JANNA: The coroner came and took Aileen away after four hours.
BRUCE: Took the sheriff that long to get there.
VIRGINIA: Absolutely ridiculous if you ask me.
SHARON: Nobody asked you. (Mutters) Bitch.
MARK: Sharon.
SHARON: Oh shut up Mark, we're a cursing church now it would seem.
JON: We all had to give our testimony.
ISAAC: Statement, Dumb-dick.
JANNA: Aileen's death was ultimately ruled an accidental suicide.
ISAAC: How the hell can that be accidental? Fucking oxymoron.
JON: Steve never came back. Not with help, nothing. Just gone forever. We thought maybe he died too.
VIRGINIA: The doors to the church were locked and nobody went inside until after the sheriff's investigation—we finally had a funeral for the girl three weeks after her death.
JANNA: Isaac wasn't there for the funeral.
JON: He apparently skipped town the night before.
BRUCE: He got up on the pulpit and addressed us all.
JANNA: I'll be honest, it was pretty strange. It wasn't his usual fire and brimstone kind of rage. Correction: it was only when he talked about or directly to the church. It wasn't so much about the world anymore. He realized what he could change. And four years later he realized another change that needed to happen.
VIRGINIA: Bruce get that chalkboard back out here one more time would you?
(He does.)
JANNA: Isaac and I only talked two more times before he left and I don't even remember what we said.
SHARON: Four years would go by.
JON: He didn't come back and we would never make up. At some point I learned to be okay with it. Not because it was okay, but because it was the way things were.
JANNA: I missed him terribly.
JON: But it was what it was.
SHARON: Four years after Elise and Aileen passed away and Isaac left, we hit a particularly hot June.
BRUCE: All that Carbon Monoxide and the what have you in the ozone air—
MARK: Oh god, stop. You sound like an idiot.
JON: Both of you stop talking. I reckon we have all had about enough. It was the head end of another hot ass summer.
SHARON: Pastor told us it was finally time for him to step down. He didn't know who would replace him, but they felt it was in the best interest of the church to hire someone from outside the town, and that it would ultimately be left to the discretion of the board of trustees—which none of us were on anymore.
VIRGINIA: Good Lord Almighty.
SHARON: —and that didn't sit right with Virginia Hickory. I reckon she thought she would take over if ever a day came that Michael Fudge was not on the pulpit.
BRUCE: Everybody really paid attention to the pastor there in his final weeks. We heard the desperation in his message.
FUDGE: The Lord is still with us. He still loves us. But he is commanding us to be better. We look at the world and we see the liars, the thieves, the drinkers, the murderers, and with condemnation and disdain in our voices we talk of correcting it with. But we fail to see these same evils within ourselves, Church, within our own hearts.
