The Six Card Tables On My Lawn
Mom tore a ticket for every one of them and looked every one of them in the face.
Twenty-two people by six o’clock. The usual ones. The wrong ones.
Dale said the table grace, because somebody had to, and he kept it to four sentences.
I was dishing potatoes onto a plate for one of Kim’s boys when the talk around the tables died away. It went quiet all at once, like when a teacher walks back into a classroom.
I looked up.
Across the street the church door had opened. Mr. Pfeifer was coming down the steps.
He had a folded paper in his hand.
He stood at the curb and looked both ways, though there was not a car moving in the whole town, and then he crossed.
He stopped at the very edge of my grass, right beside my mother’s chair. Twenty-two people had put down their forks.
“Lorene,” he said. “Hazel.”
“Mr. Pfeifer,” I said.
He looked at the tables. He looked at the roasters and the cords taped down across my walk. His eyes rested a moment on the motel men, and on Kim’s children, and on Otis, who had gone very still over his plate.
I watched him turn that folded paper over in his fingers.
I did not know what it was. I thought it might be something from the board, telling me to quit. I had my answer ready, and it was a polite one.
Then my mother tore off a ticket. Number twenty-three. She held it up to him.
“There’s plenty, Gene,” she said. “Lorene made it my way.”
He looked at that ticket as if it were a hot coal.
“I can’t, Hazel.”
“All right.”
“I only came over to say.” He stopped. He looked at the paper in his hand, and then he looked at all those faces, and he folded it once more and slid it inside his coat. “I came to say the board had its reasons. That’s all. It wasn’t done lightly.”
“I expect it wasn’t,” Mom said.
“I wouldn’t want you to think it was personal.”
“Supper’s at six on Wednesdays,” my mother said. “It always was.”
He stood another second. Then he put his hat back on, nodded, and went back across the street, and the church door closed behind him.
Mom looked at ticket number twenty-three.
She did not put it back on the roll. She put it in the pocket of her cardigan and buttoned the pocket.
“Somebody pass that boy the rolls,” she said.
Thirty-one came the second week.
One of them was Pastor Mark.
He is thirty-four, with two little girls, and he has been with us two years. He is a good preacher and a kind young man, and he had not said one word from the pulpit or anywhere else about the supper.
He came across the street at ten to six in his shirtsleeves and went straight to my mother’s chair. He got down on one knee in the grass so she would not have to look up.
“Mrs. Hazel,” he said. He has always called her that. “I sat in that board meeting. I don’t have a vote, and I told myself that meant I didn’t have a say. I should have opened my mouth and I didn’t. I have been ashamed of it for two weeks.”
Mom looked at him over her glasses.
“A pastor doesn’t vote,” she said.
“No, ma’am.”
“A pastor eats, though.” She tore off a ticket. “Number seventeen. Go sit by those motel boys. They think nobody over there knows their names.”