“Oh, honey,” she said instead of hello. She must have seen my name on the caller ID.

“You heard?” I asked, though I knew the answer. In fact, I didn’t wait for it. “Then come. Please come.”

A hesitation, and then Polly said, “We weren’t sure Birchie would want . . . We weren’t sure.”

“We need you,” I said. “And we need Alston, too, and the Partridges, and Frank Darian. Anyone else that you can think of. Birchie needs her church.”

“All right. Let me start the phone tree, then I’m on the way,” she said, staunch, and I closed the connection.

Not everyone who heard the call would come. Some of the First Baptist members who did hurry toward us would turn back when they saw the house already full of Redemption. In the same way, when First Baptist began arriving, some of the Redemption folks would cool, and some would leave. But not all.

In the intersection of who would come and who would stay was a church that did not exist. Not yet. But I had glimpsed this congregation eating gingersnaps and drinking lemonade in Martina Mack’s yard. I would re-form it now, on purpose.

Together we would comfort Wattie. We would offer Birchie absolution. I could feel it as a nascent presence that might move and grow inside Birchville the way my son moved and grew in me. Something possible. A promise. An intersection where my son belonged.

The first wave of Redemption folks had all been offered greetings and entry, but I caught Birchie and Wattie before they could follow their guests inside.

“I’m staying,” I told them, and I meant it. For as long as Birchie needed me, for sure. Perhaps after, for Wattie, because why should she have to move? Sel had been open to it, and if he could be happy here, I might even stay longer. After all, I was a Birch, and so was my son. This was our town. It would become what we made it. “I’m staying here with you, in Birchville.”

“I know, child,” Wattie said, like no other path was possible. Which it never had been. Not once she and her sister had decided.

“That’s a good baby,” Birchie said, pulling my face down to kiss me.

“We’re putting in a ramp on this porch, though. Those stairs are a death trap,” I told them, stern, and Birchie tutted.

“And ruin the lines of this house?” Birchie said. “Now, that won’t do.”

“It will do, very well, and you’re moving downstairs,” I said.

I’d go back up to my own room, turn the tower room into a nursery with silver-blue walls and true red bedding.

Down the street I could see Polly Fincher’s blond ponytail shining in the sun as she hurried toward us, carrying her own frozen emergency casserole. Frank Darian was coming out of his front door with a bag of store-bought chips, Hugh and Jeffrey in tow.

It was starting. I got out of the way and let it.

Birchie lived long enough to meet him: James Birch Briggs-Martin. He was born the day after Thanksgiving, in Alabama. He landed yelling, slick, and bloody, seven pounds, one ounce, and crazy beautiful. Sel caught him and put him on my chest.

Birchie’s best last hours were spent rocking my son with me beside her. Sometimes she knew him.

“James, James,” she said to him then, rocking and reminding, though more and more she thought that he was one of Wattie’s long-grown babies or her own lost son. Near the end she did not recognize him at all. She would still reach for him, though, readying to take her leave even as she welcomed him, staring down into his earnest face.

“Hello, hello,” she said, when I put him, a small stranger, into her arms. Her eyes brightened, and she smiled. My boy called her to immediate love in that way that babies have; it is their birthright. It is their superpower. She touched his open, tiny palm, his cheek, the burring of black fuzz on his head. “Hello.”