The cashier check was heavy in my handbag, like a brick of cold lead. I held onto the strap so tight my knuckles turned a shade of white I hadn’t seen since I was a girl.

I didn’t want to be in that courthouse. I wanted to be back in the sanctuary, sitting in the third pew from the front. That’s where the wood is worn smooth from sixty years of my own elbows.

But the sanctuary was gone. Or it was about to be. The developer had his eyes on it, and my congregation didn’t have a prayer of matching his pockets.

He wanted to turn our pews into kitchen islands and our altar into a wet bar. I remember standing in the parking lot and watching his surveyors walk around with their clipboards. They didn’t even look up at the steeple.

They just saw square footage. I saw where my babies were baptized. I saw where I sat when my husband passed.

I started making calls on a Tuesday. I don’t know why I started with the Methodists, but they listened. Then I called the AME church on the north side of the county. Then the Pentecostals.

I had a script. It wasn’t fancy. “We are losing our home,” I told them. “We are just trying to keep the doors open.”

Some hung up. Most didn’t. I spent three months chasing down leads and driving to parking lots to meet people I’d never seen before.

Checks started showing up in my mailbox. A twenty from a widow in a neighboring town. A hundred from a small Bible study group. Then the big one came from First Presbyterian.

Five thousand dollars. I remember sitting at my kitchen table and crying until my head hurt. I had enough.

The morning of the auction was gray and damp. I wore my best church hat, the one with the blue ribbon. I figured if I was going to lose the church, I was going to do it with some dignity.

The developer was already there. He looked like he was at a golf tournament, not a house of God. His agent was there too, a man in a suit that looked way too tight for his shoulders.

I walked to the front row. The agent leaned over to his boss, the developer, and I heard him loud and clear.

“Just the old lady.”

He laughed like it was a joke. I didn’t say a word. I just patted my handbag.

The auctioneer stepped up. He started the bidding at two hundred thousand. The developer’s agent raised his hand instantly.

I raised my paddle. My hand didn’t shake. I was surprised by that, honestly.

The agent looked at me, frowning. He bid again. I raised it again.

The room got quiet. You could hear the hum of the light fixture overhead. The agent looked at his boss. The developer had stopped smiling.