Aunt Pearl opened her purse with trembling hands and pulled out the folded paper with the Tennova Healthcare logo, and in her wheelchair she asked Leon to come close so she would not have to raise her voice.
In December 2023, she said, when the tornado tore through the north side of Clarksville, a hospital chaplain spent the whole night in the ER. He held hands with frightened people waiting for news. And he sat with one little girl, and prayed with her, for hours, until her daddy came out of surgery.
Then Pearl looked at her son. Dwayne, she said. That little girl was your Katie. And that daddy in surgery was you. The night of your wreck, when they were putting you back together, a preacher you are calling an app held your daughters hand so she would not be alone. That preacher is Leon.
He said a man gets paid to sit around a hospital and talk, never knowing that man sat with his own child through the worst night of her life.
Half the VFW hall had gone silent. Dwayne set down his Michelob and could not pick it back up.
I am Leons wife. He helped my daddy cut his eightieth birthday cake and said God bless you, Dwayne, and took the joke, because a chaplain spends his life with people on the worst day of theirs, and a cheap laugh does not cost him much. Dwayne crossed that hall and hugged Leon, and he cried, and he did not care who saw.