The Rumor Mill Comes To A Grinding Halt

This occurred when in the 1990s when I was a teen. We were at a church picnic, and a lady was making friendly conversation with me. She asked about my dad and when he would be back to the church. The truth was that my dad had left after endless fighting with my mom and had filed for divorce. To avoid divulging too much information, I said:

Me: “My dad is no longer around. Whether or not he comes back to the church, I’m not sure. Maybe you can ask him if you see him around town?”

Lady: “Hmmm… Okay.”

I didn’t think anything else about it. After the picnic, my mom and I rode with a good friend of our family to their house to hang out for a while. About fifteen minutes into our visit, her phone rang. Our friend casually picked it up, and as she listened to the person on the other end, her eyes began to slowly grow wider and wider to the size of freaking saucers.

Friend: “Um… excuse me? She’s actually sitting right here. Maybe you want to ask her yourself?” *Hands over the phone*

My mom took the phone, spoke briefly, and then immediately excused herself outside to continue the conversation. When she came back in, she looked seriously pissed and asked me to go into another room and amuse myself with some video games there.

As it turned out, the person on the phone was the lady at the church picnic, calling over to the friend’s house to start a rumor chain that my mom had kicked my dad out and speculating that it was because of a possible extramarital affair with the church choir leader because she’d seen them eating lunch together at a restaurant. They’d simply run into each other by coincidence, and my dad even told us about it.

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t see that lady at church services for almost the entire summer, and when she did return, she would sit in the back.