been because I’d missed the harvest dinner.
According to what Danny later told me, my mother stared down at her shoes.
She let the silence sit long enough to spoil.
Then she touched her eyes with a tissue and said:
“We don’t really know anymore.”
Technically true.
She didn’t know because she had hung up before knowing was possible.
That was the genius of it.
By the next coffee hour, someone in the choir was saying I had disappeared.
My mother never corrected her.
And in a small church, something
