Kyle turned to my mother. He had to try twice before anything came out.
“Mrs. Hagen. I’m sorry.”
“I know you are,” she said. “Right now you are. I want you sorry in a month. It’ll be worth something then.”
Gary came over while people were getting back into their cars. He was a big, slow man with a gray beard and forearms like fence posts. He looked down at the pan in my hands, and then he looked up at me.
“You’re Shirley’s boy,” he said.
I had spent most of my life trying to be something other than that. Something bigger. Something with the word regional in it.
“Yes,” I said. “I am.”
We were thirty-five minutes late to the social.
She carried the pan into the fellowship hall herself. She wouldn’t let me take it. Half the people in that church basement had a scanner sitting on their kitchen counter at home, and every one of them had heard it.
