Strangers in a Moment ...

They met in that sliver of evening when the day forgets itself. The sun was slipping behind the water tower, the heat backing off just enough to let the wind touch people’s skin without starting a fight. The Delta air smelled like rain and yesterday’s frying. On the corner of Grafton and Fifth, the little cafe with the flickering OPEN sign hadn’t changed in thirty years—vinyl seats, a pie case that rotated too slow, a picture of Dr. King that the owner dusted every morning with the reverence of communion. Alyse slipped inside because the sky threatened to empty itself and because a woman sometimes needs coffee she doesn’t make with her own hands.

She shook her umbrella just outside the door, shook off a day full of polite questions and nosy advice, and took a booth as if it had been reserved for her since 1979. She ordered coffee black and cornbread warmed in a skillet—not because she needed either, but because it felt plain and regular, and regular was a luxury lately. From the other end of the room, a man lifted his head like he already knew her order and gave it a small approving nod.

He was an older gentleman, hat tipped just so, suit that had seen sermons, city council meetings, and at least three homegoings. He had a cane but it rested against the seat instead of bearing his weight; it looked more companion than necessity. When he smiled, everything from the bridge of his nose to the corners of his eyes joined in. He might have been a deacon, a retired principal, or the sort of neighbor who cuts your grass when your back is turned and then scolds you for letting it grow so long. Alyse could have sworn she’d seen that face before, a cameo in some crowd—then the cafe light flickered and she realized she didn’t know him at all.

He stood and came her way with the slow dignity of a man who refuses to hurry even when the weather does. He paused at her booth. “Evenin’, young lady.”

“Evening,” she said, giving the word the formal dignity her mother taught her. “You’d like this booth?”

“Lord, no. My knees and these tight quarters barely shake hands. I was wonderin’ if you’d share the air with an old man who gets tired of eatin’ alone.”

There it was—the mild audacity of elderliness. She glanced at the empty cafe: the line cook humming to himself, the waitress reading a paper that was two days old. No harm. She gestured at the seat. “My rule is simple,” she said. “You sit down, you tell a decent story.”

“I can do you one better. I’ll tell you something useful.”

“You a traveling salesman?”

“Not at all.” He tapped his breast pocket. “Just a man with a few miles and a soft spot for daughters that aren’t his.”

She almost laughed and then didn’t, because something in his face suggested he meant it sincerely. “I’m Alyse.”

“Pleased.” He took the seat, removed his hat, and played with the brim the way musicians test a note before landing on it. “Folks call me Percy.”

He said it like it was both true and none of her business. She nodded, tasted the coffee, then settled back in the booth. “What makes you think I need useful?”

“A young woman sitting with her umbrella still wet, wearing a dress too fine for a weekday, turning over a ring finger like it’s a page in a book.” His eyes softened. “You keeping something simmering, Miss Alyse?”

“If I were, you think I’d tell a man with a cane who sat himself at my table?”

He showed his hands. “Fair. But I can give you my end of a bargain without collectin’ on yours.” He leaned in slightly without invading her space. “I’m partial to telling the truth without sugar, because the sugar has run short and my people need all of it for their tea. So here it is: you got a choice in front of you, and the people who love you are speaking to you in eight different languages, most of them fear and all of them love, and none of ‘em saying what they mean plain.”

“You’re confident for a stranger.” Alyse reached for her napkin, as if the issues of her life could be patted dry.

“I’m old,” he said. “Confidence comes standard with the gray hair, the way the Lord bundles patience with grandbabies. You’ll see.” He raised a palm. “I won’t ask nothin’ you don’t offer. But I want to place something before you, and then, God as my witness, I’ll eat my cornbread, compliment your good sense, and go home to my wife’s photograph. Deal?”

“Depends what you’re selling,” she said, letting a sliver of a smile show. “I don’t buy miracle water.”

“Good. Tap water does fine unless the city forgets how to be a city.” He nodded at her hand. “And I ain’t selling rings. But I know a bit about men who think authority is a holy garment and wear it to bed.” He paused. “You’re about to marry a man with a public voice and a private weather system. Both will roll in your house daily.”

