The Pictures in the Church Kitchen

Mrs. Tuttle was on her stool by the bars. She saw me and gave me the smallest shake of her head. Not yet. Let him look.

So I let him look.

He walked to the wall the way he walks out onto ice. He stopped in front of the one from 1979, the roaster lid, the scarf, the laugh.

“That’s the Bauer funeral,” he said. His voice was ordinary. “She burned the potatoes. She came home and said she was never setting foot in that kitchen again.” He reached up, and with one thick finger he straightened the frame, though it was already straight. “I told her nobody at a funeral ever tastes a thing anyhow. They only remember that somebody fed them.”

Donna, at the counter, said, “I told you she cried, Lois.”

A few people laughed, softly. My father did not. He looked at the wedding picture, and the coffeepots, and then at the Christmas table for a long time.

Then he turned around.

“Who hung these?”

“I did, Dad,” I said from the doorway. “Yesterday. The women asked me to.”

“We asked her,” Mrs. Tuttle said. “It was past time.”

“It was,” he said. “It’s good. I’m glad of it.” His eyes came back to me, and they were puzzled, nothing worse. “But these are the ones you’ve got at your house, sis. This one hung by my bathroom door for forty years. I figured Connie boxed them up for you out of the spare room.”

Nobody at the counter moved.

“They did not come out of the spare room, Dad.”

“Then where did you get them?”

I had practiced a dozen ways to say it. In the end I only had the plain one, and I said it low, so it stayed in the kitchen.

“On your curb. Thursday morning. In four boxes, with the garbage can. Mrs. Tuttle stood over them until I got there.”

He did not look at me after that. He looked at his wife.

Connie had stopped pouring. A cup stood half full under the spigot. She did not turn around. I could see the back of her neck, and the two little pearl buttons on the collar of her church dress, and how hard she was holding the edge of the counter.

“Connie,” my father said.

She said nothing.

“Connie. Is that so?”

“Yes,” she said, to the coffee urn.

He set his cup down on the steel counter, full. He set it down so gently it did not make a sound. He took his cap out of his coat pocket.

“Lois, I thank you,” he said to Mrs. Tuttle. And to no one, to the room: “Excuse me. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

He walked out through the fellowship hall, nodding to people, and up the stairs.

Connie picked the pot back up and finished pouring. She filled every cup on that counter with her face the color of the dish towels, and nobody in that kitchen said one word to her that was not “thank you” or “excuse me, Connie.” Mrs. Tuttle saw to it with her eyebrows.

When my father came back down the stairs he had something under his arm, wrapped in a shop rag.

He unwrapped it on the counter in front of his wife. It was the wedding album. White leatherette gone the color of cream, with the gold bells stamped on the front.

I made a sound. I could not help it.