The board sat at the same folding table. Four members, not five. Verlene's chair was empty. Wynette ran the meeting, with the bylaws open in front of her and a borrowed gavel from the Rotary club she clearly didn't know how to use. I sat near the front with Clem and Saoirse, who'd traded a shift to be there. Soledad and her husband Whit sat across the aisle. Whit was a big, soft-spoken engineer who looked like his mother around the eyes and nowhere else. He'd come to our porch on Saturday with Archie and a nut-free sheet cake that said THANK YOU CLEM in green gel letters, and hadn't been able to say anything at all for about a minute. Archie sat between his parents in his Chiefs shirt with his feet not reaching the floor and his new pouch on his belt. Spider-Man. He kept unzipping it to check that the pens were still inside, and Soledad kept zipping it back up.
Wynette read the petition. She read the section of the bylaws. She said that the director in question had been notified of the meeting and of her right to address the membership before the vote, and that she had—
The door at the back of the clubhouse opened, and Verlene came in.
I'd half expected her to come in swinging, the way she came into every room. She didn't. She came in like a woman walking into the wrong funeral. She was in a navy dress I'd never seen and flat shoes, no visor, no clipboard, no tote. Her bob had moved. That was the thing I noticed first, God help me, that her hair, which I'd never once seen out of place in six years, was flat on one side, as if she'd slept on it and hadn't checked. The crowd along the back wall parted for her without anyone deciding to. There was no sound in the room except the air conditioning.
She walked to the front. She stopped beside the folding table, not behind it. She looked at the board, and then out at the room, and then, for a long moment, at her son and her daughter-in-law and her grandson, and then at Clem.
"I was told I could speak," she said.
"You can," Wynette said. "Three minutes."
Verlene nodded. She had a piece of paper in her hand, folded in thirds, the crease pressed sharp. She unfolded it. She looked at it for a while. Then she folded it back up and held it against her stomach with both hands.
"I had something written," she said. "It said a lot of things about the rules. About how I've given eleven years to this Association. About how I was protecting the children of this community from a situation I didn't understand. I worked on it for a week. My attorney read it. It's very good." She looked down at it. "It isn't true."