The Help Eats in the Kitchen
“She isn’t coming back. They’re paid and they’re done.”
“Paid?” He gave a short laugh, not the easy one. “Paid by who? The family’s paying for that food. You can’t just give away what the family paid for.”
I looked at my husband for what felt like a long time.
He believed it. That was the thing. He was not lying to me. In nine years he had told that story to himself so many times, “we put on the reunion,” “the family all pitches in,” that it had gone solid. He had stood at that fireplace every June and thanked everybody for coming and never once wondered where a single dollar of it came from.
“Greg,” I said. “What family?”
He opened his mouth.
That was when we both heard the spoon.
Somebody out in the pavilion was rapping a metal spoon against a glass tea jug. Three hard raps, and three more, the way you call a wedding to order.
And then his sister’s voice, which has carried over a school bus full of sixth graders for twenty-six years.
“Sit down. All of you, sit down. I’m going to tell you where your dinner went.”
Greg went out through the swinging door. Alexis was already out there. I got up and stood at the pass-through window, because I found my knees wanted something to lean on.
Wanda was standing by the empty serving table.
She is fifty-eight, four years older than Greg, a big square woman with cropped white hair and a sunburned nose. She had on the reunion shirt from two years back. She was holding the tea spoon in one hand and a piece of paper in the other.
People sat. People do, for Wanda.
“I ran this reunion for seven years,” she said. “After Mama couldn’t. Some of you remember, because I called every one of you every spring and begged. Bring a dish. Bring ten dollars. Bring a bag of ice, for mercy’s sake.”
A few people smiled.
“Then Ron had his heart, and I couldn’t do it, and I thought, well, that’s the end of the Pruitt reunion. And it would have been. Except my brother’s wife said she’d take it. One time, she said.”
She let that sit.
“That was nine years ago. Nine. Anybody in here made a phone call for this reunion in nine years? Booked this pavilion? Set up a table?”
The pavilion was very still. Down at the water a boat motor droned past and faded.
“I didn’t think so. I didn’t either. I’m not standing up here clean. I let her take it and I was glad to be shed of it, and I never once asked how she was managing.”
She held up the paper.
“This morning that catering lady needed somebody to sign for the delivery, and Karen had her arms full, so I signed. This is the invoice. I’ve been carrying it in my pocket all day because I couldn’t quite believe it.” She put on the glasses that hang around her neck. “Sixty guests. Two thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars. Paid in full, personal check, Karen Pruitt.”
Somebody whistled, low.
“That’s just the food. I asked her straight out at the tea table what the whole day ran her, and she didn’t want to say, and I made her. Thirty-eight hundred dollars.” Wanda took the glasses off. “Out of her own pocket. She works the front desk at a dentist’s office, in case anybody’s forgot.”