and level catches the late light.
“If you’re gonna hang around,” he calls, not looking up, “you might as well learn to do it right.”
The words are offered at a volume that carries conveniently to the fellowship hall window and the boys alike. His tone is casual, almost bored. No coaxing, no pleading, certainly no altar call. It gives the children exactly what they require: room to shrug, to exchange elaborate eye‑rolls, and to wander closer in a manner that can be disavowed later.
One kicks a stone in his direction, the social equivalent of a signed contract.
“We ain’t allowed to mess with them,” the taller one mutters, by way of a last defense.
“You ain’t gonna be messing,” Darren replies, finally glancing over with a slant of dry amusement. “You’ll be learning. That’s different.”
Kathleen notes the distinction with a small, involuntary nod. It has, after all, been her own doctrine for years.
He holds up a hammer by the neck. “You know what this weighs?”
The shorter boy squints, as if the correct answer might be hovering above the handle. “Uh… ten pounds?”
“Sixteen ounces,” Darren says. “One pound. You swing it all wrong, it’ll feel like ten. You swing it right, you can work all day.”
There is just enough technical information in the statement to justify their interest and just enough quiet challenge to hook their pride. The boys drift nearer, their shoulders loosening by imperceptible degrees.
From her post at the window, Kathleen wipes the same coffee stain three times from the same saucer and thinks, with a wry mixture of alarm and satisfaction, that the hollow has acquired yet another instructor who understands that dignity is a more delicate thing than drywall.
Within a few weeks the pattern settles in so neatly that Kathleen could, if pressed, write it into the bulletin under “Regular Activities.” The buses wheeze past on the road, the hollow coughs up its crop of adolescents, and in due course there comes the familiar clatter of bicycles abandoned against the vinyl siding: each thud making Wesley wince in the distance and Darren pretend not to notice. A loose knot of teens coalesces around the makeshift workbench he has claimed from the old potluck table, their number fluctuating according to algebra quizzes, rides, and maternal suspicion.
“Measure twice, cut once,” he says so often that one of the girls paints it, in careful block letters, on a scrap of plywood and props it against the wall like scripture. He adjusts a grip on a saw or corrects the angle of a drill with a brisk tap to the wrist and a spare, precise phrase: never more than is needed, never loud. When a board goes crooked or a screw strips, he does not sigh theatrically or snatch the tool away. Instead he flips the miscut piece over, traces the error with a fingertip, and shows how to square it, his voice steady, almost amused. The first time one of the boys blurts, “Well, that was dumb,” Darren only shrugs. “Good. You got your dumb one out for today. Now we can build something.”
The release is almost physical. Laughter cracks the tight shell of their teenage self‑defence; shoulders drop, jokes loosen, and before long they are trading tales of worse mistakes: at home, at school, on other job sites none of them have actually seen. By the time the streetlights down‑hollow begin to wink on, the rough frame of a storage shelf stands upright against the cinderblock wall, more or less level, held together as much by their new, startled trust as by nails. From the kitchen window Kathleen notes, with a satisfaction she would not dream of naming out loud, that no one flinches now when he reaches to guide their hands.
On Sunday mornings he stops avoiding the sanctuary door and arrives early enough that his entrance is no longer a small spectacle. He pauses by the coat rack as if considering escape, then continues on and slips into a back pew just before the first hymn, sliding in beside his father like it is the most ordinary thing in the world. No clearing of throats, no stiff handshake. His father only nudges the hymnbook so it sits precisely between them, and they share it without comment, rough fingers brushing the same corner of the page as “Amazing Grace” rises around them. They do not look at one another, but their voices find the same line, turning pages in unison with a muscle memory older than their quarrel.
By the time the congregation organizes a Saturday crew to shore up the leaking roof, it is Darren who walks the ridge with a coil of rope over his shoulder, setting out safety lines and calling down measurements, his voice carrying clean over the hollow. His father stations himself at the ladder, jaw set, hauling shingles up hand over hand. At noon they sit side by side on the sun‑warmed tin, unwrapping sandwiches while sawdust, tar, and sweat bake into their jeans. Around them the others sprawl and chatter, trading jokes and complaints about knees and heat, but a small, held space opens between father and son. No longer quite accusation, not yet comfort, like a gap in the sheathing waiting for its next board.
It is in that pause (sandwich half‑eaten, thermos cooling between his boots) that his father finally mutters, eyes fixed on the tree line, “Didn’t think I’d see you on this roof again.” The phrase drifts out as if addressed to the poplars. Darren chews, swallows, and answers only, “I’m here, ain’t I?”. A plain sentence laid down like another shingle, sufficient to bear weight if not examination. He wipes his hands on his jeans, stands, and calls the crew back to work, letting the clean ring of hammers and the steady passing of boards speak the apology and promise he cannot yet risk shaping into words.
The first time she leaves the clipboard at home, Kathleen notices the absence like a missing brooch laid out in a drawer somewhere else; she keeps reaching for it and finding only air. By the time she settles herself at the end of the fellowship‑hall table her right hand has already strayed twice to the invisible weight that ought to be resting on her knee.
