The Six Card Tables On My Lawn

“I was wrong,” Mr. Pfeifer said. “Not about the letter. The letter is real, and I’ll pass it around, anybody can read it. I was wrong to be too proud to say we were short. I was wrong about who belongs at a church table. And Hazel, I was wrong to you worst of all.”

He put his hand in his overcoat pocket and brought out a brass key with a loop of red yarn through it.

He walked the six steps to my mother’s chair. He is seventy-three and he got down on one wet knee on my garage floor to hand it to her.

“I had no business taking this,” he said. “I don’t know yet how we’ll pay for it. But if you’ll come back, I will find a way, if I have to sell my boat.”

My mother looked at the key in her palm for a long moment. She ran her thumb over the yarn.

Then she unbuttoned the pocket of her cardigan.

She took out a red ticket, bent at the corners from six weeks of riding around in there.

“Number twenty-three,” she said. “I’ve been holding your place, Gene. Now get up off that cold floor before you take a chill, and let Lorene fix you a plate.”

He took the ticket. He could not get up right away, and it was not his knee.

Dale put a hand under his elbow and lifted him the way you would help your own father, and walked him to a chair.

The chair was between Otis and one of the motel men.

I fixed him a plate. Ham, potatoes, beans, a roll. I set it in front of him and he looked up at me, and his eyes were red.

“Your mother’s recipe?” he said.

“She made me slice them thinner.”

He nearly laughed. He picked up his fork.

It was the motel man beside him, the one with the little girl in Salina, who did the next thing. His name is Jeff. He got up without a word, went to the shelf over Dale’s workbench, and took down an empty coffee can that had held wood screws.

He put a five dollar bill in it and set it in the middle of the table.

“For the stove hood,” he said. “I’ve ate here two years.”

Otis laid his soft envelope in on top. A hundred and sixty dollars by then.

“That was meant for the window,” Mr. Pfeifer said.

“Window’s paid,” Otis said. “Let it go for the supper.”

That can went around ten tables. Kim’s oldest boy put in a quarter and two dimes, and I saw Mr. Pfeifer see it. The combine man was back through town, and he put in a fifty. Dale put in what was in his wallet and so did the pastor.

Nobody had told anybody to. I want that understood. I had kept my word to myself for six weeks and never set out a jar. This was not for my table. It was for the church’s.

Marlene counted it at my workbench with Connie watching. Four hundred and seventeen dollars and forty-five cents.

“The women’s fellowship has nine hundred in the funeral dinner fund,” Marlene said, loud enough for her husband to hear. “And I don’t believe there’s a woman in it who’ll vote no.”

“That leaves about five hundred twenty-three,” Mr. Pfeifer said. He had done it in his head. He would.

A farmer at the back table, a quiet man who had not said a word all evening, cleared his throat.