She looked up. “I’m still figuring that out, not that you have a right to talk to me about it. But it makes me happy to be around other believers. I actually like them.”

He bristled. “I like those folks, too.”

Her hand closed around the 7UP can as she eyed him carefully. “Then why do you avoid them like the plague?”

He crossed his arms over his chest and looked at the fridge. How had this happened? There were things he wanted to talk with his daughter about, but church wasn’t one of them.

“Ever since Mom died,” she continued, “you’ve been acting like it’s all those people’s fault or something. Pastor Frank told me about the incident with the chowder.”

He stifled a growl. What’d Frank have to go and do that for? He looked out the window. Barbara Currington’s ham-and-corn chowder had been the last straw. He’d continued to attend church after Caroline died for Bea’s sake, hoping the looks of pity, nosiness, and condescending platitudes would taper off. But once Bea left for school, his attendance had rapidly declined.

“I didn’t mean to dump it all over the pew.”

“But you did mean to tell her to—how did Pastor Frank put it?—keep her corn to herself?”

An old, familiar anger began to build up in his chest. He’d never asked for any food, yet someone tried to hand off a pan of pasta or bowl of soup every time he showed his face inside Moose Creek Community Church. He’d never asked for any of the pity or the inappropriate hints about single cousins or nieces or hair stylists people knew. He’d never asked to hear about the “words of comfort” God had allegedly placed in someone’s heart to share with him.

“I just couldn’t take it anymore.”

Bea’s eyes burned a hole through his skull. “Take what? The fact so many people cared about you?”

“No.” He searched for the right words like an outstretched hand groping for the light switch in the middle of the night. “The pressure to be thankful. The expectation that I should be grateful for whatever sympathy someone wanted to show, however they wanted to show it. No one ever asked me what I actually needed. They just shoved plates of muffins in my hands and expected me to be happy about it.”

Bea was silent. His neck muscles tightened. It sounded terrible when he said it out loud, but he was only being honest. It had felt so unfair at the time, like the whole church was asking him to carry the burden of pretending on top of the burden of grief.

“So you dumped out Barbara’s chowder?”

He scoffed. “It was an accident. I stood up too fast, trying to get away.”

A small smile appeared on Bea’s face. “I wish I could’ve seen it.”