Instead there is the little spiral notebook Miriam bought in town when the school supplies went on sale, its cheerful teal cover a shade too bright for proper church business. Kathleen opens it with the same faint reluctance she once reserved for unfamiliar hymns and smooths the first page, aware that her doing so is, in itself, a small declaration. No one comments. They are busy with their coffee cups and the rustle of print‑outs and the glow of Miriam’s laptop screen, casting a pale light over half the table.
Miriam is saying something about “tiers” and “stretch goals,” tapping through sample crowdfunding pages while the others lean forward, necks craned like hens at a new feeder. Words like “shareable content” and “engagement metrics” flutter past, polite but unintelligible. Kathleen listens, because listening is a new kind of work she has set herself to do, and because she has always believed one ought to understand anything that claims to be helpful before allowing it into the sanctuary.
Her fingers, bereft of their usual schedule of agenda‑checking and timekeeping, close around a pen instead. On the top line she writes, in small, careful letters, “What do they need from me now?” then underlines the last word, the ink pressing a faint groove into the paper. It is not the sort of question one announces aloud; it feels almost indecent, like coming to a potluck with an empty dish.
She glances up as Miriam scrolls to a photograph of some distant congregation posing with oversized checks and matching T‑shirts. Around the table there are appreciative murmurs, a doubtful sniff from one of the older deacons, a whispered aside about how those shirts must have cost a fortune. In earlier years she would have ridden that aside into a gentle but firm redirection and steered the meeting toward the list already prepared on her trusty clipboard.
Today she only notes the currents: whose eyes light at the idea of an online thermometer inching toward a goal, whose mouth tightens at the thought of putting their needs on display for strangers. Her pen moves again almost of its own accord. Beneath her first question she writes, “Who is afraid? Who is excited?” and, to her own surprise, draws two small boxes she might later transform into a sort of private tally.
Someone asks Miriam whether people “out there” really give money to places they have never heard of. Someone else wonders if the photographs will have to show the peeling paint. Kathleen lets the questions rise and fall without arbitration, watching who answers whom. When a pause opens (one of those little silences that once would have prodded her into supplying a decision) she feels the old reflex gather in her chest like a breath before a hymn.
Instead she looks down at the neat, cramped line on the page, inhales, and lets the silence rest a heartbeat longer. “Perhaps,” she says at last, voice mild, “we should make a list of what feels comfortable to share, and what does not, and see where that leaves us.” It is not an edict, only a suggestion laid gently on the table. Miriam’s shoulders ease; one of the younger women nods. The moment passes without the familiar click of consensus locking into place around her.
Her hand still reaches for the missing clipboard twice before the meeting ends. Each time she catches it, redirects it to the notebook, and adds another small question instead of another instruction. By the time they stand for closing prayer, the first page is nearly full.
When Lydia outlines an oral‑history afternoon up on the ridge. Children paired with elders, phones propped on hymnals recording stories of floods and revivals and the time the choir loft caught fire from an over‑enthusiastic candle. Her tongue even reaches the tip of “release forms” before she shuts her mouth on it. She flips to a fresh page instead. The pen hovers, then writes, “Who feels left out? Who can host?” beneath yesterday’s questions. A second later she adds, almost irritably, “Weather? Access?” because one cannot entirely reform in an afternoon.
When she looks up, Lydia is explaining how some interviews might happen in people’s kitchens for those who cannot climb. The younger women are nodding. Into the small lull that follows, Kathleen hears herself say, “We’ll need to make sure the homebound folks are included somehow: maybe we bring the ridge to them, in a manner of speaking.” The table turns toward her, not for orders this time, but for possibilities, and she finds, to her surprise, that she has one or two to offer without owning the whole affair.
She keeps her old responsibilities, but they sit differently on her shoulders: the prayer‑chain calls are shorter now, with more listening and fewer prescriptions, her “Have you prayed about it?” softening into “How are you holding up, really?” and then silence enough for an honest answer. The casserole routes, too, begin to wander off their accustomed track; instead of sending yet another pan of lasagna to the same three families who will protest and accept it anyway, she pauses and asks, aloud in committee or quietly on the phone, “Who have we overlooked?” and waits to be told. In the margins of her notebook, beside names and needs, small question marks bloom where she once would have drawn tidy, satisfied checkmarks.
It surfaces almost as an afterthought at the tail end of a long evening meeting, after copier‑jam laments and furnace estimates: a young mother, cheeks still pink from corralling toddlers, wondering aloud if the children might write some of their own lines instead of reciting the photocopied script from 1989. Kathleen feels the old reflex stiffen (tradition, reliability, the safety of knowing every cue and costume change) and then a cooler, unfamiliar thought presents itself with almost mischievous clarity: What real harm in asking? Her thumb finds the pen’s clicker, a small, betraying fidget; she smooths her features into something like encouragement and hears herself say, a shade more lightly than she feels, “Let’s see what the children think; they might have notions we’d never dream up.” Around the table there is a rustle of interest that does not immediately seek her eye.
