The Woman Who Fried the Chicken

Nobody sat.

I looked at Cheryl then. I made myself.

She had not moved. Every person in that hall was on their feet facing our mother, and my sister was the one soul standing with her back to the wall and nobody looking at her at all. I think that was worse than if they had stared. Her face had gone the color of the tablecloths.

I did not have to say a word to her. I never did.

There was a little commotion down by my elbow.

It was a boy. Caleb, the Tuckers’ grandson, six years old, with a cowlick and a clip-on tie. He had come all the way up from the children’s table by himself, carrying his plate in both hands with his tongue between his teeth.

He stopped in front of my mother’s chair.

“You can have mine,” he said. “I didn’t bite it yet.”

There was one drumstick on the plate.

Mom looked at that child for a long moment. I saw her swallow.

“Well, aren’t you a gentleman,” she said. “But that wasn’t my supper that fell, honey. I was carrying it to Mr. Abbott. He can’t get up to the line.”

A kind of sigh went through the room. People turned and looked down the hall at the last table by the door, where a very old man in a brown cardigan was sitting alone with his walker beside him and no plate in front of him at all.

He had been waiting politely for an hour.

Caleb thought it over.

“Then he can have it,” he said, and he set off down the hall.

I am told there were grown men who had to look at the ceiling.

By the time that boy got to the far table, Harold Jenkins had gotten there ahead of him with his own plate. So had Bill Tucker. So had a woman from the choir. Mr. Abbott ended up with five pieces of fried chicken in front of him and was heard to say, quite clearly, “Now what in the world am I supposed to do with all this.”

Pastor Lyle had been at the head table. I had half expected him to go for the microphone on the piano, and I had been dreading it. I did not want my sister preached at in front of the church. I did not want my mother made a sermon illustration, either. She would have hated it worse than the plate.

He did not go near the microphone.

He came across the floor in his shirtsleeves and got down on one knee beside me, right there in the green beans. He took out his handkerchief, a real cloth one, and he wiped up the grease spot himself so nobody would slip.

Then he picked up the four pieces of plate off my napkin and held them in his palm.

“Miss Opal,” he said, quietly enough that only the nearest tables heard, “I have stood in that pulpit six years and thanked the wrong Pruitt. I’m sorry. I should have asked.”

“You didn’t know,” Mom said.

“I should have asked,” he said again.

He stood up. He went to my sister. He did not take her arm. He just stood beside her, facing the same way she was facing, so that for the first time in several minutes she was not standing by herself.

“Cheryl,” he said. “Would you step into the kitchen with me a minute?”