The Check With Three Names On It

Mrs. Thornton was at the serving counter with Bev from the circle, stacking casserole dishes. Mrs. Thornton has run the funeral dinners at St. Mark’s for thirty years. She is 79 and about five feet tall and I have never in my life called her by her first name, and I do not intend to start.

“Renee,” she said. “Come here, honey.”

She hugged me with her wrists, because her hands were wet.

“I brought you all a card,” I said. “It was a beautiful lunch. Everybody said so.”

“Your mother would have found something wrong with the potatoes,” Bev said.

“She would have,” I said, and we all laughed, and it was the first time I had laughed in a week.

Then I said the thing I had come to say. I said it to be polite. I said it the way you would say you hoped the weather held.

“I hope Doug’s check covered all of it. If we came up short on anything, you’ll tell me.”

Mrs. Thornton set down the dish she was holding.

“What check, honey?”

“For the hall,” I said. “And the lunch.”

She looked at Bev. Bev looked at the dish towel in her hands.

“Renee,” Mrs. Thornton said, “there’s no charge for the hall. Not for a member. There never has been, not in my time and not in my mother’s.”

“Oh,” I said.

“And the lunch comes out of the dinner fund and out of our own kitchens. The fund buys the ham and the rolls and the coffee. The potatoes and the salads and the bars, we bring from home. That’s how it’s done. That’s how most every church in this county does it.”

“Nobody paid you anything,” I said.

“Your brother gave Pastor Wayne an envelope, and one for the organist, which was right and proper. I don’t know about any flowers. But nobody paid this kitchen a dime, and I’d have handed it back if they tried.”

I stood there holding my card in its sealed envelope against my chest like something that might spill.

I am not quick. It took me a moment to do the arithmetic, and when I did, I did it out loud, which I regret.

“He told me the lunch was $2,250.”

Nobody said anything. The coffee maker ticked.

Mrs. Thornton dried her hands, slowly, one finger at a time. Then she walked over to the wall by the stove, where the aprons hang on a row of nails, and she took down a faded blue one with white rickrack on the pocket.

I knew it before she turned around.

She held it out to me and folded back the hem. Inside, in laundry marker gone gray from forty years of washing, it said I. Brandt in my mother’s square printing.

“She started on this committee in 1984,” Mrs. Thornton said. “The year you turned three. She brought you along in a playpen and set you up right there by the pantry door. I have counted it up, because I knew I would be asked to say something at her funeral and then I could not get through it. Your mother worked better than 400 funeral dinners in this room.”

She put the apron in my hands.

“Did you think we would send her a bill?”