Chapter 17 Still in the dress #2
There were cars all the way down Kerr and up on the grass both sides of it.
There were folding chairs still going in the side door, which was the door she had gone out of, more of them than that hall had ever been asked to hold, and there was a rented arch on the grass being straightened by two men, and the whole thing had the exact shape of a day she had already lived, run again, with the same flowers.
She stood on the far curb until the hymn started.
Then she crossed the road and went in the front, which in twenty-six years she had never once done, because the Purnells were a side-door family.
The hall took about nine seconds to notice her. It went back to front like something spilling: heads, and then the shuffle of two hundred people turning on folding chairs, and then the organ losing its nerve and stopping on a note that went on ringing in the pipes a beat too long.
Everett was at the front in a grey suit with his hands folded in front of him, and Charlene was at his shoulder, and the girl in the dress — a Roddy girl, nice enough, twenty-three — had gotten as far as the third row of chairs and had stopped with her bouquet coming down.
“Maeve,” Everett said.
He said it the way you say a name at a bedside. She had forgotten how good he was at it. He had three weeks of the other story in this room already, every Sunday of it, and he had not needed to raise his voice once to put it there.
“I’m sorry,” Maeve said, to the room, not to him. “I’m not stopping it. Get married. I’m going to say four things and then I’m going out that door.”
“You’re not well. Somebody —”
“On the fifteenth of August I cut myself out of the back of that dress with the knife off the cake table, in the Sunday school, twenty minutes before two.” Her voice came out level and carried, and she was as surprised by it as anybody there.
“Because it laced up the back and I couldn’t reach it, and there were a hundred and ten people in this hall and not one I could stand to call in and ask.
That’s the whole reason. It isn’t nerves and it isn’t a breakdown.
I got to twenty-six years of age in this town and could not think of a single person I was allowed to ask for a thing, and when I worked that out I got the knife. ”
Nobody moved. Ken Roddy had his mouth open.
“Second. The ring’s in the chipped dish on the dresser in my old room at Fourteen Kerr Street.
Second door at the top of the stairs. I took it off at six that morning to put hand cream on and I never put it back, and it has been lying in that dish for twenty-one days.
” She found her mother in the fourth row from the front, in the good green, with the flowers she had done herself in her lap.
“Mom’s looked at it every morning since.
She can say so or she can not say so, but it’s there, and everybody in this room knows what my mother’s house looks like at eight in the morning. ”
Her mother did not stand up and she did not go. Rhonda Purnell sat in a folding chair with her chin up and a hall full of her neighbors turning to look at her, and stayed.
“Third. On Friday the twenty-first of August somebody walked into the county building in Ellery and handed a complaint across the counter — a stolen ring, four thousand one hundred dollars on the Bidwell family policy.” She turned and looked at Everett for the first time.
“That’s paper on me for a thing that’s been sitting in a dish in my mother’s house the entire time.
Dara’s job went before eleven on the Monday, and somebody in that family made that call.
The sheriff stood in a doorway ninety miles from here on a Thursday morning.
And on Monday a man lost the county tow rotation he’s had seventeen years, off the north end, effective that same morning, with no reason given at all. ”
“Maeve.” Everett’s voice had not gone up. It had gone warmer, which was the thing about him. “You’ve been living with those people for three weeks. You cannot possibly —”
“I lived with you for three.” She did not raise hers either.
“Everett, I’m not calling you a liar. I’m saying every one of those four things happened inside twenty-one days to the four people standing nearest me, and there is exactly one man in this county who can make all four of them happen without ever getting out of a chair.
I’m not asking anybody to do anything about that.
I’m asking you to have heard me say it in front of everybody you know. ”
Somewhere on the left, Dara stood up.
She did not come forward and she did not speak.
She just stood, in the sixth row, in her good coat, with her hand on the back of the chair in front of her, so that the room had to see which side of it she was standing on — and Maeve had to stop for a second and get her breath, because that cost her sister more than anything in the building.
“Last thing,” Maeve said, when she could.
“I’m going back up the pass. I’ve got a job I got myself on the third day and a room I pay for on Toole Street, and I’m going to work that counter and pay that rent, and nobody up there has to want me for it.
” She looked along the front row, at Charlene, at the flowers, at the girl in the dress who was going to have this told about her for the rest of her life.
“That’s all. I’m sorry about your afternoon. Truly.”
She turned around to walk out.
And Hitch was standing at the back of the hall with his hat in his hands, just inside the door, under the clock — ninety miles and one pass, in the clothes he worked in, with the whole county in the chairs between them.
He had been there long enough to have stopped her, and he had not, and he was not moving now. He turned his head a few degrees to put his good ear to her. That was all he did.
Maeve Purnell walked the length of her own town’s church hall and out the front door into the white afternoon, and nobody in it said one word to her feet.