The room went the kind of quiet you only get in a small cafe when the cook takes a smoke break and the waitress remembers her dreams. Alyse didn’t blink. “You do feel bold, Mr. Percy.”

“I feel responsible,” he said. “Age does that. It makes you want to stop a young person before they make your same mistakes or different ones you could’ve warned ‘em about.”

She took a breath that felt heavier than air. “Say your piece then. Since you were brave enough to sit down, be brave enough to state your business.”

He nodded once, appreciative. “Yes, ma’am. You deserve plain. He will love you with a thoroughness that scares you, and it’ll make you strong where you are already strong and brittle where you can’t afford to be. He will offer to carry you across puddles and then tell you where to step when there’s no water at all. People will clap for how he ushers the old ladies down the aisle and lays hands firm on children—hands like a builder, like a man who knows where to put weight.” He laced his fingers together. “When you are tired, he will seem like rest. When you are rested, he will seem like a duty.”

“You talk like a preacher,” Alyse murmured.

“Sometimes I talk like a father,” he said simply. “The trouble with some men is that they think covering you is the same as owning shade. They confuse being a door with being a lock.” He looked steadily at her. “I am telling you this because I have loved and failed, because my boy learned my best and my worst and he’s still deciding which one he will become day by day, and because I do not want you to mistake someone else’s weather for God’s will.”

“You’re making a lot of assumptions about my fiancé.” Alyse felt something coil in her stomach. She did not recognize this man, and she recognized him completely: the eyes that had wept at hospital beds, the knuckles that knew the shape of pulpits. “You don’t even know his name.”

“I know the type,” Percy said. “I raised one. And I prayed over dozens. And I buried a few, earth to earth and regret to regret.” He leaned back, giving her space to breathe. “If I’m wrong, I’m wrong and the cornbread is on me. But if I’m right, a gift is on the table and I’d like you to take it.”

“What gift?”

“Questions,” he said. “Good ones. Ask them before vows make every question sound like betrayal.”

The waitress placed Alyse’s cornbread down, the butter melting in rivulets like the handwriting of July. Percy waited until the woman had walked away.

“All right.” Alyse lifted her chin. “I’m listening.”

“Ask him who he goes to when he’s wrong,” Percy said. “Not when he’s pressed—not when the papers are due and the budget is crooked. When he’s wrong. If the answer is ‘no one,’ that’s not a man, that’s a silo.”

Alyse folded her napkin. “He talks to the Lord.”

“So do snakes in the garden,” Percy replied. “If the Lord is the only one your man submits to, you might be marrying a very small church of one.”

She couldn’t help it; a little laugh broke out, bright and brief. “You really don’t sugar-coat.”

“That’s expensive and I was raised to save,” he said dryly. “Next question: When you shine, does he get bigger or do you get smaller? Some men praise a woman for shining until Sunday morning; they make a sermon of her and an example of her, and then spend the week dimming the lamps.”

Alyse thought of her Baldwin piano, the keys greeting her like old friends, the way he had smiled at her voice but tensed when people fell flat for her and not his prayer, the way he said “That was beautiful” and then later said, “Remember whose house we’re in.” She pushed back that memory like a chair not yet ready to be sat in. “Go on,” she said.

“Ask him who he envies,” Percy said. “You can learn a man’s grief by the men he envies. If he envies peace, he hasn’t made peace with himself. If he envies applause, he ain’t ready for quiet rooms.”

Alyse said nothing.

“And finally,” Percy added, “ask him if he believes correction is an act of love. Not for the children, not for the church, for him.” He tapped the table. “Tell him, ‘Baby, what happens when I put a hand on your shoulder and say, ‘You’re wrong’? Do you hear enemy or wife?’”

The air between them shifted. Alyse felt a tremor under her ribs, like the train tracks behind the cafe when a freight rolled through. She looked at her left hand again. The finger was bare tonight—she’d left the ring on her dresser while she ran to see about a dress fitting and got caught in the incoming rain. A silly superstition, but she fooled herself into believing if she didn’t wear the promise she could still hold it at a distance and look at it carefully, like a yard-sale painting you admire without buying.

“You said ‘your boy,’” she said finally, voice light but pointed. “What’s his story?”

