The Six Card Tables On My Lawn
I put her on the dessert end. Within ten minutes she had an apron on.
While we were scraping plates she said, low, not looking at me, “He’s not a hard man, Lorene. I want you to know that. He hasn’t slept right since that meeting. Something’s eating him and he won’t tell me what.”
“He said the wrong people, Marlene. To my mother’s face.”
“I know what he said.” She scraped a plate. “I’ve been married to him forty-six years. When Gene says an ugly thing, it’s nearly always standing in front of something he’s ashamed of. I just don’t know what it is yet.”
I did not forget that.
The fourth week I looked out my kitchen window at five o’clock and saw Pastor Mark coming across the street with a church roaster in his arms and another one being carried behind him by a deacon.
Forty-eight people came that night.
We had run out of card tables, so Dale and two other men carried four of the long folding tables out of the fellowship hall, through the church’s own front door, across the street, and set them up on my lawn. Nobody stopped them.
Three board members’ wives were serving. Marlene on desserts, Connie on potatoes, Jan pouring coffee out of the church’s own forty-cup urn, which had somehow crossed the street as well.
I stood there with a ladle in my hand and counted. More than half the people on my grass were from our own congregation. They sat down in between the motel men and the harvest hands and Kim’s children, and they passed the rolls.
Dale had strung a line of work lights from the maple to the porch, because it was full dark by a quarter past five now.
My mother sat at the end of the walk in her winter coat with a lap robe and tore forty-eight tickets.
“Number thirty,” I heard her say. “You’re new. What’s your name, honey?”
Across the street there was one window lit, in the church office.
I saw a man’s shape standing in it. He stood there a long time.
Otis went to the Pfeifers’ house the next afternoon. He walked. I offered to drive him and he said no, he needed the seven blocks.
I do not know what was said in that front room. Otis never told me, and I never asked. I only know he was in there an hour, and that Marlene drove him home.
It snowed the sixth Wednesday.
Not a blizzard. One of those wet November snows that starts at noon and comes straight down, heavy, so the maple looked like it had been frosted.
I called the school at one and told them I was leaving early. When I pulled in, Dale had both cars out on the street and the garage swept to the corners.
He had all ten tables set up inside. He had the work lights hung from the rafters, and his electric shop heater going in the back corner.
“No propane,” he said, before I could ask. “Not with fifty people and the door down. Electric, and the big door stays up a foot for air.”
He had even set Mom’s lawn chair just inside the walk-through door, out of the draft, with her afghan folded on the seat.
I had made ham and scalloped potatoes again. It was what I had started with and it seemed right.
I did not expect many. Not in that.
Fifty-three people came through the snow to eat supper in my garage.