Later, at her kitchen table with a cup of tea going cold, she rereads the day’s notes, so many more question marks than underlines, and lets out a quiet, self‑mocking laugh. To her oldest friend on the phone she allows, “Turns out the church don’t fall apart if I’m not holding every thread.” Afterward, alone with the hum of the refrigerator, she writes on the last line of the page, “Trust them,” underlining it once, lightly, and closes the notebook without needing to add what used to be her favorite word: “Approve.”
The first time he leaves a pallet of bottled water by the fellowship hall door with no “Courtesy of Colby’s” sign propped against it, Kathleen happens to be the one coming round the corner with the church key in her hand.
For a moment she thinks the absence is an oversight. His printer broken, perhaps, or some new modesty that will prove temporary. The shrink‑wrapped cases gleam faintly blue in the weak security light, anonymous as any grocery‑store display. Brent himself is halfway back to his truck, shoulders hunched against the evening chill, when he realizes he has been seen. He pauses, one hand on the tailgate.
“Morning, Miss Kathleen,” he says, though it is nearly dark. He does not gesture toward the water, does not explain, only wipes his palms on his jeans as if they were wet rather than merely work‑rough. “Figured y’all know where it come from.”
It is, she reflects, not at all the same as his old line delivered with a grin wide enough to carry half the congregation. This one drops between them with an awkward simplicity that leaves surprisingly little room for her customary commentary.
She could, if she chose, fill that space. There are remarks available to her: about generosity that needn’t hide, about how the committee might like to acknowledge the gift properly. Instead she finds herself studying the way he does not quite meet her eye, the quick, embarrassed tilt of his head before he turns away. Something in it reminds her, disconcertingly, of a boy caught doing a kindness he would rather not have praised.
“Well,” she says at last, the key cool and solid in her fingers, “we’re obliged, all the same.” It is as bare a thank‑you as she has ever offered him, unadorned by suggestions, and he only nods once, climbs into the truck, and drives off without so much as a lingering joke in the doorway.
Inside, as she notes the delivery in her little book with its new crop of question marks, she hesitates over the line where a name would usually go. After a moment she writes simply, “anonymous,” and, because old habits are not broken in an evening, adds in smaller letters beside it: “very likely not for long.”
Word makes its slow, sidelong way round not through banners but through their disappearance; folks register, in that attentive silence the hollow does so well, that the bright orange COLBY SPONSORS posters have vanished from the bulletin board, leaving behind an expanse of cork studded now with handwritten notes of thanks that name casseroles and coolers but no donors. Kathleen, passing by on a Sunday, sees Sister Eleanor’s careful script, “To whoever brought the extra ice: bless you”, and feels a small, startled prick of respect as sharp as any rebuke.
Down at the store, change arrives just as quietly. One week there is only the usual clutter near the back: stacked dog food, a jumble of rakes. The next, a card table materializes in that dim corner, two metal folding chairs drawn up as if by accident. By Friday there are four chairs, a plug‑in coffee pot breathing steam, and a tin of generic cookies with no price tag and no sign. “Help yourself,” someone has written on an index card, the marker line a fraction shakier than Brent would like the world to know.
At first they linger in the safe lanes (between canned beans and motor oil) eyeing the little coffee pot as if it might be wired to a payment plan. In Pine Hollow, nothing from Brent Colby has ever been entirely without terms. But the coffee remains uncharged, the cookies replenished without comment, and the chairs, inexplicably, are never folded up and put away.
Gradually a few of the older men begin claiming the space as if it were their own notion. They park themselves there after unloading feed, caps pushed back, trading opinions on the weather, grandbabies, and bad backs. Brent keeps to the register and the stockroom, not hovering, not angling close enough to steer the talk toward tabs or favors owed, as though he has finally understood that the listening is the whole of the offering.
One Friday afternoon, while a small knot of church ladies shell peas at the table and Brent busies himself with an earnest, unnecessary rearrangement of dog food within earshot, a bell over the door jingles and his daughter walks in, suitcase still in the truck. She takes in the bare walls, the bulletin board conspicuously free of COLBY SPONSORS, the easy, unselfconscious laughter at the back. For a moment her brow creases (as if she has stepped into the wrong store) before she looks at him properly and says, half‑teasing, half‑bewildered, “You change something in here, Dad? It’s…quieter.”
The next day, when she notices the plain cardboard by the fellowship‑hall door and asks why his name ain’t on so much as a strip of tape, he studies the steering wheel a long beat and says, “Figured it ain’t all about my name.” She waits, weighing old irritations against this unfamiliar modesty, then, almost offhand, “Well… you wanna get coffee in town? Just talk?”
For one treacherous second the old joke springs to his tongue and he feels it there, mean and easy. He swallows it back like bad medicine. “Yeah,” he says instead, rough but steady. “I’d like that.” The silence that follows sits between them not like unpaid balance but like a table someone’s just cleared, waiting on whatever might be set down next.