I smiled at her as I cleared away some more of the empty plastic plates left on the various tables. “But you gotta admit, there aren’t many places like this that offer a free floor show with dinner.”

“Mind your humor there; it’s not very Christian to make light of others’ woes.”

“Then how come you grinned when I said that?”

“That was not a grin. I…had me some gas.”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.” She winked at me, then looked out at the guests. “I don’t mind doin’ the Lord’s work, not at all, and Heaven knows these poor people need all the help they can get, but I swear, sometimes...” She squinted her eyes at nothing, trying to find the right way to express what she was thinking without sounding uncharitable.

“Sometimes,” I said. Then winked back at her. “We can leave it at that and it’ll be our little secret.”

She laughed as she dumped the contents of the DONATIONS can onto the table and began counting up the coins. “Oh, bless me, will wonders never cease? It looks like we might’ve took in a small fortune tonight. Why there must be all of—” She counted out a row of dimes, then a few nickels and pennies. “—three dollars and sixteen cents here! Might put us in a higher tax bracket.”

“I’m sorry it isn’t more,” I said, digging into my pocket and coming up with thirty-three cents, which I promptly handed over. If you’ve got spare change, it goes into Ethel’s til or. She. Will. Get. You.

“Always remember, Sam,” she said to me as she took the change, “what the Good Book says: ‘What we give to the poor is what we take with us when we die.’”

“Then I’m screwed to the wall.”

Her eyes grew wide at my language.

I looked down at my feet. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m going to chalk that up to your being tired and let it go, Samuel.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Both Ethel and the Reverend (who’ve looked out for my own good as long as I’ve been here) call me “Samuel” when they’re irked at me about something. I prefer “Sam.” “Samuel” always sounded to me like the noise someone makes trying to clear their sinuses.

Ethel picked up her purse and took out a five-dollar bill and some change, adding it to the til. “I have one rule for myself, Sam—I will not, absolutely not hand the Reverend less than twenty dollars at the end of each week.”

“How often do you have to make up the difference?”

She shrugged. “That’s my and the Good Lord’s business, you needn’t bother yourself worryin’ over it.” Then she gave me a conspiratorial wink. “Maybe we’ll soon have enough saved up to get the basement wall fixed.”

“Be still my heart,” I said.

Ethel was referring to the east wall in the men’s shower room. For the last several weeks, more and more of the tile and grouting had fallen out, and the cement foundation on that side was starting to crumble. Because of an unusually damp autumn, and with the almost non-stop rain of the past week or so, the soil behind the weakening cement started oozing through the gaps, slowly transforming everything into a muddy wall that was pushing out what tile still held its ground (it didn’t help matters that there was a leak in one of the pipes running into the showers). I’d been down there with the Reverend earlier that day, piling bags of sand, wooden crates filled with canned food, and even a couple of pieces of old furniture against it. It was a fight we were going to lose unless one of the contractors the Reverend had been guilt-tripping since spring threw up their hands in surrender and donated the time, manpower, and materials to repair it. I didn’t think Ethel’s twenty dollars a week was going to help much, regardless of how often she’d been making up the difference—something I suspected she really couldn’t afford to do.