“You walk behind your mother.”

I pulled my arm away before his fingers could touch the cloth.

“No, I won’t,” I said.

The organist kept on playing, but three women in the middle pews turned their heads to watch me walk the wrong way down the aisle.

Arthur Pendelton got up from his pew, his heavy hands leaving his belly as he grabbed the carved end of the bench to steady himself.

“Where’s she going?” Arthur asked, his voice cutting straight through the middle of the hymn.