Percy’s eyes softened with grief that had been ironed flat and folded long ago. “He is beloved,” he said. “He is his father’s son when his father’s son needed the most grace. He thinks God called him to lead and he is not wrong. But calling does not cancel character problems. Sometimes calling just gives them a microphone.”

“Then why did you raise him that way?” The question came out hotter than she meant. “No disrespect, Mr. Percy, but folks don’t come out of nowhere.”

“The world is a crooked table,” he said, accepting her heat as if it were coffee. “We do our best to set the place. My own father taught me to carry the church on my back, and I liked how tall that made me feel. My boy watched and learned. I have apologized to God more than I have apologized to men, and that’s an arithmetic I am working to reverse.” He let the words sit. “I’m not here to scold my son to you. I’m here to bend down and tie your shoes before you run, because running in this world with laces untied will send you to the ground.”

Alyse’s eyes prickled, and she was annoyed to discover that gratitude and exasperation felt like the same itch. “I can tie my own shoes.”

“I noticed,” he said with a small grin. “But I’m faster at it.”

“You always talk to women like this in cafes?”

“Only when the Lord gives me the nudge and the pie looks decent.”

“You from around here?” she asked.

“From churches and hospital halls and the front porches of people who don’t sit down ‘til the song is finished,” he said, evasive yet kind. “I’ve lived in this Delta long enough to tell the difference between a summer storm and a ruinous flood.”

“Which one am I in?”

“You’re in the kind where the cow looks at the fence and considers an adventure.” He gestured toward the window. The rain had started now, gentle tapping like a polite visitor. “You’ll get wet either way. I’d like you to choose your mud on purpose.”

Alyse buttered her cornbread with more force than butter required. “Here’s the trouble with your questions,” she said. “I know the answers. I’ve known them since before I let that man buy me a second dinner. But I’ve also got eyes and so does everybody in town. And there is a certain way people like a story to go. Girl with voice marries man with a plan. Future secured. Pew reserved. We roll forward.”

“Tradition is a fence, not a prison,” Percy said. “It’s there to keep the cattle out of the azaleas, not to keep you from water. Anybody using tradition to keep you thirsty misread the manual.”

Her laugh came out true this time. “You sound like somebody’s pastor.”

He inclined his head, not confessing, not denying.

“You warned me about my shine.” Alyse’s voice gentled. “You warned me about his envy, his correction. Are you warning me about danger, Mr. Percy?” She swallowed. “Not just difficulty—danger.”

His eyes didn’t flinch. “I am warning you about the kind of loneliness you cannot describe to your closest friend without making her want to fight somebody. I am warning you about waking up one day and realizing you have become primary caretaker to a man’s image. It is a subtle and holy-sounding slavery. And it will not take your voice. It will take your quiet.”

Alyse felt her shoulders drop. Something inside her had been braced for an hour and now it sat down. “You don’t even know him,” she said again, not because she believed the defense, but because the mind likes familiar furniture.

“The Lord knows him,” Percy said. “And you do too, or else you wouldn’t be sitting across from a stranger who walked up to you like a cautionary tale wearing a hat.”

She wanted to say, Sir, you are something else. She wanted to say, Why you? Why now? Why me? Instead, she said, “What if I love him? What if I love him and I don’t want to be the one to say no and make a new path and disappoint a hundred mouths and two dozen eyes?”

“Then you love him,” Percy said gently. “Love doesn’t require you to be brave every day. But love does require truth. And here is where I stop meddling and I start blessing: if you marry him, marry him with your eyes open and your shoes tied and your spine a covenant you make with yourself. Write down three names of people who tell you the truth and give them permission to drag you out the door when your house forgets the definition of peace. Give them keys. Give them calendar access. Give them authority that rivals his voice in your head.” He paused. “And tuck some cash where nobody but you knows to find it. That’s not a betrayal. That’s an umbrella. Rain is not sin; it’s weather.”

Alyse didn’t say anything for a long few seconds. The rain grew louder; someone across the street hurried with a newspaper over their hair like news could keep water off. Finally she whispered, “You said ‘events yet to come.’ You sound like you know something about my days ahead.”

