The Woman Who Fried the Chicken

She went. She walked the whole length of the serving table with her head up, and I will give her that. The kitchen door swung shut behind them.

People began, slowly, to sit down. The line started moving again. Somebody took the sign off the table and laid it face down, and I never did learn who.

Dean looked at me.

“You all right?” he said.

“My knees hurt.”

“You’re fifty-four years old and you’ve been on a church floor for five minutes. I’d expect so.” He gave me his hand and pulled me up. “That was the right thing,” he said, lower. “I was about to say plenty. I’m glad you got there first.”

Dean took the napkin out of my hands and carried it to the trash barrel himself. I washed up at the kitchen sink and fixed a fresh plate. There were, by then, eleven pieces left in the roaster, and not one person in that line objected when I took a thigh. I gave Mom my arm, and we walked down the hall together to Mr. Abbott’s table. It took a while. People touched her sleeve as she passed. Somebody said, “Thank you, Opal.” Then somebody else did. She nodded at each of them, embarrassed to the roots of her hair.

Mr. Abbott tried to get up when he saw her coming. It is how he was raised.

“Don’t you dare,” Mom said. “Sit.”

She set the plate down in front of him beside the five others.

“I am sorry it took so long, Frank,” she said. “There was some trouble with the first one.”

“So I gathered.” He looked up at her. His eyes are very pale now, almost no color at all. “Opal, you didn’t need to walk all the way down here. Not on my account.”

“Well, who else’s account would I do it on?”

He laughed. Then he stopped laughing and picked up the thigh, and he held it a second before he bit it, the way you would hold something you were about to say grace over.

“Louise used to say,” he told me, “that there were two women in Henry County she’d trust to feed me. Herself and your mother.” He chewed and swallowed. “After she died I figured I’d live on canned soup. I told Opal so at the funeral dinner. And the next Tuesday there was a knock at my door.”

“It was only a meatloaf,” Mom said.

“It was four years of Tuesdays and Fridays, is what it was.” He put down the chicken. His hand, the one with the wedding band still on it, found hers on the table and covered it. “I have not once sat down to one of those suppers without knowing somebody remembered I was still here. You don’t know what that is, at my age. To be remembered on a Tuesday.”

My mother, who had not cried when a plate was knocked out of her hands in front of two hundred people, cried then.

She did it the way she does everything, without any fuss. She just sat down in the chair beside him and let the tears go, and patted his hand, and said, “Eat, Frank, before it’s cold.”

I stood behind her and held onto the back of her chair and did not try to stop mine either.

It was perhaps ten minutes before the kitchen door opened.

I have asked Cheryl since what the pastor said to her in there. She told me he said very little. He asked her how long it had been since she had slept a night through. He asked after Ron.