The Binder

After a year of being told to wait, Brother Thompson asks Dad and Pastor Garrett one more time — and this time the answer is yes. Allison Jones, eleven years old and the finest organizer in the congregation, hears the news and does what Allison does: she gets a binder. Tabs. A timeline. A rain plan. It is genuinely beautiful work, and Brother Thompson, who is newer in the Lord and gentle to a fault, says yes to every bit of it. Then Allison walks past his porch with a printed schedule and hears him practicing what he actually wants to say — plain, stumbling, out loud, to his dog — and understands that there is nowhere in her beautiful plan for him to simply talk. What it costs her to close that binder is the whole story. 

Scripture: Proverbs 16:9; Ecclesiastes 3:1 (KJV).

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SPEAKER_00 1:19

Welcome to the Jones Family Chronicles. For life at school, home and church is always full of lessons, laughter, and love. Meet Dad, the pastor's assistant, Mom, the heart of the home, and their five bright and lively kids. Allison, Addison, Anna, Ava Grace, and Little Andy, who somehow always managed to turn ordinary days into extraordinary adventures. So gather round, open your heart, and let's discover together the joy of faith, family, and the timeless truths of God's Word. This is the Jones Family Chronicles. All right, kids, gather close. Papa has a story for you about your favorite family The Joneses. Brother Thompson had asked once before and been told to wait. That had been better than a year ago, and he had taken it the way he takes most things, without any argument in him at all. Ted had explained it kindly, and Pastor Garrett had explained it kindly, and what they had both said in different words was that he was still new in the Lord and that a thing done right is worth waiting for. And Brother Thompson had said yes, sir, and gone home and waited. A whole year of Wednesdays and Sundays he never once brought it up again. He waited the way a plain man waits, which is mostly by showing up. He was there on Wednesdays when it rained. He carried the folding chairs in and carried the folding chairs out. He learned a second verse and then a third slowly the way he does everything, with Sister Beverly sitting a respectful two feet away in the Thames Hall, going over them with him. Anybody watching that ear could have told you where it was heading. Nobody rushed it. That was the whole point. So when he asked the second time, on a Wednesday night in the pastor's office, he had his hat in his hands and he did not look particularly hopeful.

SPEAKER_01 3:58

Dad was there. Dad looked at Pastor. Pastor looked back at him. Brother Thompson? Pastor said, I believe it's time.

SPEAKER_00 4:11

Dad said afterward that the man did not say anything for a good while, and that when he finally did, all he said was all right three times in three different voices. The news came out at the Jones Supper table that next evening, and the table came apart. Anna got out of her chair entirely. Addison wanted to know immediately what Sister Beverly would wear, and then more quietly whether anybody had asked her what she'd want to wear, because those are two different questions. Ava Grace said she already knows, which nobody understood at the time, and everybody understood later. And he banged his cup and shouted Pastor, which was not strictly relevant, but was offered with great enthusiasm. And Alison, at the end of the table, did not say anything at all for a full minute. Then she set down her fork. He'll need help, she said.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Can I have a binder?

SPEAKER_00 5:24

Here is the thing that should be said plainly because it matters to the rest of the story. Alison Jones is good at this. It is not a joke about her, the way her sisters sometimes make it a joke. She is genuinely unusually good at this. By Saturday she had a white three ring binder with a label on the spine, and behind the cover were tabs, and behind the tabs was work, real work, the kind grown people get paid for. Tab one was the timeline, backward from the moment itself in fifteen minute pieces. Tab two was people with a job written beside every name. Tab three was the Thames Hall, including which of the long tables wobbled and would need the folded cardboard under the leg. Tab four was what she called contingencies, which was mostly rain. She interviewed her mother about flowers. She asked Sister Dis Bennett politely and at the correct moment what time the building was free. She found out from Sister Alexis without ever once asking directly which hymn Sister Beverly hums to herself when she thinks nobody is listening. That's the one we'll have going, Alison said, writing it down, soft underneath everything. It was from beginning to end the finest piece of planning anybody in that church had done in years. And Brother Thompson, when she brought it to his porch and turned it around on his knee and walked him through it tab by tab, said, Well, that sure is something. The plan grew the way plans do, which is to say it grew inward, taking up more and more of the room until there was not much room left. String lights went up in it, Anna was assigned to the parking lot as a lookout, which was the happiest assignment of her entire life, and which she immediately told four people about. Even Andy had a job, which was to be held by somebody and to not shout. And every time Allison brought a new page to the porch, Brother Thompson looked at it for a while and said, That sounds real nice. He said it about the lights, he said it about the hymn, he said it about the fifteen minutes she had set aside at six forty labeled BT Speaks. Allison heard yes every single time. What she did not hear because she was busy and because the thing was going so well was that a man who has been told to wait for a year and who is newer in the Lord than the child standing in front of him, and who is grateful that the child's whole family for more than he could ever say is not a man who is going to tell an eleven year old no. On the Thursday before Alison walked over with the final printed schedule in a plastic sleeve. She was three houses down when she heard him talking, and she slowed up because it sounded like company and she did not want to interrupt. It wasn't company, it was pickles. Flat out on the boards in the last of the sun, and Brother Thompson in his chair above him, with his hands working against each other, talking to his dog.

