Every Sunday she takes the seat right at the end of our little laminate table because it gives her a straight shot at the exit. I noticed that weeks before I let myself admit I noticed anything at all. She never fought over the purple marker. She never asked for an extra animal cracker from the box with the torn corner. She said please so much it made the other mothers look over and smile like she was a prize heifer at the county fair.
Sometimes praise is just relief with manners on it.
That morning our lesson was about comfort, which is a hard word to fill up with meaning when you are working with scrap paper and glue sticks that smell like sour paste. I had the children cutting out cotton balls for sheep and clouds while the old coffee urn in the hallway sputtered and hissed like an angry copperhead. The room always smelled like wet carpet and the grape juice we used for communion trays soaking in the plastic tub out back.
Most of the children drew dogs or houses with crooked chimneys.
Abby drew a woman in a green sweater standing beside a yellow figure with a circle around its head. The woman had brown hair that looked like a bird’s nest and red shoes with the toes pointing straight up.
I knew those shoes.
Rachel wore them every Sunday she brought Abby to class, right up until the Sunday she stopped coming through that door entirely.
I leaned over the table, wiping my thumb on my apron to keep from smudging the blue construction paper. I asked her who the lady in the green sweater was supposed to be.
Abby didn’t look up from her work. “My mommy,” she said.
I tried to keep my voice light, the way you do when you are talking to a child who dropped an ice cream cone in the gravel. “That’s a real pretty picture of your mommy, honey.”
Abby just nodded, gave her glue stick a little twist, and pressed another cotton ball down right over the woman’s shoulder.
Then she took a black crayon and wrote MOMMY in big, jagged letters across the top of the paper, the lines shaking so hard the M looked like broken fence wire.
Her stepfather, Travis, had been telling everyone in the fellowship hall that Rachel was taking some time away to clear her head. He said she was high-strung and needed a break from the farm work and the heat. He stood by the coat rack every Sunday morning with one hand resting heavily on Abby’s shoulder, accepting handshakes from the deacons like a man who had just won a blue ribbon for a clean tractor engine.
I didn’t like the way his thumb rubbed the back of that little girl’s neck.
That wasn’t evidence, and I knew it. I have been teaching Sunday school in this valley for nineteen years, and if the Lord wanted me to be a detective, He would have given me a badge instead of a box of dull-tipped safety scissors. But I know the difference between a child who is tired and a child who is shrinking.
Abby was getting smaller by the inch every week she sat in that room.
I reached out and touched the corner of the blue paper. “Honey, why did you put Mommy up in the clouds with Jesus?”
She kept right on coloring, her little arm moving in a tight, angry circle. “That’s where people go when Daddy says they’re gone.”
My knees popped so loud when I sat down in the child-sized plastic chair that the little boy across from us giggled. I didn’t care about my joints. I cared about the way the air in the room suddenly felt as thin and sharp as a hay baler blade.
I asked her when she had seen her mother last.
Abby stopped her crayon right in the middle of a yellow star. She looked down at her fingers, tried to count them, and then just let her hands drop into her lap.
“Before the big rain,” she whispered.
The big rain had washed out the culvert down on County Road 12 forty-seven days ago. I remembered it because the water came right up to the bottom step of the church porch, and Rachel had driven her little red truck through four inches of standing mud just to drop off a tray of lemon bars she baked in a pan with blue masking tape on the lid. She had stood right by that coat rack, laughing while she wiped the mud off Abby’s shins with a damp paper towel.
That was the twist of the knife in my ribs. Rachel hadn’t gone off to clear her head. She had been right here, breathing the same damp church air, until forty-seven days ago when the trail just went cold.
After class let out, Travis came through the side door with his hat in his hand.
He spotted the blue paper in Abby’s hand before she could slide it into her cardboard Bible carrier. He reached down and snatched it right out of her fingers.
“What’s this junk?” he asked, his voice too loud for a church basement.
Abby’s shoulders went all the way up to her ears, and she tucked her chin into her collar like a turtle pulling its head into the shell.
I stepped around the craft table, wiping my hands on my apron again. “We’re sending all the drawings home for the bulletin board, Travis. Give that back to her.”
Travis looked down at Rachel’s green sweater and the yellow figure with the circle around its head. He didn’t smile the way he usually did when people were watching.
“She’s got a mighty big imagination,” he said.
Before I could reach out my hand, he folded the paper once, hard and sharp right down through Rachel’s face, and shoved it deep into the pocket of his barn coat.
I didn’t say another word until the heavy oak door clicked shut behind them and his pickup truck rattled out of the gravel lot, throwing stones against the side of the coal shed.
Then I walked straight back to the office where the old copier hummed and smelled like hot dust. I had taken a picture of every child’s artwork that morning on my phone because the pastor likes to post them on the church Facebook page for the Wednesday updates. I scrolled back through my gallery until I found Abby’s blue paper, laid my phone flat on the glass, and printed out a fresh copy in full, sharp color.
I turned the paper over and wrote today’s date in red ink so nobody could ever pretend they forgot when it happened.
At 12:18, I pulled the old snack sign-up sheet out from under the calendar on the bulletin board where Rachel’s handwriting was still smudged in blue ballpoint ink from seven weeks ago.
Gloria answered on the first ring, before the phone even had time to finish its second buzz, like she had been sitting right beside it with her hand on the cradle the whole time.
“Please,” Gloria said, her voice shaking so hard the receiver rattled against her teeth, “please tell me you’ve seen my daughter.”
