The Six Card Tables On My Lawn
So in October of 1992 she asked the board if she could use the church kitchen on Wednesday nights. She made one roaster of chicken and noodles and a pan of apple crisp, and she put a card in the window of the drugstore that said Free Supper, Wednesday, 6:00, Everybody.
Eleven people came.
She fed them at one long table in the fellowship hall, and she sat down and ate with them, and that was the entire program. There was never a sermon attached to it. There was a table grace and there was food.
Thirty-four years of Wednesdays. She missed some for blizzards and one for my daughter’s wedding and six weeks in 2019 when she broke her hip, and even then she ran it from a chair with a clipboard.
By the end it was sixty and seventy people some nights.
Widowers, mostly, at the start. Then the farm families when corn went to nothing. Then the people from the apartments down by the tracks, and the men who rent by the week at the motel on the highway, and harvest hands in the fall who were a long way from anybody’s kitchen.
She kept a roll of red tickets in her apron. Nobody ever paid a cent. She tore one off for every plate so she could count the stubs afterward and know how many pounds of potatoes to buy for next week. That was all those tickets ever were. A widow’s bookkeeping.
When her legs gave out two years ago, she could not stand at the stove anymore. Younger women took over the cooking. I helped when I could get away from the school, where I have cooked in the lunchroom for nineteen years.
But Mom still sat at the door every Wednesday with her roll of tickets.
“Number fourteen,” she would say, and tear it off, and look the person in the face.
I have come to believe that was the real supper. Somebody looking you in the face and giving you a number, like you had been expected.
That Sunday afternoon my husband Dale came in from the garage and found me standing in the kitchen doing nothing, which is not like me.
“What did he say to her?” he asked. He had been ushering and missed it.
I told him. The announcement, the key, the wrong people.
Dale is not a talker. He was a lineman for the power district for thirty-one years and he still thinks before he speaks, like a man who has worked near things that can kill him.
“You want me to go over there?” he said.
“No.”
“I’d be polite about it.”
“I know you would.”
And I will tell you plainly why I did not let him, and why I did not go myself, because my sister-in-law asked me that same week why I did not simply march across the street and give that board a piece of my mind.
My mother has sixty-one years in that church. She was married in it. She buried my father from it. Every friend she has left on this earth sits within four pews of her.
If I made a fight of it, there would be sides. There are always sides. And an eighty-four-year-old woman would spend whatever Sundays she has left sitting in a room where half the people would not meet her eye.
I was not going to make her choose between her church and her daughter.