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Beverly, he said. Then nothing for a while.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Beverly I ain't got much. He stopped. He started over. Okay. Beverly I ain't got much. And I'm slow at most things. And you've done that about me longer than anybody.

SPEAKER_01 9:49

But but what I've got, I'd like to spend it on you. If you'll have me, that is. It was not good.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

That is the honest truth of it. It was plain and it stumbled, and he said ain't twice, and he lost the thread in the middle both times he tried it. Pickles did not even open his eyes. Alison stood behind the mailbox with the plastic sleeve in her hand and did not go up the walk. She read her own schedule that night, sitting on her bed all the way through the way you'd read somebody else's. six fifteen guests seated. Soft under everything. Six twenty five Sister Beverly brought in on the arm of Sister Garrett, who does not know why? six thirty lights, six hundred thirty five Anna clears the lot. Fifteen minutes. She had given him fifteen minutes. Between the lights and the refreshments, and she had put a label on it. And Alison sat there and understood in the particular way that arrives all at once and cannot be sent back, that she had built a beautiful thing with no room in it anywhere for the one man it belonged to.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

He had been practicing for a year. Not the fifteen minutes, the saying of it.

SPEAKER_00 11:36

And then she heard it again, all of it at once, the way you hear a thing the second time. Every that sounds real nice he had ever said to her one on top of the other, on the lights and the hymn and the tables and the label. She had counted every one of them as a yes and written it down and moved on to the next page. Not one of them had been a yes. Every single one had been a kindness from a man who did not have it in him to tell a Jones child no. Mom found her still sitting up with the binder closed on her knees, which for Alison is the equivalent of a house on fire. I took it, Alison said. Mom sat down on the end of the bed and waited, because Mom knows that when a child gets to a true sentence on her own, you do not help her past it. He didn't ask me to do any of it, Alison said. He just kept saying it sounded real nice. She turned the binder over in her hands. He would never tell me no, not us, not after everything.

SPEAKER_01 12:56

That cost her something to say out loud. It always does.

SPEAKER_00 13:03

She went over on Friday and gave it to him closed. You should do it your way, she said. I made it into a program. It's not a program. Brother Thompson turned the binder over a couple of times without opening it. There's some real fine work in here, he said. That business with the hymn? I'd never have thought of that in a hundred years. You can have the hymn. No, no, he said slowly. I don't believe I can. I believe if I take the hem, I'll take the lights next, and then I'll take the fifteen minutes, and then I'll be up there doing your beautiful thing instead of my plain one. And she'd know it.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

She'd know the second she looked at me, set the binder on the rail and said she's not marrying the lights. Alison said.

SPEAKER_00 14:01

And when am you going to do it? And Brother Thompson said, I expect when it's time. Which is the least satisfying answer that has ever been given to an eleven year old, and he wasn't even being difficult. He simply didn't know. So Alison went home not knowing the day, not knowing the hour, not knowing the words, holding nothing at all, and that and not the binder was the thing it actually cost her. Dad found her on the back step that evening and sat down next to her without saying anything for a while. Then he read her one verse off his phone because the Bible was inside and he didn't want to get up. A man's heart deviseth his way, but the Lord directeth his steps. Proverbs sixteen and nine. Devise, Dad said, That's you. It's not a criticism. You've got a devising heart. God gave you that and he meant it. He bumped her shoulder with his. But look what the verse gives him. Not your plan, your steps. He takes the next step and the one after that.

