He stopped three steps from the bottom.
And he just looked at us.
Five women in their church dresses, wearing aprons borrowed off the hooks. Hooks that, it turned out, were still hanging exactly where we’d left them. Roasters steaming on every burner. The smell of fried onions and baked ham filling that basement, the way it had filled it for thirty years before anybody ever thought of a sign-up sheet.
“I don’t—” he started.
He didn’t finish that sentence either. Just like Harold.
He just said, “Thank you.” Very quietly.
And he went back upstairs to get his wife.
Tamra came down those stairs at eleven-twenty.
Her face was the particular color of a person who’s spent the last hour and a half rehearsing an apology to an empty room, and now has to deliver it to five women she isn’t sure will accept it.
