The Mother In Law Who Stayed

“A benefit dinner,” she said. “We’ll do a fish fry and a cake auction. Charge a plate. Put a jar out. The whole county will come, because the whole county loves a reason to eat and a reason to be good to somebody.” She reached over and put her hand on mine. “Let us do this for you, honey. You’ve waited on half this county for six years. Let us wait on you one time.”

I did not want to. I want to be honest about that. My pride reared up like a mule. I had always been the one who worked, who carried trays, who did not take. The idea of a whole town buying fish plates because I could not take care of my own was almost more than I could stand.

It was Lorene who settled it. She said, “Rachel. Let me tell you something I had to learn too late. Pride is just fear wearing its Sunday clothes. These people are not pitying you. They are loving you. There is a world of difference and you are going to learn it right now, because that baby is going to need you to know how to let good people help, over and over, for the rest of her life.”

So I said yes.

The third Saturday came at the end of my thirty-ninth week. I was enormous and slow and the baby had dropped and I felt every one of her nine pounds, and I almost did not go, because what if, what if right there in the fire hall. But Lorene put me in a sundress and did my hair and said if my water broke at a fish fry it would just be the most talked-about birth in the history of Delcie, and we went.

I have been to a lot of gatherings in that fire hall. Weddings, funerals, the fall festival, the night they voted. I had never seen it like that.

They had strung the lights. The volunteer firemen were out back at the fryers in their aprons, and the smell of it carried all the way to the county road. There were folding tables end to end with white paper over them and mason jars of black-eyed susans somebody had cut from a ditch, and there was a long table of cakes and pies for the auction with little index cards saying who had made them, and there was a banner, a real banner, that somebody’s teenage daughter had painted, that said FOR RACHEL AND BABY and had a little heart on it, and when I walked in and saw that banner I had to hold on to the door frame.

The whole county came. That was not an exaggeration Dolores made. They came. People I knew and people I half knew and people I had only ever seen across the Blue Spoon on a busy morning. They came and they put money in the jar and they bought plates they did not need and they bid up those cakes past all reason, forty dollars for a hummingbird cake, fifty for a pecan pie, a hundred and ten dollars for a plain yellow cake with chocolate icing because by then it had become a contest of who loved the baby most. They came and they hugged me and most of them did not say much because there was not much to say, but they looked me in the eye, and in a small town a look in the eye is a contract.