The Kitchen The Church Took Back
Prairie Table had the lunch booked for sixty people at eleven thirty that Saturday. I know because Eunice’s daughter in law, who did the church bulletin, mentioned it to Eunice without thinking twice, the way you’d mention the weather. Tamra had arranged it weeks in advance for a different funeral that got postponed, old Mr. Riggle’s, when his family asked to push the date so an out of state son could get there, and rather than cancel the Prairie Table order outright Tamra had simply moved it to Dana Haney’s service, since it fell close enough on the calendar. Six hundred and fifty dollars, Eunice’s daughter in law said, for soup, rolls, a cold cut tray, and sheet cake, which was a fair enough price for sixty people from a caterer forty miles off, if the caterer showed up.
The caterer did not show up.
I heard it from Harold Bruning, the council president, who called Louise at nine thirty that Saturday morning in a voice I am told had never once in his seventy four years sounded that rattled. A hard frost had come through two nights before and caught half the county unprepared, and somewhere on the gravel between Grand Island and us, Prairie Table’s delivery van had slid into the ditch trying to avoid a stalled grain truck. Nobody was hurt. The food, strapped loose in warming trays in the back, was a different story, soup spilled across the floor of the van, the cold cut tray crushed under a case of bottled water that had shifted on the turn. The driver called the owner, the owner called Tamra at nine forty, forty five minutes before mourners would start filing down into that same basement, and told her there was no lunch coming, full refund of course, she was terribly sorry, but there was simply nothing left to deliver.
Harold told Louise because Harold, bless him, did not know what else to do and his own wife had been gone eleven years and he had never once in his life organized a meal for more than himself and a dog. “Louise,” he said, “I don’t suppose there’s any way,” and he did not even finish the sentence, because he did not feel he had the right to ask it, not after what the church had done to the five of us two months before.