No, I couldn’t imagine what those moments had been like for Ellen Kowalsky, but as I glanced over at Allen’s face I knew he could, that there were times he thought about what his life would be like now if he’d taken an earlier flight, or a later one, or told his wife he’d take a taxi home or decided, as she’d evidently wished, not to go to Kosovo at all.

Walter Phillips got up from his chair, as if to offer his seat to Ellen Kowalsky.

“You don’t have to do this, Ellen,” Herb Kowalsky said, a tenderness in his voice I’d not heard before. That tenderness surprised me and, I suspected, a number of other people in the room. But maybe not his wife. I wondered if I had made some judgments about Herb Kowalsky that were a little too easy and convenient. Yet even as I thought this another part of me remembered the scorn in his voice when he’d spoken of hillbillies.

“Yes, I do,” Ellen Kowalsky replied, glancing back at her husband as she spoke. She blinked quickly and for a few moments stared at the back wall again, securing her hold before continuing. She took a deep breath and lowered her eyes so she might see ours.

“I could tell you Ruth was the perfect child, that she never gave her father or me any trouble and was always good to her brother.”

A woman on the second row began to cry, loud enough to make Ellen Kowalsky pause and raise her eyes to the back wall again.

“But you’d know that couldn’t be true of any child, so I’ll tell what’s true, that there were times Ruth tried our patience, times we had to punish her, times she disappointed us.”

The Atlanta Constitution’s photographer took a photo. Several people turned and glared at him. Neither he nor anyone else took another one.

“In other words, she was like anybody else’s child. But there were times we were short-tempered with her when we shouldn’t have been and times we didn’t give her as much attention and love as we could have. Any parent in this room knows how that can happen. We get so caught up in our own lives we forget that nothing’s more important than our children. We always say we’ll make it up to them tomorrow or this weekend or on a birthday or Christmas. We assume that tomorrow or that birthday is going to come.”

Ellen Kowalsky had used up her allotted time, but no one in the room was going to tell her that. Her voice softened even more, almost a whisper now, as if she were in a confessional booth instead of a rural community center.