The Woman Who Fried the Chicken

“Mama, I hit a plate out of your hands.”

“You did. And you’ve said so, on your knees, in front of the Lord and everybody, and that is harder than frying chicken.” She patted her cheek. “It’s forgiven. It was forgiven before it hit the floor. Now get up off there, that floor is hard, and you’ve got a hip.”

Cheryl did not get up. She put her face in our mother’s lap, in the skirt of the old blue dress, and wept.

I got down beside her. I had not planned to. I put my arm around my sister’s back and felt how thin she had gotten since April, and I was ashamed too. I live twelve minutes from her. I had not known she was up at three.

“You should have called me,” I said into her shoulder.

“I know it,” she said.

“I’d have come. I’d have sat with Ron.”

“I know it. I know.”

Mr. Abbott, above us, cleared his throat.

“Opal,” he said, “I’ve got six pieces of chicken here and two daughters of yours on the floor. I believe this one could use a drumstick.”

That was when the room laughed. It was a soft laugh, a wet one, and it let everybody breathe.

Dean came and got Cheryl up by one elbow and me by the other. Harold Jenkins brought her a chair. Somebody’s wife brought her a cup of coffee and a plate, and she sat down between Mom and Mr. Abbott and ate a piece of the chicken she had been taking credit for, and cried through most of it, and nobody at that church has ever said one unkind word to her about that night that I have heard.

I think it is because they watched her walk that hall.

There was a consequence. I do not want to tell this as though there was not.

Cheryl went to Pastor Lyle that same week and resigned the chair of the fellowship committee. He did not talk her out of it. He told her he thought a year off was wise, that she had a husband to look after and had been carrying too much, and that there was a difference between being forgiven and being rested.

Then he told her that if she wanted to do something for the harvest supper next fall, he knew a woman who could use a second pair of hands at the stove.

He also did not preach on it. Not that Sunday, not ever. The only thing he did from the pulpit was the following week, at announcements, and it took him fifteen seconds.

“I have a correction to make,” he said. “For six years I have thanked the fellowship committee for the harvest supper chicken. That chicken has been fried by Mrs. Opal Pruitt, every year since 1975. I was wrong, and I wanted the record straight.”

Mom was in her usual pew. She looked at her bulletin the entire time.

But she folded that bulletin in half and put it in her Bible when he was through, and it is still there.

The men of the church did something too, and I will tell it for the sake of anybody’s husband who is reading over a shoulder.