He looked down at his hands. When he spoke, it was quieter than the rain. “You will lose things,” he said. “Some will leave you, some you will set down. A father. A child. A marriage. I pray I’m wrong about the third, but I know grief’s fingerprint. It’s on your future. That’s not a curse. It’s a map.”

Tears rose sharp and involuntary and unfair. “Stop,” she said, and it was both a plea and a command. “You don’t get to speak that over me.”

“I don’t,” he agreed. “Neither does anyone else in this room. But I can tell you the truth wrapped in hope: you will not be destroyed by what is coming because you were not built with breakable parts. God did not design you to shatter; He designed you to bend back and sing anyway.”

“Sing anyway,” she repeated, and the words felt like a pair of shoes that fit.

“You will be tempted to be angry at God and you can be,” he said. “He is a big God. But be sure your anger lands where it can be healed and not on the small people who love you, even when they get messy with it. The older women will scold and the younger ones will gossip, and both are forms of worry. Let them love you, badly if they must, and do not put your heart in anybody’s mouth who hasn’t proven they know how to chew.”

Alyse wiped a tear with the napkin corner, then rolled her eyes at herself for leaking in front of a man who shared her salt like it was a plate. “You have the nerve to be right.”

“I had the nerve to survive,” he said. “Right is a different category.”

“Say I believe you,” she said. “Say I take your questions home and ask them. Say I listen. What if he answers right, Mr. Percy? What if he says all the noble things and believes them at lunch and forgets them at midnight? What do I do then?”

“Believe his patterns,” Percy said simply. “Words are free, child. Habits cost. If he answers with poetry but lives with fists—be they made of meat, Scripture, or silence—believe the life, not the lyric.”

She shut her eyes once, briefly. He had not raised his voice, had not said anything truly new, and yet everything in the booth had re-arranged itself like the chairs after a wedding.

“Do you love him?” Percy asked, not to pry, but like a doctor checking pulse.

“Yes,” she said. “But love is not the question I have to answer tonight.”

“Look at you,” he said. “Soft and steel.”

She snorted. “You don’t even know me.”

“I know enough.” He reached into his pocket and drew out a small, folded piece of paper. He slid it across the table, not like a secret, more like a receipt. “This isn’t a talisman and I ain’t a fortune-teller,” he said. “It’s a list. The kind that keeps you from forgetting yourself when the whole world gets loud.”

She opened it. Seven lines, handwritten in strong, tidy script:

1. Memorize three phone numbers. Call them before you apologize to the air.

2. Keep a go bag: ID, a little cash, a book of hymns. (Hymn # 120, # 210, # 341 when the night gets long.)

3. Do not argue with anger. Close the door. Breathe. Hum your grandmother’s song.

4. Tell the truth early. Whisper if you must. Shout if you must. Tell it.

5. Schedule joy like you schedule duty. Play the Baldwin. Sing in the kitchen. Jazz on Tuesdays.

6. If a hand meant for a blessing lands wrong, leave. No synonyms.

7. God does not require you to be miserable to be holy.

Her breath shook and straightened like a wheel hitting a pothole then finding the road. “Is this yours?” she asked.

“It’s my mother’s,” he said, smiling wistfully. “She kept it inside her Bible, next to the page where the family births and deaths were written in blue ink. She was a traditional woman—put on a hat for the store, put beans aside for neighbors, made my daddy look like a hero in public even when he deserved to look like an ordinary man. But she wrote herself a list and called it ‘insurance.’”

“And you carry it?”

“Every day since the day I learned how to be both son and father.” He nodded at the paper. “You ain’t obligated to agree with a stranger. But if you want to tuck that in your purse, it doesn’t ask for rent.”

“I’ll make room,” she said. “Plenty of unnecessary things in there anyway.”

“The unnecessary things get us through,” he said. “Needful is a thin blanket.”

They ate in easy silence. The coffee cooled. The rain steadied.

When Percy finally stood, his cane made the softest noise against the vinyl. He set about the small choreography of men who respect the work of leaving—the hat positioned, the jacket tugged straight, the check paid with a dollar too much tip because service work is God’s favorite work. He left a second folded paper on the table under the salt shaker, not so she wouldn’t see it but so she would have to decide to pick it up.

Alyse pointed at it. “What’s this?”

