Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen by Susan Gregg Gilmore Page A

sixteen, I had learned to tolerate his perfection, and he had learned to tolerate my surly indifference. “Gee, Catherine Grace,” Ruthie Morgan would tell me, “with that pleasant attitude of yours, I'm sure the boys are just lining up to go out with you.” Ruthie Morgan had always enjoyed pointing out my shortcomings, and now, all grown up, and dressed in a cute baby blue sweater set and freshly polished Papagallos, she seemed to have no visible imperfections of her own. She just made something of a hobby identifying mine.
    Truth be told, most of the other girls were fairly certain I would be left a lonely, bitter spinster. But I think that had more to do with my refusal to attend Miss Lilly Martin's School of Etiquette and Social Graces held every Tuesday for two laborious hours in a house that reeked of mothballs and Glade room freshener.
    Turned out, Lolly and me were the only girls in our graduating class at Ringgold High who did not also possess a diploma from Miss Lilly Martin's School of Etiquette and Social Graces. Lolly's mama said she wasn't going to spend one dime on teaching Lolly how to hold a knife and fork judging by the way she had gained weight. She said she had already figured out how to do that just fine. And Daddy said when it got right down to it, a man would rather have a wife who could talk football than etiquette. So I took my chances.
    But my junior year, something strange and very unexpected happened. I saw Hank as if I were meeting him for the very first time. I was attending a Young Life meeting at church, something my daddy made me do regularly, since apparently being the preacher's daughter meant serving as his personal ambassador to all teenaged Christian functions. Anyway, we were singing the last verse of “Michael Row the Boat Ashore” when Daddy interrupted to ask the group if we would consider putting together a program for the Christmas Eve Cedar Grove Holiday Celebration. Of course, we had no choice but to say yes because when the preacher asked you to do something the answer was always
yes.
    Hank, not surprisingly, was excited about the chance to show off in front of the entire church. He looked up at my daddy and said something about it being an honor and that we would not let him or the good Lord down. Oh brother.
    “Let's tell the story,” he said with authority, like he had been thinking of this for a long time, “of the night Jesus was born. But let's tell it our way. In our version, Mary and Joseph will hitchhike all the way from some place like Louisville, wander along Highway 127, and then stumble into Ringgold sometime close to midnight. Worn out and dirty from their journey, they'll look for a place for Mary to have her baby. But will somebody in our small town, which, let's face it, was probably not all that different from Bethlehem, welcome a strange couple and embrace them in their time of need?”
    I couldn't believe what I was hearing. The old blue-haired ladies might think this was blasphemy, but I thought it was brilliant. A bunch of teenagers were going to make their very own neighbors, their brethren in Christ, wonder if they would have been kind enough to give Mary a warm, safe place to birth our Savior and Redeemer, which I kind of doubted—remembering how Brother Hawkin's daughter had been hidden down in Texas for a good nine months while her good-for-nothing boyfriend strutted his butt around the county dating anybody with a skirt and drinking beers behind the high school on Saturday nights.
    Anyway, I hated to admit it. I mean I
really
hated to admit it, but this was a great idea. And I felt like, for the first time, I wasn't the only one who was seeing the small-minded way of thinking here that people seemed to cultivate just as mightily as their gossip and their vegetables. Even Mrs. Roberta Huckstep might be forced to consider if she was Christian enough to let some strange, young couple rest their heads on one of her beds covered with those crisply