Part 2: Forty-Five Minutes
Prairie Table was booked to serve lunch for sixty people at eleven-thirty that Saturday.
I knew because Eunice’s daughter-in-law, who puts together the church bulletin, mentioned it to Eunice offhandedly, the way you’d mention the weather.
Tamra had actually placed that order weeks earlier, for a different funeral, old Mr. Riggle’s. But Mr. Riggle’s family had asked to push his service back so a son could fly in from out of state. Rather than cancel the order, Tamra moved it over to Dana Haney’s service, since the dates fell close enough together.
It came to six hundred and fifty dollars for soup, rolls, a cold cut tray, and sheet cake. That was a fair price for sixty people from a caterer forty miles away.
If the caterer showed up.
The caterer did not show up.
I heard about it from Harold Bruning, our council president. He called Louise at nine-thirty that Saturday morning, and Louise told me later that in seventy-four years she’d never heard Harold sound so rattled.
A hard frost had swept through two nights earlier and caught half the county off guard. Somewhere on the gravel between Grand Island and our town, Prairie Table’s delivery van hit a slick patch while swerving around a stalled grain truck and slid straight into the ditch.
Nobody was hurt. The food was another matter. The soup had spilled across the floor of the van, and the cold cut tray was crushed under a case of bottled water that slid over on the turn.
The driver called his boss, and the boss called Tamra at nine-forty, forty-five minutes before mourners would start walking down those basement stairs. There was no lunch coming. She’d get a full refund, of course. She was terribly sorry, but there was simply nothing left to deliver.
Harold called Louise because Harold, bless him, didn’t know what else to do. His wife had been gone eleven years, and he’d never once in his life organized a meal for more than himself and a dog.
“Louise,” he said. “I don’t suppose there’s any way—”
He didn’t even finish the sentence. He didn’t feel he had the right to ask, not after what the church had done to the five of us two months before.
Louise called me. I called Wanda and Marge while Louise called Eunice. That’s how we’d always divided the calls, thirty years of habit moving faster than thought.
By the time I hung up the phone, it was nine-fifty.
There would be seventy people at that basement table by eleven-thirty, not sixty, grieving a girl of twenty-three and a baby who never drew a breath. And in the middle of them stood a young man with no family, with nothing to eat, and nobody at that hour lifting a finger to fix it.
I didn’t call Tamra to ask permission.
I want to be honest about that, because it matters how a person does the right thing, not just whether she does it. I didn’t act to spite Tamra or prove a point. In that first half hour I simply didn’t think of her at all.
I thought about Cole Haney standing alone in the front pew. I thought about the funeral shelf in the pantry, the one we’d kept stocked for thirty years out of a habit nobody had ever told us to break. And I thought that whatever happened to five old women’s pride that morning mattered a great deal less than whether a boy who’d just lost his wife and child had a hot plate of food and a kind face in front of him by noon.
Eunice still had her key to the church. Nobody had ever asked for it back, which tells you how little thought went into taking our kitchen in the first place.
By ten o’clock, the five of us stood in that basement kitchen in our church clothes with our sleeves pushed up. It felt as though no time had passed at all, and it also felt as though no amount of time could ever give back what had been taken. Both things were true in the same breath.
“Ham and noodles,” Wanda said, already pulling the big roasters down off the high shelf. “We’ve still got canned ham in the chest freezer upstairs, don’t we? Or did Tamra clear that out too?”
“She didn’t touch the freezer,” Eunice said. “I don’t think she knew it was there.”
Marge was already on the phone with her husband, Dale, who’s seventy and still farms outside of town. He keeps two beef quarters in his locker freezer for exactly this kind of morning, one every farm family in this county has lived through at least once, with a sudden need to feed forty or sixty or ninety people on four hours’ notice.
“Dale. Bring the folding tables from the shop. And call LeRoy’s boy, see if he can run the extra chairs over from the fire hall.”
LeRoy had passed nine years ago, but his son still kept his father’s old flatbed trailer. Inside of twenty minutes that trailer was backed up to the fellowship hall door, loaded with eight folding tables and forty metal chairs. Dale and LeRoy’s boy and Harold himself hauled them down the ramp, three men who had never cooked a funeral lunch in their lives, doing the one thing they did know how to do, which was carry something heavy without being asked twice.
Louise opened three jars of her own green beans, canned last August from her own garden. She’s put up green beans every August for fifty years, whether the church needed them or not, because that’s simply what a woman like Louise does with a garden.
I had four pounds of ground beef in my freezer at home, meant to be my meals for the week. It went straight into a roaster of tater tot hotdish, because tater tot hotdish is what this county eats when it grieves, and no catered cold cut tray, however lovely the spread, can replace it.
Eunice, nearly blind in the dim basement light, worked the biscuit dough by feel. She could have made those biscuits in her sleep, and some mornings she nearly did.
None of us had slept well in the two months since our kitchen was taken from us. And this, God forgive the strangeness of grief, felt almost like relief.
We had no time to bake a sheet cake. But every one of us had, every single week for thirty years, kept a tin of bars sitting in our kitchens at home. A woman who’s cooked funeral lunches that long keeps a standing stock of lemon bars and rhubarb crisp the way a farmer keeps diesel in the tank, ready before anybody asks. Marge’s granddaughter drove the two miles to Marge’s house and back in eleven minutes flat with every tin in the pantry.
At eleven-fifteen, Pastor Shay came down the basement stairs. He was looking for Tamra, he said. She was up in the sanctuary trying to work out what in the world to tell seventy mourners who’d be walking down to an empty table in fifteen minutes.
He stopped three steps from the bottom, and he just looked at us.
He saw five women in church dresses, wearing aprons borrowed off the hooks, hooks that had hung exactly where we’d left them. Roasters steamed on every burner, and the smell of fried onions and baked ham filled that basement the way it had for thirty years before anyone ever thought of a sign-up sheet.
“I don’t—” he started.
He didn’t finish that sentence either, just like Harold. He only said, “Thank you.” Very quietly.
Then he went back upstairs to get his wife.
