The Pecan Pie at the Soup Kitchen

Nine Years

My husband Dale died on a Tuesday in March, nine years ago now. His heart, at the lumberyard, in the middle of loading two-by-sixes onto a contractor’s flatbed. He was sixty. He had been fine at breakfast.

Mark was thirty-one. He had been married to Jen for three years and their boy, Owen, was a baby. Mark drove over from his insurance office in his work clothes and stood in my front room and did not sit down for about a week.

He handled everything. The funeral home on Pierce Street, the life insurance claim, the pension paperwork, the truck Dale had not finished paying off. He cleaned out the garage. He took over the gutters and the furnace filter and the snowblower.

I let him. I was so tired. And I think, looking back, it was the only way he knew how to grieve, with a list in his pocket and a job to do.

He called me every night at eight for two years. Every single night. Then it went to most nights, and then to Sundays, and that was all right, because by then I had found my feet.

I went back to the library at West Middle School for the rest of that year and retired the June after. I joined the funeral luncheon committee at the parish. I learned how to make a ham loaf for sixty people. I learned the names of everyone’s grandchildren.

And I was lonely in a way I did not have words for. Not sad, exactly. More like I was living in a house where every room had the lights on and nobody in it.

Walt

Walt Brandvold came onto the funeral luncheon committee four years ago, the winter after he lost his wife, Darlene. Somebody had to carry the roasters up from the church basement, and he was the only one under seventy who volunteered.

He was a retired lineman. Thirty-eight years with the power company, climbing poles in ice storms and riding bucket trucks up and down Highway 75. He had big careful hands and a gray crew cut and he wore the same brown cardigan to every meeting.

He did not talk much at first. He carried things. He fixed the latch on the walk-in cooler that had been sticking since the Carter administration. He showed up early and stacked the chairs after.

The first real conversation we had was over a coffee urn that would not perk. He took the lid off, looked at it, and said, “Darlene always said I could fix anything but a conversation.”

“Was she right?” I asked.

He thought about it. “Mostly,” he said. “She was right about most things.”

We were friends for three years before it was anything else. Coffee after committee meetings. A ride home when my Buick was in the shop. He came to Owen’s baseball games once or twice because I mentioned them, and sat at the far end of the bleachers so as not to intrude.

Last spring, after the Easter luncheon, he walked me to my car in the church lot and stood there with his hands in his cardigan pockets.

“Carol,” he said, “I’m seventy-one years old and I don’t know how this is done anymore. But I’d like to take you to supper. Just you and me. If that’s all right.”

I said yes before he finished. He looked so surprised I laughed out loud in the parking lot, and the Kowalski sisters turned around to see what was funny.

We went to the steakhouse out by the stockyards. He ordered for himself and asked what I wanted and did not order for me. He paid, and he let me leave the tip. I came home and stood in my kitchen and did not turn on the radio, because I did not want anything to cover up the feeling.