The Night My Son Called 911
I went out on the step and pulled the door shut behind me again. I was getting practiced at it.
“Evening,” he said. “This is my wife, Brenda.”
“Hi, honey,” Brenda said, like she had known me twenty years.
“Deputy Larson.”
“Tom. I’m off the clock.”
“Tom. I appreciate it. I do. But I can’t take that.”
It came out flat and hard, harder than I meant. I heard my father in it. I saw the church ladies carrying their box back down the walk.
Tom did not argue. He looked at his wife.
Brenda came up the two steps with the pan and stood right in front of me. She was a head shorter than I was. Steam was coming out from under the foil, and I could smell it, onions and beef and cabbage and bread, and my mouth filled so fast it hurt.
“Well, that’s a problem,” she said, “because I’m not giving it to you.”
“Ma’am?”
“This is my good pan. My sister gave me this pan. I don’t leave it at people’s houses. I’ve lost three that way.” She tipped her head at the door. “So I’m going to need to come in and sit down, and we’re all going to have to empty it, and then I’m taking it home with me. That’s not charity. That’s me not trusting you with my pan.”
“It’s runza casserole,” she said. “It’s no good cold. You’re letting it get cold.”
Behind me, through the door, a small voice said, “Mom. It’s rude to leave company on the step.”
If she had held that pan out to me, I think I would have said no, and gone inside, and been very proud.
But she did not hold it out. She just stood there holding it herself, waiting to be asked in, like any neighbor.
I opened the door.
Mason set the table. Nobody told him to. He got down the plates, and I watched him count them under his breath, and he set five. Five plates, five forks. He put one at the place by the window where nobody had sat since July.
“That one’s Mom’s,” he told Brenda, in case there was any confusion.
“I figured,” she said.
We did not have five chairs. Tom brought the step stool in from the porch and sat on it at the corner with his knees up around his ears, and Kelly thought that was the funniest thing she had ever seen in her life.
Brenda cut the casserole into squares and served it herself, all the way around. She set mine down last, and it was the biggest one.
“Tom, you want to say it?”
He took his cap off and we held hands. He said a short plain grace, the kind men say who mean it. He thanked the Lord for the food and for the hands that made it, and for good reporting, and Mason sat up straighter.
“Amen.”
Nobody ate.
I looked up. Mason had his fork in his fist, and he was not looking at his plate. He was looking at mine. So was Kelly, because Mason was. So, in a quieter way, was a deputy sheriff on a step stool.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I said.
I cut the corner off the square. I put it in my mouth.
I had not sat down to a hot plate of my own in close to three months. I had forgotten that food has weight, that it is warm all the way down. The bread on top was soft and the cabbage was sweet and somebody had put real butter in it. My eyes stung, and I looked at my plate so they would not spill.