I’ve done, I don’t know, forty years of being the person who shows up. Casseroles when someone’s sick. Committees. Fundraisers. Vacation Bible School every summer until my knees gave out. I don’t say that to make myself sound good.

I say it because I think I genuinely believed that if I just kept showing up and being useful, eventually the scale would tip back. Eventually I’d feel like I’d paid for it in a way that actually counted. I’m seventy-one years old and it hasn’t tipped yet. So I don’t think that’s how it works.

The centennial is this Sunday. The church is turning a hundred years old and they’ve been planning this thing for two years. There’s going to be a covered dish and a history display in the fellowship hall and they’re pulling out the old ledgers and record books because someone thought it would be meaningful to see the history of the congregation written down in actual handwriting. When I heard about the ledgers I got a headache that lasted three days. I keep thinking about whether someone is going to stand there and page through 1986 and notice what I noticed when I was the one writing those numbers down.

Maybe nothing is visible. Maybe it all looks fine on paper. I honestly don’t know anymore what’s actually in those books and what’s only in my head.

Marcus is driving in tonight. He texted me yesterday to say he’d be there by eight and did I need him to pick anything up. I said no, I had food, come whenever. Normal. Polite. Like always.

I’ve been trying to figure out for weeks whether to tell him before the service or after. Or at the service, which is the plan I keep coming back to and also the plan that scares me the most.

I asked Pastor Gary for five minutes at the end because I thought if I did it in front of the congregation, in front of the people I’ve been sitting with for forty years, I couldn’t back out of it. I could back out of a conversation with Marcus in my kitchen. I’ve been backing out of that conversation for thirty-eight years.

I don’t know what I’m expecting him to do. I don’t have some picture in my head of us hugging and everything being different. I’m not that naive. I think what I actually want is just for him to know that I know. That I’ve always known what I did to him, specifically, not just to the church. That the thing that kept me up at night wasn’t the money. It was watching him get quietly edged out of something he was good at because of something I did, and never saying a word to him about it.

He was sixteen. He was just a kid sitting across a table helping his mother count money on Sunday afternoons. That’s all he was doing.