The Help Eats in the Kitchen
“I can’t believe this.” She snatched her purse off the chair, the chair that was supposed to have been mine. “I cannot believe this family.” And she walked out of the pavilion, fast, across the grass to the gravel lot. A car door slammed. An engine started.
Greg watched her go. He did not go after her. I will always remember that he did not.
Instead he walked to the serving table and took a paper plate off the stack. A clean one, with a fluted edge.
He carried it through the swinging door into the kitchen.
He pulled the other stool over next to mine, and he sat down on it with the empty plate on his knees.
“There’s nothing left to put on that,” I said.
“I know.”
“Sitting in here doesn’t fix it.”
“I know that too.” He turned the plate around in his hands. They were not steady. “I just figured this was where I ought to be eating.”
I did not take his hand. I want to tell this honestly. I was not ready, and it would have been a lie, and I had about used up my lifetime’s supply of comfortable ones.
But I did not tell him to leave.
What happened next in the pavilion happened without me, and I believe that was the best part.
Wanda did not sit back down. She dumped the plastic forks out of a paper bucket, walked it to the head table, and put a twenty in it where everyone could see.
“That’s a start,” she said. “Jeff, you and Kim have that new boat. I expect to hear it fold.”
It went table to table. I could hear it going. Nobody gave a button.
Uncle Dale, to his credit, stood up and announced he was driving to the grocery in Branson West and who was coming. Three trucks went. They came back in forty minutes with hot dogs and hamburger and buns and four bags of charcoal, and the men who had been waiting to be served lit the park grills and cooked their own supper in their good shirts.
It was not brisket. It was a little burnt, and they ran out of mustard.
It was the first Pruitt reunion in nine years that the Pruitts put on.
Around three o’clock Wanda came to the kitchen door. She looked at the two of us on our stools.
“Greg, go turn hot dogs,” she said. “Karen, Mama wants you.”
Ruth had the chair beside her pulled out. Alexis’s chair. She patted the seat.
I sat down at the head table in my blue sundress, with no apron on, and my mother-in-law covered my hand with hers. Her skin is like paper now. She did not make a speech. She is not that kind.
“That’s a pretty dress,” she said. “I didn’t get a look at it before.”
Jeff brought me a hamburger on a paper plate. He set it down carefully, with both hands, and he could not quite meet my eye.
“Karen,” he said. “I shouldn’t have laughed.”
“No,” I said. “Thank you for the burger.”
Wanda counted the bucket at the end of the day, out loud, at the fireplace. Six hundred and fifty-five dollars. She tried to give it to me.
“Keep it,” I said. “Start next year’s with it. Whoever’s running it.”
“I’m running it,” Wanda said. “You’re done. You’re a guest. You’ll show up at noon and bring nothing, and if I see you lift a pan I’ll take it out of your hands.”
Greg and I did not talk much on the drive home to Reeds Spring. The lake was going gold out the truck window.