“I believe that boy right there knows something.”
Betty Shears was standing straight up at her table near the front of the fellowship hall. She’s seventy-nine years old. She’s buried two husbands. She’s played the organ at Mount Hope Community Church since before I was born.
And she was pointing her cane straight across the room at my grandson.
Every head at every table turned.
Wyatt’s ears went the exact color of the cranberry relish on the table in front of him.
I need to back up a little. Because you can’t understand what happened in that hall without understanding the two minutes before it.
It was the Wednesday supper before Thanksgiving. The fellowship hall was so full that night that Pastor Ward had to send the Hendricks boys to carry in extra folding chairs from the Sunday school rooms. Even then, my husband Dale and I ended up at the very end of a table jammed up against the dessert line. I could smell the cinnamon on somebody’s apple crisp the whole supper long.
Wyatt sat between us.
He’s twelve. My son Curtis’s boy. He’d been picking at the same plate of scalloped potatoes for ten minutes without eating one bite.
And I remember thinking, the way you sometimes think a small true thing right before a big one, that my grandson had been acting strange for two months. And I still didn’t know why.
Then Pastor Ward stood up at the front of the hall with his coffee cup in his hand. He said he had one announcement before the pie got cut.
Dana Dermot stood up beside him. Her husband Roy stood up too, and their boy Micah.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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