The Six Card Tables On My Lawn
He sat by them. By the end of the meal he knew both their names and where they were from and that one of them had a little girl in Salina he had not seen since Easter.
It was that night, in my kitchen, that Otis told me about the window.
He had stayed to dry, the way he always stayed to stack chairs at the church. I was washing roaster pans and he was standing at my counter with a dish towel, drying the same serving spoon over and over.
“Lorene, I got to tell somebody something.”
“All right.”
“That window. The big one in the fellowship hall, by the back door.”
I had heard about the window. Everybody had. It had been found broken on a Thursday morning in September, and it had cost the church six hundred and forty dollars to replace.
“It was me,” Otis said.
I turned the water off.
“I stayed late to put the chair cart away. Your mother’d gone home. It was just me. I got the cart on that little ramp and it got away from me, forty chairs on it, and the corner went right through the glass.” His voice was shaking. “I stood there I don’t know how long. And then I locked up and went home. God forgive me, I went home.”
“Otis.”
“I thought if they knew an old fool couldn’t even push a cart, they’d tell me not to come anymore. That supper’s the only night I talk to anybody. So I kept still. And then Gene found a couple of cigarette ends out back, and everybody figured it was those fellows from the motel, and I let them figure it.”
He pulled an envelope out of his shirt pocket. It was soft from being carried.
“I been putting back twenty dollars a week. That’s eighty there. I’ll get the rest, it’ll just take me till spring.”
Otis lives on a Social Security check in a house with one room heated.
I dried my hands. I wanted to tell him to keep his money, and I wanted to tell him it did not matter, and neither of those would have been true or kind.
“You have to tell Mr. Pfeifer yourself,” I said. “Not me. I’ll walk over there with you if you want. But it has to come out of your mouth.”
“I know it.”
“Those two men at my table have been carrying your window for a month.”
He nodded. The tears were running down into his collar.
“Give me a week to get my nerve,” he said. “I’ll do it. I give you my word.”
I believed him. Otis is a man who walks seven blocks rather than drive with bad eyes.
The third week it was cooler, and thirty-eight came, and a woman walked up my front walk carrying a nine by thirteen pan with foil over it.
It was Marlene Pfeifer.
She is a small, brisk woman who taught second grade for thirty years. She stopped in front of me with her chin up, as if she expected to be turned away.
“Pumpkin bars,” she said. “Cream cheese frosting. I didn’t tell Gene I was coming, and I’m not going to tell him I’ve been, but I expect he can see me from the church office window, and that’s his lookout.”
“Marlene, you don’t have to.”
“I’ve eaten your mother’s cooking at every funeral dinner for forty years. Where do you want these?”