“A blessing,” he said, eyes warm. “Nothing with my name on it. Just somebody’s father trying to be useful.”

“Do you have children?” she asked impulsively. “Beside the ‘boy’ you mentioned.”

“Enough to make my knees tired,” he said with a laugh. “Daughters of the church, sons of bad luck, and one boy who is both pride and prayer. A granddaughter with a stubborn jaw. A sanctuary full of people who want my approval and my correction and can’t tell the difference.”

“And your wife?” Alyse asked softly.

“Gone ahead,” he said, the grief shining for a second like metal in a field. “She left me her laugh and a casserole dish nobody wants to return.”

“I’m sorry.” It was the common phrase, cheap and sincere.

“Thank you. Grief is the price of all that sweetness. I won’t demand a discount.”

He tipped his hat. “You are loved, Miss Alyse. Whatever you choose next, get yourself some rest. You think better horizontal.”

“That’s profoundly practical,” she said, smiling.

“Thank you,” he said solemnly. “I practiced.”

He left. The bell on the cafe door scolded him cheerfully. The rain accepted him the way old men are accepted by weather: as if they had a conversation already arranged.

Alyse waited. She sipped the coffee cold and didn’t make a face. When the waitress wandered back, she asked for the check and received it with the guilty pleasure of seeing someone else’s handwriting do arithmetic for her. She paid, then finally slid the salt shaker aside and unfolded the second paper.

It was a church program—one of those thin folded things that smell like ink and lilies. On the front, a photograph of a man in a clerical collar, captioned: REV. PERCY L. WRIGHT—PASTORAL ANNIVERSARY. On the inside, the order of service, and on the back, a note in the same strong, tidy script.

Daughter,

He is not a monster. He is not a saint. He is clay, like you. If he lets the Lord shape him, you will know. If he asks you to be the potter, you will break your own hands. Choose peace and don't apologize.

—P.

Alyse stared at the name until the letters became a fence and then a gate. Percy Wright. She knew the name. Hard not to. The old pastor from Bethel Street—the one whose name people said with the affection of a father and the suspicion reserved for men who’ve stood in power too long. The one who had a son who… She didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t have to.

She folded the program exactly along the crease, slid it into her purse next to her wallet and lip gloss and a receipt for dry cleaning she’d forgot to pick up. When she stepped outside, the rain had softened to a kiss. The streetlights came on one at a time like lazy ushers. She walked home not with certainty but with a list, and sometimes that’s the better of the two.

That night, Alyse lit one candle in her kitchen. Not for drama—her power was paid up, no thanks to anyone—but because candlelight is honest about what it can and cannot show. She set the Baldwin’s fallboard down, rested her fingers there as if the word BALDWIN were braille and she could read a future in it. Then she took out Percy’s list and propped it against the sugar jar.

She dialed three numbers as practice. Celeste answered on the second ring, the tenderness in her voice like a quilt. Olivia answered with a joke she’d told since Alyse’s childhood, and Alyse laughed because laugh muscles are like any other; if you stop using them, they atrophy. The third number went to voicemail—Uncle Henry, his greeting equal parts threat and affection: “If you’re asking for my truck, return it with gas. If you’re hungry, there’s ham. If you’re in trouble, leave the door unlocked.”

She left the door unlocked, metaphorically speaking, and put all three names at the top of Percy’s paper as if writing them made them legally responsible.

After, she hummed without singing. She hummed Hymn #120 because it felt like standing in the back of a sanctuary and leaning against a wall. She hummed #210 because the music is what you do when the words are dishonest or tired. She hummed #341 because some nights the only theology that counts is mercy.

In the morning, Matthew called, his tone soft with rehearsal. He had a plan for Saturday and wanted to know the dress color and the time, whether she’d sing, whether she’d stand, whether she would be the sun to his Sunday.

She listened. She answered. She asked one of Percy’s questions like it was her own idea. “Who do you go to when you’re wrong?”

Matthew laughed at first, playful. “Wrong? Me?” The charm poured like syrup. Then he said, lighter, “The Lord.”

She let that sit. “No mentors? No friends who call you back to yourself?”

“I call them,” he said. “They come to me.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll be in your neighborhood later. I’ll stop by.”

