The Pictures in the Church Kitchen

She died three years ago in March, of her heart, in her sleep. We had her lunch in that same basement. The women would not let me carry so much as a pickle fork.

On Saturday I got there at eight with the pumpkin bars. There were five women already at work in aprons: Mrs. Tuttle on a stool at the counter buttering buns, because she could not stand long yet, and Brenda and Kim and Jan and old Donna, who is ninety and slices ham thinner than a machine can.

Connie was not there. Connie pours the coffee on Sunday mornings, which is a job the women gave her last spring to make her welcome, and she does it faithfully. But she was not on the funeral list. My mother’s old list is still the list, recopied by Lois, and nobody had gotten around to asking Connie if she wanted on it. I have thought about that since, too.

We fed a hundred and ten people. Vernon Koch was ninety-one and had farmed north of town, and his granddaughters cried over the cheesy potatoes because they tasted like every funeral they had ever been to. When the hall was empty and the dishwasher was roaring, Mrs. Tuttle wiped her hands and said, “Did you bring it?”

I got the picture out of my tote bag.

It is a color snapshot somebody had blown up to an eight by ten years ago. October of 1979. My mother is thirty years old, standing at the big range in that very kitchen in a blue checked apron, holding the lid of an eighteen-quart roaster up like a shield and laughing at whoever had the camera. Her hair is tied back in a scarf. There is steam on the window behind her.

The women came and stood around it. Donna put on her glasses.

“That’s the Bauer funeral,” Donna said. “That was her first one in charge. She scorched the scalloped potatoes on the bottom and cried in the pantry.”

“She did not cry,” said Mrs. Tuttle.

“She cried, Lois. I was holding the door.”

Then nobody said anything, and Mrs. Tuttle looked up at the wall.

I looked where she was looking. Above the pass-through there was a clock, a fire extinguisher sign, and the laminated sheet from the county health department. That was all. That was all there had ever been.

“Amy,” Mrs. Tuttle said, “do you know there is a framed photograph of every pastor of this congregation since 1911 in the upstairs hallway? Every one. Including the one who stayed eleven months and left with the organist.”

“And there is not one picture anywhere in this building of the woman who fed this church’s grief for thirty years.” She laid her hand on the frame. “I would like this to hang in here. I would like to look at her while I butter buns. I am asking you, as her daughter.”

I had not come for that. I need whoever reads this to believe me. I came with pumpkin bars.

“Mother would say feed the people and never mind the cook,” I said. “She never once let anybody take her picture in here on purpose.”

“She would say exactly that,” said Mrs. Tuttle. “And she would be wrong, and I would tell her so. I ought to have asked you at her funeral and I was too sad to think of it.”

“I don’t want it to be hard on Connie. She works in here Sundays.”