Chapter Seven

AS SHE PLUNKED INTO THE PEW, Celia squirmed in her itchy Sunday dress—too tight by half—and squeezed a finger between her chin and the elastic strap that secured the bonnet her mother insisted she wear. Her Sunday shoes were an inch too tight and the rough pine pew made her backside go numb. Slouching was impossible. Constructive—or is it constrictive? Celia couldn’t remember which amazing new word it was, but one of those captured just how she felt. How Chester sat bolt upright and still on the other side of their mother in his green woolen sweater and too-short, strangling tie was beyond her.

She hoped Reverend Willard wouldn’t get revved up this week and go on and on as he did when filled with the Spirit. Why, just last summer Wanda Whitcomb had claimed she was slain of the Spirit during one of his “magnificent sermons”—though Celia wondered if she wasn’t just trying to catch the reverend’s eye the way she fell. It wasn’t that his sermons weren’t interesting or entertaining or downright inspiring. It was just that a body could only sit still in such discomfort for so long.

But all that flew from Celia’s head when her ears caught the tap, tap of Miz Hyacinth’s cane coming down the aisle—a tap, tap that had not been heard inside Shady Grove Baptist for a good two years. Celia jumped up to catch a glimpse and wave to Miss Grace, who had a hold on Miz Hyacinth’s arm, steering her to the pew across the aisle and up one.

“Celia,” her mother hissed, “sit down.”

Celia sat, but the arrival of Miz Hyacinth in church after two years’ absence, and of Miss Grace—the woman in tweed, still in tweed—captured her attention for the entire service.