The Name Hidden Under Mama’s China

What I did instead of chasing a truck down a gravel road in my church shoes was go back inside, sit down at Mama’s kitchen table, which Terry apparently hadn’t wanted, and call three women.

Phyllis Ann Kessler. JeanOurada. Ardith Fenwick.

If you didn’t grow up in a town like Bellford you might not understand what those three names meant in that kitchen, so let me explain it the way I’d explain it to anybody.

For fifty years, every single Sunday that none of them were in the hospital or out of town or, toward the end, physically unable to get there, those three women came to my mother’s house after church and ate dinner with her at that table, off that china. It started in 1976, the year after my grandmother Opal died and left my mother the cabinet and everything in it, because my mother told me once that she came home from Opal’s funeral luncheon and could not stand the idea of eating off those dishes alone, not after fifty years of watching her own mother set that table every Sunday of her childhood, and so she called Phyllis first, because Phyllis lived closest, and asked her to come to dinner the next Sunday, and Jean and Ardith joined within the month, and that was that. Fifty years. Not a club, not a card game, just four women and a roast and whatever vegetable was coming in out of somebody’s garden, every Sunday, at that table, off those dishes.

They had fed my children off that china. They had sat at that table the Sunday after my divorce from my first husband and let me cry into a cup of Ardith’s coffee without once telling me what I should have done differently. They had sat at it the Sunday after Jean’s husband died, and the Sunday after Phyllis’s grandson came home from Afghanistan, and every single Mother’s Day, Easter, and the Sunday closest to each of their birthdays, for half a century.