The Check With Three Names On It

A few people laughed, gently.

“It has gone to the funeral dinner fund, which had $61 in it. The ladies tell me it will replace both roasters and the coffee urn that has been leaking on the floor since about 2011, with enough left to feed the next dozen families.” He folded the paper. “Ilene served in that kitchen for forty-one years. I guess she raised three children who knew what it was worth. On behalf of this congregation, Doug, Alan, Renee, thank you.”

And people clapped. Lutherans do not clap in church. They clapped.

I did not look at my brothers. I looked at my lap, and at Aunt Lois’s hand on mine.

But I could see the third row across the aisle without turning my head. And every woman in it had turned and was looking at the two men in the pew in front of me.

Nobody glared. Bev was even smiling a little. But Mrs. Thornton’s face was perfectly still and perfectly level, and she held it on my brothers for as long as the clapping went on, and then a moment longer.

She knew. She had known since that Tuesday. And she was not going to say one word, and neither was I.

The back of Doug’s neck went red from his collar to his fresh haircut.

Alan put his head down. He kept it down.

Then Doug turned all the way around in the pew and looked at me.

He looked like a man who had reached for a railing in the dark and found it missing. He opened his mouth.

I looked back at him. I did not smile and I did not frown. I did not say a thing.

He turned around again.

Then Pastor Wayne began to read the names.

The bell rang for each of them, one long note that you could feel in the pew.

“Ilene Marie Brandt,” Pastor Wayne said.

The bell rang.

It had been decided, back before any of this, that Doug would light the candle, being the oldest. He stood up. He got as far as the end of the pew and he stopped there with his hand on the rail.

It was Alan who moved. He stood, and he did not go forward. He turned around and held his hand out to me.

“You,” he said. His voice cracked on it. “It ought to be you.”

So I walked up the aisle of the church where my mother carried me to be baptized, and I lit her candle off the big one, and my hand shook so that it took two tries. When I turned around, the whole third row was crying into their bulletins, and Jeff was looking at the ceiling the way he does.

That was the tender part of that morning. The other part came downstairs.

There is always coffee after service, down in the fellowship hall. I would have skipped it, but Aunt Lois wanted a cup, and you do not hurry a woman of 81 past a table of bars.

People kept coming up to my brothers. Men shook Doug’s hand. An old farmer told Alan that his mother had fed his family through three funerals and it was about time somebody fed her back. Doug said “thank you” eleven or twelve times, each one quieter than the last.