The Kitchen The Church Took Back

Wanda set down her serving spoon and put both hands on that young man’s shoulders, the way you would steady a fence post that had started to lean, and she said, “Well then, son, you sit right down here and you eat all you want of it, and when you’re done there’s seconds, and there’s a woman in this basement who will sit with you as long as you need sitting with.” And she walked him to a chair herself and sat down across from him, and I watched a boy with no family left in the world eat a plate of hotdish across a folding table from a seventy-one year old widow he had known for eleven minutes, both of them crying a little and neither one of them minding that the other saw it.

I will tell you plainly that I cried too, over by the coffee urn, the same two urns Eunice’s husband had bolted shelving for thirty years before, and Marge found me there and did not say anything, just squeezed my arm once and went back to cutting lemon bars into smaller pieces, because seventy people is more than sixty and there is always a way to stretch what you have if you care enough to try.

After the last mourner had gone, after the tables were wiped down and the roasters scrubbed and stacked, Tamra stayed behind. She sat down on an overturned bucket by the pantry, the funeral shelf open in front of her where somebody, probably Louise without a word, had already started restocking the canned beans we’d used.

“I thought I was doing you a kindness,” she said. “I went to that conference and they talked about burnout, about churches that run the same five people into the ground for forty years because nobody ever gives them permission to stop. I looked at the five of you climbing those stairs with hot pans and I thought, nobody has ever told these women it’s all right to rest. I thought I was the one finally saying it.”

“We know what you thought,” I said. I sat down on a chair across from her, my knees complaining the way they do now at seventy-two. “I don’t believe you meant us harm, Tamra. I never believed that, not even the day you taped that sign to the door.”

“Then why didn’t anybody tell me different? Why did you just let me do it?”

That was Sharon’s question too, the practical one, and I gave Tamra the same honest answer I would later give Sharon over coffee. “Because you’re the pastor’s wife of a church that’s one bad year from closing its doors, and we were not going to be the reason folks in this town said five old biddies ran off the new pastor’s wife two years into his call. Some things are worth losing quiet rather than winning loud. We decided the kitchen was one of them. I am not sure now that we decided right, but it’s what we decided, and I don’t regret the kindness of it even if I regret some of the silence.”