The Six Card Tables On My Lawn

Otis came first, with snow on his cap, and Mom gave him number one. The motel men came, and Kim carried her littlest and stamped her boots. Pastor Mark and his wife brought both their girls. Marlene, Connie and Jan had their sleeves rolled before I got the lids off.

It was loud in there. It was warm. Somebody’s child was under a table. The windows of the garage door fogged over, and it smelled like ham and wet wool and coffee.

We were halfway through the meal when the walk-through door opened and the cold came in.

Mr. Pfeifer stood in the doorway.

There was snow on the shoulders of his overcoat. He had no boots on, only his dress shoes, wet through. He had walked across.

He took off his hat and held it in both hands in front of him.

The garage went quiet, table by table, until the only sound was the heater ticking.

“Hazel,” he said. “Lorene. I’d like to say something, if you’ll let me. To everybody. I won’t be long.”

I looked at Mom. She gave one small nod.

He reached inside his coat and took out a folded paper. I knew it the second I saw it. It had been folded and unfolded so many times it was soft as cloth.

“This came on the twenty-second of September,” he said. “From the company that insures the church.”

His voice was not steady. He is a man who kept the books at the co-op for forty years, and I had never once heard his voice not be steady.

“When that window got broken, I called our agent to ask if it was covered. It wasn’t. The deductible is a thousand dollars and the glass was six-forty. But my asking got somebody looking at our policy. And they wrote to say that a weekly meal for the public, in a kitchen with no inspected hood over the stove, was more than our policy allowed. We could buy the added coverage and have the hood brought up and inspected. One thousand eight hundred and forty dollars the first year. Or they would not renew us in January.”

He looked down at the letter.

“We put a furnace in that building in August. There was six hundred and twelve dollars in the general fund the night the board met. I am the chairman. I have been the one who signs the checks for eleven years, and I could not stand up in front of this congregation and say the church did not have the money to feed people.”

Nobody moved.

“So I didn’t say it. I said the other thing. I had it in my head those two men had broken our window.” He made himself look at the motel men. “I never asked you. I never sat down at a table with you one time in my life. I said you were the wrong people, and I said it to the woman who had fed this town for thirty-four years, and then I asked her for her key.”

He stopped. His jaw worked.

“Otis came to my house and told me the truth about that window, which took more nerve than I have shown in two months. He sat in my front room and cried about a pane of glass. And I thought, Gene, that old man is ashamed of an accident, and you are not even ashamed of what you did on purpose.”

Otis was looking at his plate.