A Change of Heart by Philip Gulley Page B

family would have healed. Except it had been a slow summer for news, sales of the Herald were lagging, and Bob Miles couldn’t resist the temptation to write a story about children being kidnapped by religious kooks, some of whom lived right under our noses, maybe even at the tourist cabins. So when Amanda worked up the nerve to tell Ellis she’d been visiting her parents, he went ballistic and tried to ground her to her bedroom until she married or turned sixty, whichever came first.
    “I’ll work on him,” Miriam told Amanda. “Don’t fret. A man might think he’s the head of the house, but the woman is the neck that turns the head.”
    But Ellis wouldn’t budge. He was on Amanda like robes on the pope, shuttling Amanda back and forth to school, not letting her out of his sight except to use the bathroom. Miriam tolerated it for three days before cuffing Ellis upside the head, in a gentle, Quakerly sort of way, and ordering him to settle down before they lost Amanda for good.
    Bob Miles watches from his window and writes what everyone already knows, that Fern Hampton shops on Tuesday mornings and Deena is back to pouring coffee at the Legal Grounds. But sometimes it’s the stories never told in the Herald that matter most. A mother and father longing for a second chance, talking with their daughter on a Saturday morning at the Dairy Queen. From a certain angle, the child favors the woman. They sit side by side, holding hands, thumbing through an album, the girl pointing out a snapshot on one page and a blue ribbon on the next. The woman wipes away a solitary tear and draws the girl to her. The father looks on, his hand resting on the child’s shoulder.
    People drive past and try to place them. Amanda, of course, they know. The National Spelling Bee Champion. The smartest kid to ever hit town. It’s the man and woman they’re not sure of. They’ll mention it on Sunday morning at church.
    “Who was that I saw you with yesterday morning?” they’ll ask Amanda.
    “Those are my parents,” she’ll say. It is a knife to Ellis’s heart. He stiffens and turns away.
    That’s the big story in town this late summer, whispered from house to house, confided over cups of coffee at the Legal Grounds. These are mostly good people; they feel slightly ashamed of their curiosity, but they can’t help it. To not spread the story would be like passing a car wreck without slowing down to stare. So around and around the story goes and where it stops, no one knows.

Ten
A Nearly Perfect Day
    L abor Day found the children back in school and people returning to church. Sunday school had resumed at Harmony Friends Meeting after a three-month respite from Christian education, which most of them could ill-afford. Certain other Christians in town wonder aloud what it must be like to love the Lord only three-fourths of the year, but the Harmony Friends aren’t fazed by sarcasm. The Sunday after Memorial Day they shut down Sunday school, begin worship an hour earlier, and let the censure roll off their backs.
    Every now and then a new member, aflame with pious zeal, will stand the Sunday before Memorial Day and harangue them for coasting through the summer. He (it’s always a he) will read from Revelation about being lukewarm and warn that God will spew them out of his mouth. The old-timers sit stoically in their pews, unfazed by this moist and gruesome prophecy.
    The Tuesday after Labor Day, Sam Gardner walked his sons to school. Levi was in fifth grade, Addison in third. They attend the same school, the one Sam attended, three blocks south of the town square; it’s a squat brick building that appears unfinished, which, in fact, it is. The town ran out of money after three stories and had to leave off the fourth floor and the clock tower. Consequently, no one in Harmony is ever sure of the time, except when Darrell Furbay, the fire chief, sounds the fire whistle at noon. How he knows the correct time is something of a