The Lunch Lady at the Engagement Dinner

The rehearsal

We held the rehearsal dinner in the fellowship hall at St. Wenceslaus, our church in Hollis, on the Friday night before the wedding. Linda said it was the first rehearsal dinner she had ever been to with a choice of two pies.

I made the food. Pam and Sheila came and helped, and they would not take a dime for it. We did ham balls, which every Czech grandmother in three counties will fight you over, and scalloped potatoes, and green beans with bacon, and the rolls. Two hundred rolls. The cinnamon rolls were for the morning after.

Tom Reeves came into the kitchen before the meal. He was not supposed to. He just came through the swinging door like he had done it a thousand times, because I suppose he had, once.

He stood by the stove and looked at the ham balls in their roasters and breathed in.

“My mother made these,” he said.

“Everybody’s mother made these.”

“Not like this.” He tried one off the spoon, burned his mouth, and did not care. “Brown sugar and the tomato soup. She’d put a little mustard in.”

“I put a little mustard in,” I said.

He nodded slowly, and he did not say anything else, and he did not need to. He went back out to the hall.

He sat at the end of a folding table with a Styrofoam cup of coffee, the same as any man in any church basement in Iowa, and that was where he looked most at home all weekend.

Dave gave the toast for our side. It was eleven words long. I counted afterward. “Allison, welcome to the family. Nick, you did better than you deserve.” Everybody laughed. Nick laughed hardest.