By the time I hung up the phone, it was nine-fifty.
There’d be seventy people at that basement table by eleven-thirty, not sixty. Grieving a girl of twenty-three and a baby who never drew a breath.
And a young man with no family, standing in the middle of all of it. With nothing to eat. And nobody, at that hour, lifting one finger to fix it.
I didn’t call Tamra and ask permission.
I want to be honest about that. Because it matters how a person does the right thing, not just whether she does it.
I didn’t do it to spite Tamra or prove a point. I just didn’t think about her at all in that first half hour.
I thought about Cole Haney standing alone in the front pew.
I thought about the funeral shelf in the pantry. The one we’d kept stocked for thirty years out of a habit nobody had ever told us to break.
