The Six Card Tables On My Lawn

“It’s had gravy on it since Roosevelt.”

Dale ran two extension cords out the front window, one from the kitchen and one clear around from the garage.

“What’s the second one for?” I asked.

“Each of those roasters pulls about fourteen hundred watts. You plug both into one circuit and you’ll be serving in the dark with a tripped breaker.” He taped the cords down flat where they crossed the walk so nobody with a cane would catch a toe. “One roaster, one circuit.”

That is the sort of man I married. He will not make a speech across the street. He will make sure nobody falls.

At five o’clock I carried the first roaster out, the potatoes, bubbling brown at the edges. Then the ham, sliced and steaming. I had my thermometer in my apron pocket out of pure habit.

At a quarter past five I helped Mom down the porch steps and settled her in a lawn chair at the end of the front walk, with an afghan over her knees and her walker parked behind her.

She had her good cardigan on. She had put on lipstick.

She had the roll of tickets in her lap.

Then we waited.

It was a mild evening, the kind October gives you once or twice as a present. The light was coming in gold and sideways through the maple. Across the street the church sat white and quiet, with one car in the lot.

Five-thirty. Nobody.

Twenty-four chairs. Six tables. A blue bedsheet lifting a little at the corner in the breeze.

“Maybe nobody knows,” I said.

“I told Verna at the beauty shop yesterday,” Mom said. “They know.”

At twenty to six a man came around the corner on foot.

It was Otis.

Otis is eighty-one. He lost his wife, Jean, nine years ago, and I do not believe he had missed a Wednesday since the week of her funeral. He walks seven blocks each way because he gave up his license after his cataracts.

He had on a clean plaid shirt buttoned to the collar. He stopped on the sidewalk at the edge of my grass, the way you would stop at somebody’s door.

He took off his cap.

“Hazel,” he said. “I heard there might be supper. I didn’t know if it was for just anybody.”

My mother looked up at him. She pulled the first ticket off that roll, slow, because of her fingers.

“Number one, Otis,” she said. “Same as always. Go sit down before it gets cold.”

He took that ticket in both hands.

His chin went. He stood there in my front yard with his cap against his chest, an old man holding a little red piece of paper that was not worth anything to anybody, and he could not speak.

“Thank you,” he finally got out. “I didn’t know where I was going to go.”

I had to turn around and stir the green beans, which did not need stirring.

After that they came up the sidewalk in twos and threes.

The young mother from the apartments, Kim, with her three little ones in a row behind her like ducks. The two men from the weekly motel, who had washed up and combed their hair wet. Old Mrs. Lindgren on her daughter’s arm. A man I did not know in a seed cap, who turned out to be running a combine for the Schultes and had not had a meal at a table in eleven days.