SPEAKER_01 15:19

You were never going to be able to hold both ends of this sweetheart. Nobody is.

SPEAKER_00 15:26

He did it on a Saturday, on his own porch, at something like four in the afternoon, with no lights and no hymn and nobody's schedule. The Joneses were across the street and two houses down on their porch, because Saturday afternoons in September are porch afternoons, and that is simply where they were. They saw Sister Beverly come up the walk with a foil covered dish the way she does, because she had heard he had not been eating well and she had not waited to be asked. They saw him stand up out of his chair. They couldn't hear one single word.

SPEAKER_01 16:09

Not one.

SPEAKER_00 16:11

Fifty yards of street and a hedge, and Alison Jones sat there on the top step with her hands flat on her knees and watched the most important five minutes of a man's life happen in total silence. It was four in the afternoon, and it was a Saturday. There were no lights because it was broad daylight, there was no hymn, nobody had been seated, nobody had cleared the lot, and the north table with the wobble was locked inside a building half a mile away, with the cardboard still folded under it from the last potluck. Every single thing Alison had built was sitting in a closed white binder on a shelf in her room, and none of it was needed. And it was happening anyway, perfectly, without her. She saw him take a long time about it. She saw him lose it in the middle and stop and start again, the way he had with the dog. She saw Sister Beverly set the dish down on the rail without once looking where she was putting it. Mom's hand arrived on the back of Alison's neck about then and stayed there. And neither of them said anything, because there was nothing that needed saying and because Mom is not a woman who narrates. And then she saw Sister Beverly's hands come up to her face.

SPEAKER_01 17:39

Anna made a noise like a tea kettle. Addison put both hands over her mouth. Ava Grace said quietly to nobody.

SPEAKER_00 17:52

I told you she already knew. And Auntie got down off the step and went across that street holding his father's finger, and walked right up onto the porch and put his red ball into Brother Thompson's hands. Ball. He said Brother Thompson, who had waited a year and did not have much, and was slow at most things, stood on his porch holding a two year old's red ball in both hands, and could not get a word out for a while. They set the date on Sunday afternoon around the Jones' table, with Pastor Garrett's church calendar open in the middle and Sister Garrett keeping Houston and Andy from getting into the pie. It took a long time. There was a revival to work around and a camp, and the Saturday the building gets the floors done, and Anna suggested her own birthday four separate times. Then Dad turned the calendar toward Brother Thompson and Sister Beverly, and they looked at it together for a minute, and Sister Beverly put her finger on a Saturday in September, and that was that. Dad read at the end the way he does, with the Bible in reach and everybody still sitting. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. Ecclesiastes three and one. A season, he said, not a schedule, a season. There's a difference, and I think the difference is that you can't make a season come. You can only be ready when it does. He looked down at the table. This man was told to wait a year, he waited. He didn't sulk about it, and he didn't go around it. And I want every one of you to notice that the waiting didn't cost him a single thing. The waiting is part of how he got it.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

Then Sister Beverly said Alison. Alison looked up. I'm told you're the one to talk to, Sister Beverly said. About a wedding.

SPEAKER_00 20:05

I don't know the first thing, and I'd be grateful for the help if you've got the time. There was a considerable pause. I have a binder, said Alison. I heard you did. She got it that night and opened it on her bed and looked a long while at tab one. And then she turned to the very back, passed everything to the first clean page, and started there instead. New page Somebody else's day. Later, Dad said to mom, The world will tell you to make your plan and then hold it with both hands and don't you let anybody take it off you, he said. But a plan held that tight stops being a help and starts being offense, and it's usually the person you love standing on the other side of it. Alison drew up the finest plan in that whole church, Dad said, and the best thing she ever did was to close it and hand it back and sit down on a step fifty yards away where she couldn't hear a word, and let a slow man say his own small piece in his own plain voice. There's a wedding coming in September.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

I'm sure she'll have plenty to do.

SPEAKER_00 21:33

Now, who's ready for brownies?