Honey, who are you talking to? Mary said.
He looked up and she was standing beside the bed now.
You were talking out loud. Were you dreaming, honey? Were you having a kind of dream-like? Here’s your water. Your water’s right here. She gave him the glass and he took it but didn’t drink.
They’re right here, he said.
There’s nobody here.
Frank is here.
Frank. You saw Frank?
He was here. I didn’t get to talk to him enough. I wanted to talk to him.
I wish he’d talk to me, she said.
Did he drink coffee? Dad said.
Who?
Frank. Did he drink coffee when he was still living here? When he was a boy?
Yes. Of course. He always drank coffee. Frank loved his coffee.
32
ON THAT NEXT SUNDAY there were only a few of the congregation waiting for him in the sanctuary to begin the service. His wife was there and their son, sitting beside her, looking bored and angry already, and the old man, the old usher, standing in the back with a handful of bulletins to be distributed, and the Johnson women sitting where they always sat, and a dozen or more others, mostly women, and the pianist at the piano down at the front of the sanctuary, playing the invitation to worship over and over until the preacher should arrive and they could begin.
Then he came in, entering from the side door and crossing the carpeted dais to the pulpit. He was dressed in black pants and the long-sleeved white shirt, open at the neck as before, but with the sleeves buttoned this time, and this time he stood behind the pulpit according to custom.
He stood there for a time not speaking, looking out at them. They waited. It was very quiet. The pianist had stopped playing, finally making an awkward end to the music in the middle of a passage.
Then he began to speak, in a quiet voice. Go home, he said. You might as well. I have nothing more to say. You don’t need me or whatever I might think of to say to you. You know yourselves what you should do. Now or at any other time. Go home. You might as well. I don’t take any of it back, I don’t retract it. But you don’t need to hear it from me.
He stopped. They waited for more, not moving. His face was swollen a little from the previous night. He looked at them over the pulpit. There was a long silence. The congregation waited, but he said no more, except to say: Thank you for coming back this morning. I want to say that. Perhaps there’s a kind of hope in that. I choose to see it as such. But you can go home now. Be at peace. I have nothing more to say.