CHAPTER 27
I find a pew toward the back in case I have to leave early. Just showing up here has got me exhausted. Not to mention dealing with Joy and my mom’s friends, all of them as hungry for gossip as Oliver Twist and his orphanage friends were for their gruel. I’ll be lucky if I make it past the first few songs.
While one of the elders reads the announcements (which are right there in the bulletin for literate congregants to read for themselves), I glance around. The church’s women’s missionary league has always done its best to overcompensate for the building’s somewhat bland exterior by overloading the inside with every single fake flower, gaudy candle arrangement, and ornately framed piece of junk you can find on clearance at the local craft store. It’s even worse now at Christmas
