The Benefit Supper at the Legion Hall

Arlene

It was Arlene. She stood up from the second table, slowly, one hand on the back of her chair. She is eighty-eight years old and she has a bad hip, and she walked down that aisle in her navy coat like it was the aisle at church.

Nobody in the room moved. Tracy stood frozen at the microphone.

Arlene came around the end of the head table and pulled out the folding chair next to mine. She sat down in it with a small grunt. Then she reached over and took my hand off the tablecloth and held it in both of hers.

She did not say a word. She did not look at Tracy. She just held my hand, and her hands were dry and cool and very light, and she squeezed it once.

That was when the room understood. I felt it go through them. Arlene Fuhrman had taught most of the adults in that hall the books of the Bible, and if Arlene was sitting there holding my hand, then I was who they were afraid I was, and I was not sick.

I heard the woman in the Wisner-Pilger sweatshirt say, “Oh my Lord.”

My eyes filled up. Not because of Tracy. Because of Arlene’s hands, and the twenty-dollar bill folded in thirds, and forty years of Christmas cards.

What Tracy said

Tracy did not put the microphone down. I think if she had put it down she would have run. I have thought about that a lot since. She held onto it like it was the only thing keeping her standing up.

“That’s my sister,” she said into it. Her voice came out of the speakers thin and strange. “That’s Shannon.”

Nobody said anything.

“She’s not sick,” Tracy said. “She was never sick. I made it up.”

There was a sound in the room then. Not loud. More like a hundred people letting out a breath they had not known they were holding. Somebody’s fork hit a paper plate.

Tracy’s face crumpled. She started to cry, the ugly way, the way she used to cry when we were girls and she got caught, all at once with her mouth pulled down. She kept talking through it anyway.

“Doug lost his job in April,” she said. “Everybody knows that. And we got behind. We got nine thousand dollars behind on the house, and the bank sent the letter. The real one. The one that says what happens next.”

She wiped her face with the back of her hand. The microphone squealed and she pulled it away and then put it back.

“And I couldn’t,” she said. “I couldn’t stand up here and ask you for money for us. Not for me. I have worked that deli counter for twenty-two years. I have sliced your ham. I have made the potato salad for every funeral in this town. And not one time did anybody bring me a casserole.”