Kayla knelt down and pulled a little boys drawing out of his backpack, a picture of a bedroom ceiling painted like a bright blue sky, with a child sleeping under it and a smile on his face.
Chase, she said, you said somebody has to hold the roller. Let me tell you what a man with a roller did for my son.
After the tornado tore through Somerset, Kayla said, I was a single mother with nothing, and we got a little trailer, and it was bare and gray and my boy would not stop crying at night. A house painter came, after the storm, and painted every room for free. And in my sons bedroom, he painted the whole ceiling like a blue sky, with clouds, so my little boy would have something beautiful to look up at. My son stopped crying. He sleeps under that sky every night. This is his drawing of it.
The picnic had gone quiet. Ray had set down the chess pie.
Chase said somebody has to hold the roller, and the cousin he mocked painted a frightened little boy a whole sky to sleep under.
Kayla had only started coming to the church in June, and she had not known, until Chase stood up and made his joke, that the painter who gave her son his sky was sitting right there handing his mother a slice of pie.
I am Rays daddy, and I have been a deacon forty years. Ray wiped his hands on his jeans and said God bless you, Chase, and took the joke, because a man who paints a grieving child a blue sky does not need a pharmaceutical rep to tell him what he is worth. Kaylas little boy walked up to Ray and hugged him, and Chase watched it, and he put his sweet tea down and had nothing left to say.