The Kitchen The Church Took Back

Louise opened three jars of her own green beans, canned last August from her own garden, the way she had canned beans every August for fifty years whether the church needed them or not, because that is simply what a woman like Louise does with a garden. I had four pounds of ground beef in my own freezer meant for my week’s meals that went straight into a roaster of hotdish, tater tots on top, because tater tot hotdish is what this county eats when it grieves and there is no replacing it with a catered cold cut tray no matter how lovely the spread. Eunice, half blind in bad light, worked by feel on the biscuit dough she could have made in her sleep, and probably nearly was, since none of us had slept well in the two months since the kitchen was taken and this, God forgive the strangeness of grief, felt almost like relief.

We did not have time to make a sheet cake. What we had, every one of us, every single week for thirty years without fail, was a tin of bars in our own kitchen at home, because a woman who has cooked funeral lunches that long keeps a standing stock of lemon bars and rhubarb crisp the way a farmer keeps diesel in the tank, ready before she is asked. Marge’s granddaughter drove the two miles to Marge’s house and back in eleven minutes flat with every tin in the pantry.

At eleven fifteen, Pastor Shay came down the basement stairs looking for Tamra, who he said was up in the sanctuary trying to decide what in the world to tell seventy mourners who would be walking downstairs to an empty table in fifteen minutes, and he stopped three steps from the bottom and just looked at us. Five women in their church dresses with aprons borrowed from the hooks that still, it turned out, hung exactly where we’d left them, roasters steaming, the smell of fried onions and baked ham filling that basement the way it had filled it for thirty years before a sign-up sheet ever existed.

“I don’t,” he started, and then he didn’t finish that sentence either, the way Harold hadn’t. He just said, “Thank you,” quiet, and went back up to get his wife.

Tamra came down those stairs at eleven twenty with her face the particular color of a person who has spent the last hour and a half rehearsing an apology to an empty room and now has to deliver it to five women she is not entirely sure will accept it. She stood at the bottom step the way she had stood in front of her sign-up sheet two months before, except this time her hands were not folded calm at her waist. They were twisting a church bulletin into a tight little roll.