The Benefit Supper at the Legion Hall

What I could have done

People have asked me since why I did not just call the pastor. Or why I did not report the page to the website, or call the sheriff, or put a post on Facebook that said, I am fine, this is a lie, do not give.

I could have done any of those things by lunch on Wednesday. I thought about every one of them.

But I kept looking at that list of ninety-six names. If I reported the page, it would come down, and the town would hear about it from somebody’s cousin at the co-op. Half of them would believe whatever they heard first.

And there was a supper on Saturday. A hundred people or more were going to walk into the Legion and put down twelve dollars and a little extra in the coffee can, for me.

I wanted them to see my face before they gave one more dollar. Not a post. Not a phone call to the pastor that he would have to repeat. My face, in the room, healthy, so they would know with their own eyes.

And I wanted my sister to have to look at me. Not to shame her. I told myself that over and over on Friday night, lying awake. Not to shame her. Just to stop whatever this was before it got any bigger.

Mark wanted to drive up with me. He had already moved his Saturday call.

“This one is between sisters,” I told him. “If it goes bad, I’ll call you from the parking lot.”

He did not like it. He made me promise to text him when I got there and when I left, and he put a gas card and a granola bar on the front seat of my car, because that is what Mark does instead of arguing.

The drive home

I left Lincoln at two-thirty on Saturday. Highway 77 north through Wahoo and Fremont, then 275 up the Elkhorn valley through West Point. I have driven it a thousand times and it still takes exactly two hours if you do not stop for pie.

It was the last good week of harvest. Combines were still working the corn past West Point, and the grain trucks were lined up at the elevator with their tarps rolled back. The cottonwoods along the river had gone yellow. Somebody had a pumpkin on every fence post for a quarter mile.

The Wisner water tower came up out of the fields like it always does. My stomach turned over like it always does, for different reasons this time.

The Legion lot was full at a quarter to five. Pickups mostly, a few Buicks, the van from the care center. I parked on the street by the grade school and texted Mark. Here. Going in.

He wrote back one word. Okay. Then a second text. I’m right here.

The head table

So that was how I came to be standing just inside the door of the Legion hall with a red ticket in my pocket, looking at my own face.

They had blown up the photo from my cousin’s wedding to the size of a poster board and set it on an easel next to the head table. Under it, in black marker, someone had lettered PRAYING FOR SHANNON in careful church-bulletin letters.

The hall was packed. Long folding tables with white paper tablecloths off a roll, paper plates, a Crock-Pot of meatballs on every buffet line. The flags were up on the stage, and someone had strung pink crepe paper from the lights.

I counted later from the ticket roll, so I know: one hundred forty-one people came that night.

I walked up the middle aisle and sat down at the end of the head table, right under the poster. Nobody stopped me. People were busy getting their plates and finding their aunts.

A woman about my age in a Wisner-Pilger sweatshirt leaned over from the next table and touched my arm. “Oh, hon, I think that table’s saved for the family.”

“I know,” I said.

She looked at me a second longer, smiled the polite way you smile at someone you have decided not to argue with, and turned back to her plate.