What We Lost (Sara Zarr) by Sara Zarr

Author:Sara Zarr
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780316244022
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2013-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

We find seats in a pew near the back of the sanctuary. It’s crowded with people I don’t know, people I don’t even recognize. A lot of them have blue ribbons pinned to their shirts. A lady behind me tells someone else that she drove all the way from Wyoming with her daughter, who’s fifteen. Like me. And I realize that this isn’t mine, or Pineview’s. Now everyone thinks they have a right to a piece of Jody being gone.

There was this boy in my eighth grade class, Ronnie Gomez, a scholarship kid. He died of leukemia halfway through the school year and suddenly all the kids were crying like they’d lost their best friend. People who had treated him like dirt before he got sick—because he came here straight from Mexico and barely spoke English, because he only had two outfits to wear to school—put up this memorial poster in the cafeteria. As if they’d ever even said hello to him, let alone visited him in the hospital the way I did, with my dad, touching the gray, sick skin of Ronnie’s hand while we prayed by his bed.

“That’s the way it is with most things in life, Sam,” Dad said when I complained about the poster, and how no one even asked me if I wanted to sign it. “No one is there to see your finest moments and give you a medal. But that’s not why you do good things, right?”

A Teachable Moment. A reminder about the parable of the workers in the field, how the workers just do what the workers do for the agreed-upon wage and shouldn’t expect things to line up with human ideas of fairness. And then Dad ended up using it as a sermon illustration—changing the names to protect the innocent, and me.

Tonight, some part of me can’t help but feel the way I did about Ronnie, and want all these people to leave. This happened to us, not them.

Pretty soon Mr. Hathaway, sweaty and out of breath, joins us. I can see the back of my dad’s head in the front row. Jody’s parents and Nick are next to him, with Erin and a few of the youth group kids in the pew right behind. There’s still some sun coming in from outside, and also candles light the sanctuary, the way they do at Christmas. My dad gets up, and people start to quiet down other than a few whispers and rustlings as they try to make room for more arrivals.

Dad climbs the three stairs to the chancel. I know he’s saying the Lord’s Prayer under his breath because that’s what he’s done my whole life right before he speaks in church, to calm his nerves. I know there’ll be a small Dixie cup of water on the shelf of the lectern. It used to be my special job to put it there, when I was little. I don’t know who does it now.

He clears his throat.

“This will be simple and brief.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.