The Woman Who Fried the Chicken

I reached under the folding chair and got the roll.

Then I had it all. Four pieces of plate, two pieces of chicken, a handful of beans, one roll. I gathered it onto a paper napkin to carry to the trash. But I did not carry it yet. I stayed on my knees with it in front of me, and I looked up at my mother.

Now I had a choice, and I knew it.

I could have said it myself. I had the sentence ready. I had been carrying it eleven years.

But I thought, if I say it, then I am one more daughter talking over her. One of us had just told the room she had had enough. I was not going to be the other one, telling the room what she was.

It was hers to say. It had always been hers to say.

So I did not raise my voice to the hall. I kept it ordinary, the voice I would use in her kitchen, loud enough for the nearest tables to hear and no louder. What the room did with it after that was the room’s business.

“Mom,” I said. “Who fried this chicken?”

She looked at me like I had lost my mind.

“Jan,” she said.

“Who was up at four o’clock this morning frying it?”

Her eyes went to Cheryl. Then to the floor. Then, slowly, out across the tables, at all those faces turned toward her. I watched her realize that every one of them was waiting.

Her chin came up about half an inch.

“I did,” she said. “Same as I have every year.”

Eight words. She did not say them loudly. The nearest tables heard, and I watched it travel back from there, table to table, heads leaning together.

For a second nothing happened.

Then, at the second table back, a chair scraped.

Harold Jenkins stood up.

Harold is seventy-one. He farmed cattle and beans west of town until his knees quit, and he has been a deacon since before I was married. He is not a man who makes speeches. He did not make one then.

He just stood, with his napkin still in his fist, and looked at my mother.

“Miss Opal,” he said, “I was nine years old the first time I ate that chicken.”

And he stayed standing.

Another chair went back. That was Bill Tucker, who runs the tire shop on Second Street. Then his brother. Then a man I went to high school with, who has a gray beard now and grandchildren, and who I happen to know took three pieces of Mom’s chicken home in his coat pocket in 1983.

They did not say anything. They just stood up, one after another, the way men stand when a funeral procession goes by.

Dean was already standing, with his hand still on the back of her chair.

Then it was the women, and then it was whole tables, and the sound of two hundred folding chairs going back on linoleum is a sound I will hear until I die.

Nobody clapped. I was glad. Clapping would have turned it into a show, and it was not a show. It was a room full of people who had just found out they had been thanking the wrong person for a long time, and did not know how else to say so.

Mom sat in the middle of it with her hands in her lap.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “Sit down. It’ll get cold.”