“Give me an hour,” she said. “I want to finish a piece.”

“Always working,” he teased. “I love that about you.”

She hung up and went to the piano. She placed Percy’s list inside the hymnal—not to hide it, but to anchor it where it would always be opened. She played scales because scales are honest. She played jazz because jazz respects both structure and rebellion. She sang because humming is fine for midnight, but morning deserves words.

When Matthew came by, he brought flowers and certainty. He stood in her kitchen doorway and looked like the kind of picture people frame. He kissed her on the forehead like a benediction. He praised her piano and then, gently, warned her not to outshine a certain guest soloist Sunday because the sister was sensitive. She accepted the suggestion like it was a napkin. He asked her about dinner at the deacon’s house. She said yes with a clear voice and then said no to staying late with one just as clear, and he blinked, then conceded with a nod that looked like a man agreeing to pay a bill he had not planned to pay.

Before he left, she touched his sleeve. “Baby, what happens when I say, ‘You’re wrong’?” she asked, the words a ribbon pulling through a needle.

He smiled. It didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Then you pray for me,” he said. “And you say it sweet.”

“What if I can’t say it sweet?” she asked. “What if all I have is true?”

He laughed again, charming. “You always have sweet.”

She smiled back, warm as summer and old as scripture. “We’ll see.”

After he drove away, she sat at the kitchen table and wrote a new list under Percy’s.

1. Pay attention.

2. Believe patterns.

3. Keep my own weather.

When she opened her purse the next day to look for a pen at choir rehearsal, the church program slipped out. Hattie—the mother-hen soprano who could smell trouble and pound cake at the same distance—caught it before it hit the floor. “Well now,” Hattie said, eyes widening. “Look who’s on the back of this program. Rev. Percy Wright. Mercy, I still miss his sermons. He married me and my second husband both—may the Lord rest one and convict the other.”

Alyse smiled, took the program, and tucked it back away. “He stopped by the cafe yesterday,” she said gently, testing the truth in its smallest dosage.

Hattie froze like a deer in somebody else’s headlights. “Stopped by? Alyse Daniels, don’t start seeing spirits on an empty stomach.”

“He wasn’t a spirit,” Alyse said. “He was a stranger. He had a hat. He had good cornbread manners.”

Hattie snorted in spite of herself. “Girl, you need rest.”

“I do,” Alyse said. “And I’m getting some.”

On Sunday, Percy Wright did not appear, not in pew nor in vision. But his list did, tucked into her pocket, reassuring as a handkerchief in a nervous man’s hand. Alyse sang what was assigned to her, held back where love demanded, let go where truth required. After service, when people clapped for Matthew, she clapped too because she loved him and because good work deserves applause. When people clapped for her, she received it and didn’t apologize, and when Matthew’s jaw tightened for a fleeting second, she put her finger on the list in her pocket and felt her own name like a pulse.

Years carried on. Rain visited and left. Losses came: one like a bell tolling, one like a breath stolen, one like a door closing so softly you almost convince yourself it wasn’t a door at all. Hattie brought casseroles. Celeste saddled her with advice wrapped in affection like a hard candy stubborn to unwrap. Olivia called twice as much. Uncle Henry changed the locks when Alyse asked and did not ask a single why; he was built that way—useful first, wise later.

On a particular afternoon when the light got that late-summer gold that suggests God loves this county especially, Alyse stepped into the cafe again. The cook was humming a different tune but the pie still rotated like it had nowhere else to be. She took the same booth. The waitress was younger now, her hair pinned up with bobby pins that caught light like little meteors.

“Black coffee,” Alyse said. “And cornbread if the skillet’s clean.”

A shadow fell across the table. She looked up reflexively, the old booth teaching her to expect holy interruptions. It wasn’t Percy. It was a young woman with tight worry written on her face like a list. “Ma’am,” the girl said, voice shaking. “Do you mind if I sit? My fiancé’s… He’s on his way. I just need a minute.”

Alyse gestured to the seat. She had questions she could lend. She had a list she could copy out by hand. She had a blessing that didn’t know how to keep still. She smiled with both tenderness and steel. “Come on,” she said. “Tell me something useful, and I’ll tell you something true.”