Living Witness(12)

“And they’re suing you, too,” Tina said. “They put your name right in the suit. I saw it in the newspaper. The idea of doing such a thing.”

“My name comes first alphabetically,” Gary said. “They don’t bother to list all the names every time they talk about the suit. It would take up too much space. And time.”

“They should all move back to wherever they came from,” Tina said. “And Annie-Vic and Henry can move on out with them. Whatever happened to democracy? We voted you in for the school board. The people have spoken.”

Gary wasn’t actually sure the people had spoken. In the election that had put not only Gary himself, but Franklin Hale and Alice McGuffie and, yes, even Annie-Vic on the school board, not a single word had been said about the issue that had since become the biggest thing in town since the flood of 1954. There was something about the way this whole thing was set up that made Gary very uneasy.

“It’s all about her, anyway,” Tina said. “It’s all about Annie-Vic Hadley. And you know it. There wouldn’t have been a lawsuit if it hadn’t been for her.”

“I think Henry Wackford could have filed a lawsuit without the help of Annie-Vic.”

“He could have, but he wouldn’t have. You know it. There she is, and the whole rest of the school board agrees, except her, and so there wasn’t a united front. I was talking to Alice about it only yesterday. If the board had a united front, there isn’t anything Henry Wackford or those people from the development could have done. We’d have God back in the Snow Hill public schools, and they’d just have to lump it.”

“I’m pretty sure they could have sued, united front or not,” Gary said. He was still being calm, but talking about the whole thing always made him agitated. He wasn’t like Tina. He knew better than to think that all it would have taken to avoid trouble was a school board without a single dissenting voice. Still, he had a problem with Annie-Vic, and he always had had.

“She thinks she’s so smart,” Tina said. “Going away to some fancy college full of rich girls. She thinks she’s better than all of us. And now this. This isn’t about teaching evolution, Gary, and you know it. This is Annie-Vic making us look like a bunch of rubes and hicks on national television.”

Gary almost said that if the town didn’t want to look like a bunch of rubes and hicks, it shouldn’t act like a bunch of rubes and hicks, but he didn’t say it. He didn’t say half of what he thought these days. He shuffled the papers around in front of him a few more times and admitted to himself that he wasn’t paying attention to them. He had no idea how many extra people they would need with a town full of national reporters—international ones, too. Molly who worked out at the Radisson said there was a booking for some guy from Italy. He didn’t know and part of him didn’t care.

“I’m going to run on home for a minute,” he said. “I left my lunch on the kitchen table.”

“Sarah won’t bring it out to you?” Tina said. “Sarah’s such a Christian woman. I can’t imagine her letting you run on home with that leg of yours.”

“Sarah’s got Lily and Michael to look after,” Gary said, and then, to forestall one more question about why the children weren’t named after anybody in his own family, he got up and took his jacket off the back of his chair.

“I’ll be twenty minutes,” he said, heading for the door.

“I think it’s a miracle the way you get around on that fake leg,” Tina said. “It’s like you never lost a leg at all. You’ve got God’s grace in you. There’s nothing else to say about it.”

There was a lot else to say about it, and Tina would say it, if he didn’t get out fast.

The police station was right on Main Street, and when Gary looked left he could see Annie-Vic rounding the intersection at the north end of town, power pumping like a woman half her age. He did have a problem with Annie-Vic, and with all the Annie-Vics of the world, and that was part of what he didn’t understand about people. Annie-Vic was a smart woman. He’d talked to her dozens of times over the years. She was smart and well read, but she lived in delusion, and Gary didn’t know why. To Gary Albright, the existence of God was as clear and undeniable as the existence of snow. Denying it was like denying the existence of the color green. The scripture said that it was the fool who denied God, but Annie-Vic was not a fool, and Gary didn’t think she was that other thing, which his pastor always said explained the vigorous atheist. Gary couldn’t imagine Annie-Vic committing one mortal sin after another, even before she had reached this advanced age.