I didn’t have to imagine the wretched events that awaited them across the street at Birchville First Baptist on this particular Sunday morning. I would see the whole story unfolding in my head from a hundred different angles, because every church member who was present—and a few who weren’t—would later tell me all the gory details.

As the church bells pealed ten-fifteen, Birchie and Wattie linked arms to careful their way down the wide steps of their front porch. Those two little old ladies, round and soft and short and fragile, looked like a matched set of salt and pepper shakers as they toddled down the hill toward First Baptist, on schedule and as timely as the tides.

Birchville’s population was a little smaller and skewed a little older than when I was growing up, but there was still a family of Darians, plenty of Alstons, and a slew of Macks who lived in the town. My grandmother was the only remaining Birch, though, and all the old-name families were members at First Baptist. As Birchie and Wattie made their stately way up the left side aisle, folks cleared a path, offering smiles and greetings. Birchie took it as her due, pausing only to exchange a speaking glance with Wattie as Martina Mack clomped up the other aisle in her enormous Sunday hat. It blocked the view, perched high and bright red over Martina’s iron-gray witch scraggles, but Martina would neither remove it nor move back. She had to sit in the second row, right side, exactly opposite Birchie’s pew.

Wattie’s knees were bad, so Birchie helped her settle before sitting down herself, and quite a few folks in the congregation looked away. There were folks at the church who could not seem to remember that Miss Wattie did not work for Birchie. Wattie had never worked for us, in fact. That was Wattie’s mother, Vina. She had been the Birches’ housekeeper. When Birchie’s own mother died in childbirth, Vina had rocked Birchie, and taught her songs, and tucked her in for naps in the kitchen playpen. She still had milk from her youngest boy, so Vina fed Birchie with her own body. A year or so later, Wattie came along to join my grandmother, and they had bonded deep as sisters. The two of them had put up jam together every August of their lives in that kitchen: as babies watching, as helpers too little to be truly helpful, as young girls, as married ladies, and eventually as jam masters who regularly took multiple ribbons at the county fair.

Around twelve years ago, I started worrying about Birchie living all alone in that big house full of staircases with her bad balance and worse eyesight. I’d wanted her to move to Virginia, into an assisted-living apartment near my house, but she would have none of it.

Meanwhile Wattie’s husband had passed, and both her sons lived far, Stephen in Chicago, Sam in Houston. They were worried, too. Wattie’s house was on an isolated road outside of town. She drove herself into Birchville almost every day with less and less regard for what lane the car was in. She and Birchie would sit out on the porch in fine weather or in front of the living room’s wide windows when it rained. They would knit and talk and supervise town life. It was a relief for all of us when Wattie failed her driver’s test and came to live with Birchie in the big Victorian. They could walk to the beauty parlor, the library, three restaurants, the yarn shop. The Piggly Wiggly didn’t have a delivery service per se, but for Emily Birch Briggs? The groceries got delivered.

The longer they lived together, the more symbiotic they became. Church had been the last amalgamation. On paper Wattie was still a member at Redemption, the all-black Baptist church near her old house. Birchie kept her membership at First Baptist, too, but for years now they had gone to services together, half the time walking to First Baptist and half the time being driven to Redemption by one of the deacons. This was a First Baptist week, and they bent their heads over their shared church bulletin until the service started.

Birchie took tidy notes in the margins of her Order of Worship, upright and attentive, giving Miss Wattie small, decorous nods when the preacher got it right, frowning slightly when he got it wrong. There were very few nods.

Miss Wattie remained stoic. Her large, heavy-lidded eyes hardly seemed to blink, but a close observer would notice that her full lips clamped in tandem with every Birchie head shake. The Reverend Richard Smith was new to the church, and very young, and prone to passionate sputtering about the Beatitudes. He told everyone to call him Pastor Rick, and sometimes, when he mentioned hell, it almost sounded like he was putting air quotes around the word. Worse, there were no detectable air quotes when he mentioned dinosaurs. Neither Birchie nor Miss Wattie could approve of him.

The old pastor—a properly powder-dry fellow of their generation—had died. Instead of promoting Jim Campbell, the blandly handsome, middle-aged unter-pastor, the church had called this new boy. He’d been born respectably enough in Alabama, but he’d gone to Golden Gate Seminary out in California.

As far as I could tell, they’d returned him with his old-school Southern Baptist doctrinal stick-in-the-butt still firmly lodged, but he also owned a pair of man sandals and did not eat red meat. Worse, he’d alternately coaxed and needled every single First Baptist member onto Facebook. Even Birchie and Wattie had signed up, strictly as a kindness. He’d betrayed their goodwill gesture by making the church newsletter completely virtual. To save trees, he said, but it meant they’d actually had to learn to turn on the computer I had gotten them. To my grandmother all this meant he was now “from” California, which was practically Babylon—the setting of a thousand movies about fornication that she flat refused to see.

“And he sweats when he preaches,” Birchie had told me on the phone. In her small, pursed mouth, “sweats” sounded like a curse word.

“I’m sure he can’t help it,” I’d told her.

“He most certainly could. The church has air conditioning.”

Birchie should know, as she had single-handedly paid to install it in the 1970s, when she was going through the change of life.

“The pulpit is right under the vent, but he won’t preach from it,” Wattie chimed in. They were on speakerphone. They’d always liked to have a share in each other’s conversations, but over the past couple of years they’d used the speakerphone more and more often. These days they took every call in tandem. It had happened so gradually I thought nothing of it. “He puts on that headset like a pop star, waving his arms around and jogging back and forth.”

“It’s true!” Birchie confirmed. “I feel like I’m watching that communist Fonda girl on one of her tacky aerobics tapes, what with all his gyrations splashed across those . . . screens.”

“Everybody’s using screens now, y’all,” I told them. “And no one watches tapes. Or does aerobics, for that matter.”

I heard a skeptical “Humph,” but I didn’t know if it was Birchie or Miss Wattie.