Epilogue: Who’s Hungry?
We didn’t take the kitchen back that day, not the way you might hope a story like this would end, with the sign torn down and an apology demanded and everything put back exactly as it was. It happened slower than that, and better.
The following Tuesday morning, Tamra knocked on the basement door. She knocked, on a door in her own husband’s church.
When Louise opened it, Tamra stood there in jeans and an old sweatshirt, holding a notebook and a pen.
“I’d like to learn the funeral shelf,” she said. “And the dietary list. And how Eunice takes her coffee. Not to run any of it. Just to help carry it. If you’ll still have me.”
The four of us looked at Louise. Louise had started this whole thing thirty-one years ago with two casserole dishes and a cold February morning, so the answer was hers to give. She studied Tamra for a long moment.
“There’s always room at this table for one more set of hands, Tamra,” she said. “So long as you remember whose table it is you’re setting.”
Tamra nodded, her eyes wet. “I’ll remember,” she said.
She came every Tuesday after that, writing down everything. She learned that scalloped potatoes need a full extra hour if you double the batch. She learned to set the coffee going before anything else, because grieving people always want coffee first. She learned that Eunice takes hers black, that Marge can’t have onions, and that old Mr. Pfeiffer in the fourth pew can’t have salt but always asks for the ham anyway, so you give him a small piece and don’t say a word about it.
She learned all of it, and she never once tried to run it.
The sign-up sheet still hangs on the pantry door, but it says something different now. It’s written in Marge’s handwriting instead of a computer font, and it isn’t a list of caterers or times. It’s a list of names, of people willing to carry the folding tables, haul the coffee urns up the stairs, or drive an old woman home after a long morning on her feet. Even five women who’ve done this for thirty years are allowed, now and then, to let somebody else carry the heavy end.
There are twenty-three names on it now. The first is Tamra’s. The second is Pastor Shay’s.
Prairie Table sent the church a refund check for six hundred and fifty dollars, along with a very nice letter of apology. The church council met the following Wednesday to decide what to do with it, and Harold Bruning stood up before anybody else could speak.
“I move that we put it toward a new chest freezer for the basement,” he said. “For the funeral shelf. A big one.”
Pastor Shay seconded it, and it passed seven to nothing. Tamra cast the seventh vote, having been added to the council that fall.
We got the freezer in November, a big white chest freezer that sits right beside the pantry. Dale and LeRoy’s boy carried it down the stairs. Somebody, and I’m still not sure who, put a strip of masking tape on the lid, and written on it in black marker are five names.
Louise. Wanda. Eunice. Marge. Opal.
I’m fairly sure it was Tamra. She’s never said, and I’ve never asked.
Cole Haney still comes to church most Sundays, sitting by himself in the last pew near the back. But twice now, on a Tuesday morning, he’s come down the basement stairs to help.
The first time, I looked up from the stove and there he stood in the doorway with his hands in his jacket pockets, not sure he was allowed in.
“I don’t really know how to cook,” he said.
“Nobody does, at first,” I said. “Come on in.”
He helps Eunice stir the big pots now. Her eyes can’t quite see well enough anymore to tell when the noodles are done, so Cole stirs and Eunice tells him when, by the smell.
He told me once, quietly, while drying roasters at the sink, why he comes.
“It’s the only place in this whole town,” he said, “that still smells like somebody cares whether I eat.”
Wanda sends him home every Tuesday with a foil-covered plate. She says he’s too thin, and she says it every single week. He always answers, “Yes ma’am,” and takes the plate.
I don’t know if Cole will stay in this county forever. He’s young. He might go back to Ohio someday, or somewhere else with fewer hard memories.
But I know this. For one Saturday morning in October, when he had nothing and no one, five old women who’d just had the thing they loved most taken from them chose to give it away all over again, to a stranger.
That’s what thirty years in a church basement kitchen actually taught us, underneath all the roasting pans and coffee urns and canned green beans. It taught us that love, the real kind, the kind that gets up at six in the morning for people who will never even know your name, doesn’t keep count of what it’s owed.
It only keeps asking one question.
Who’s hungry?
And then it goes downstairs and finds out.
Note: This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events. Names, characters, and details have been altered. Any resemblance is coincidental. The author and publisher disclaim accuracy, liability, and responsibility for interpretations or reliance. All images are for illustration purposes only.
