The Kitchen The Church Took Back

Louise called me. I called Wanda and Marge while Louise called Eunice, the way we had always split the calls, thirty years of muscle memory moving faster than thought. It was nine fifty by the time I hung up the phone. There would be seventy, not sixty, people expected at that basement table by eleven thirty, grieving a girl of twenty three and a baby that never drew breath, and a young man with no family standing in the middle of it with nothing to eat and no one, at that hour, lifting a single finger to fix it.

I did not call Tamra and ask permission. I want to be honest about that, because Ruth Heppner would tell you, and she would be right, that it matters how a person does right as much as whether she does it. I did not do it to spite Tamra or to prove a point. I simply did not think of her at all in that first half hour. I thought of Cole Haney standing alone, and I thought of the funeral shelf in the pantry that we had kept stocked for thirty years out of habit nobody had told us to break, and I thought that whatever happened to five old women’s pride that morning mattered less than whether a boy who had just lost his wife and his child had a hot plate of food and a kind face in front of him by noon.

Eunice still had her key. Nobody had ever asked for it back, which tells you something about how little thought had gone into the taking in the first place. By ten o’clock the five of us were standing in that basement kitchen in our church clothes with our sleeves pushed up, and it was like no time had passed at all and also like no time could ever bring back what had been taken, both things true in the same breath.

“Ham and noodles,” Wanda said, already pulling the big roasters down from the shelf. “We’ve got the canned ham in the chest freezer upstairs, don’t we, or did Tamra clear that out too.”

“She didn’t touch the freezer,” Eunice said. “I don’t think she knew it was there.”

Marge was already on the phone with her husband Dale, who farms outside of town and still, at seventy, keeps two beef quarters in his own locker plant freezer for exactly this kind of morning, the kind every farm family in this county has lived through at least once, a sudden need to feed forty or sixty or ninety people with four hours’ notice. “Dale, bring the folding tables in the shop, and call LeRoy’s boy, see if he can run the extra chairs over from the fire hall.” LeRoy had passed nine years back but his son still kept his father’s flatbed trailer, and inside twenty minutes that trailer was backed up to the fellowship hall door with eight folding tables and forty metal chairs, Dale and LeRoy’s boy and Harold himself hauling them down the ramp, three men who between them had never cooked a funeral lunch in their lives doing the one thing they did know how to do, which was carry something heavy without being asked twice.