The Kitchen The Church Took Back

What it cost us, we did not say to anyone either. Wanda’s husband LeRoy died nine years ago and the kitchen was the only place in town Wanda still laughed out loud. Eunice’s eyesight had gotten bad enough that she had quietly stopped driving at night, and the Tuesday kitchen prep was one of the only mornings left where somebody still needed her for something besides a ride. Marge had buried a grandson three years back, a boy named Tyler who died of an infection that should not have killed a healthy nineteen year old, and the lunch she helped cook for his own funeral was, she told me once, the only thing that got her out of bed that week, because grief with your hands busy is a different animal than grief with your hands empty. And I will say my own truth plainly. My Hollis has been gone for six years. The kitchen was the place I still felt like I was somebody’s wife, somebody’s neighbor, somebody who mattered to this town in a way that had nothing to do with being alone in a quiet house. Tamra could not have known any of that. We never told her.

So we went to church on Sundays and we sat in our regular pews, Louise two rows behind me, Wanda across the aisle, and we watched the sign-up sheet on the kitchen door fill in with names for the next three funerals, all of them small, old-timers whose families had plenty of their own people to cook for them anyway, so Prairie Table’s lovely spreads went mostly fine, soup in disposable bowls, little trays of cold cuts, nothing anybody complained about and nothing anybody remembered either. We showed up to those funerals in our good dresses instead of our aprons and we sat with everybody else, the way Tamra said would be nice, and it was not nice, it was just different, the way a room is different when the furniture gets moved and you keep walking into where the chair used to be.

Then, the second week of October, Cole Haney’s wife died.

I did not know Cole well before that week. He and Dana had moved to our county eighteen months before, about the same time as Pastor Shay, so new in town that most folks still called them the young couple renting the old Petersen place out on the gravel. Cole worked the loading dock at the grain co-op. Dana had been expecting their first baby in the spring. She went into the hospital in Grand Island on a Tuesday with what the doctors first thought was a bad headache, and by Thursday she was gone, an aneurysm, the kind that gives almost no warning and takes almost no time, and the baby did not make it either. Cole had no family in the county. His own mother had passed when he was in high school and his father lived three states away and had not spoken to him in years over some old grievance Cole never discussed. Dana’s people were from Ohio, too far and too poor on fuel money to come except for the service itself. The boy was twenty six years old and he stood in the front pew at Zion with nobody beside him but Pastor Shay’s hand on his shoulder, and I do not think I have ever in thirty years seen a man look that alone in a room full of people.