The Lights on Route 9

Thursday

Dale’s mother is Joan Lindgren. She was seventy that fall, and she had been my mother-in-law for sixteen years, and I had not heard one word from her since August.

I did not blame her. Joan lived in town now, in a little house by Our Savior’s Lutheran, and she was Dale’s mother.

I assumed she had chosen. People do. I had decided I would not make her choose out loud.

Joan had a coffee group that met every Thursday morning at nine. There were about ten of them, women from church, most of them farm widows or farm wives with husbands too stubborn to retire.

They had met at the café in Nordby for as long as I could remember, and since the café closed, at the back table of the co-op convenience store.

On the second Thursday in November, at five minutes to nine, Joan’s Buick pulled into my lot.

Behind it came a Ford Taurus and a Chevy Impala and a minivan, and out of them came ten women from Our Savior’s in their good winter coats.

Joan walked in first. She stamped the snow off her boots on the mat. She looked at the counter and the pie case and the six red stools, two of them still taped.

“Carrie,” she said. “We’ll need two pots, and whatever pie you have, and we’ll need to push the stools a little. Is that all right?”

I could not speak. I nodded.

Emma was in school and Jack was in school, and it was just me and Arvid and ten church ladies and a beet driver at the end of the counter eating egg bake.

They pushed the stools. They took their coats off.

Joan sat at the middle of the counter where she could see the door, and she ordered sour cream raisin, and she talked about the Advent bake sale like she had been coming there for fifty years.