The Six Card Tables On My Lawn
Besides, the vote was taken. Seven people had raised their hands in a room. A shouting match was not going to put the hams back in the oven.
I stood at my kitchen window, and I looked across the street at the church, and then I looked at my own front lawn.
It is a good lawn. Corner lot, flat, with a silver maple that Dale’s father planted.
“Dale,” I said. “How many card tables do we own?”
He looked at me. Then he looked out the window. Then the corner of his mouth went up, very slightly.
“Two,” he said. “Your mother’s got two more in the basement. And I believe I know where I can borrow a couple.”
I settled one thing in my own mind before I bought a single potato. I would charge nothing and take no donations, not so much as a jar on the table. I would feed my guests on my own lawn the way anyone feeds company.
I have cooked in a school kitchen for nineteen years, so the food would be held hot and handled right. That part I did not have to think about.
Tuesday after work I went to the grocery store and spent seventy-four dollars and some cents of my own money. A nine-pound boneless ham. Twelve pounds of russets. Onions, milk, butter, flour. Four of the big cans of green beans. Three dozen rolls from the bakery case.
I peeled potatoes at the kitchen table until ten o’clock that night.
Mom sat across from me. She cannot stand at a stove, but there is nothing wrong with her opinions.
“Thinner,” she said. “They won’t cook through. You’re not feeding hogs.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“And you scald the milk first. I don’t care what the box says.”
“I’m not using a box.”
“Well, I should hope not.”
It was the most like herself she had sounded in three days.
Around nine she went quiet. I looked up and she had her hands flat on the table.
“Lorene. What if nobody comes?”
“Then we eat ham until Christmas.”
“What if they come and the church is upset with you?”
I put the peeler down.
“Mom, I am not doing one thing against that church. I’ll be in the pew Sunday, same as ever, and my envelope will be in the plate. I am having company for supper. That’s all this is.”
She thought about that for a while.
“Company,” she said. “Well. Then I’d better find my tickets.”
She went through three drawers in her bedroom before she found them. It was a new roll, never started, red, the double kind with the number printed twice. She set it on the kitchen table next to the salt.
“Nobody needs a ticket to eat in my yard,” I said, as gently as I could.
“I know that.”
She did not put them away.
Wednesday I took a half day. The ham went in at noon.
Dale came home at three with two card tables in the bed of his pickup that he had borrowed from his brother Jeff, and he set all six out under the maple in two rows of three. Mom supervised from the porch.
“They need cloths,” she said. “It’s not a rummage sale.”
I do not own six matching tablecloths. Nobody does. We ended up with two checked ones, a yellow one, my Christmas cloth turned to the plain side, a blue bedsheet, and the white one with the cutwork that Mom’s mother made. Mom insisted on that one.
“It’ll get gravy on it,” I said.