Sunday Dinner Behind the Dugout

Jenna said it with her hands in my dishwater, which is the only reason I did not drop the roaster. She was rinsing the gravy boat, and she did not even turn around when she told me.

“Bev, I think we need to be done with Sunday dinner. The kids have travel ball every Sunday now. Nobody has time to sit at a table for two hours anymore.”

It was the first Sunday in June. The windows were open, and I could hear Lyle and Nate out by the shed, talking about the planter and whether the beans were up yet on the north eighty.

I had made Sunday dinner for thirty-four years. Pot roast, mashed potatoes, a hotdish if somebody was coming late, and a pan of bars cooling on the counter by the back door where everyone could see it.

“Done,” I said. I had a dish towel in my hands and I kept drying the same plate. It was dry before she started talking. I kept going anyway.

“Not done forever,” Jenna said. “Done for summer. Maybe done for good. I don’t know. Carter’s got a tournament in Marshall next weekend and Maddie’s got one in Pipestone the week after. Sundays are championship days.”

She finally turned around. She had that look she gets at the end of a long week, gray under the eyes, her hair pulled back with a clip that had lost one of its teeth.

“I’m not trying to hurt you,” she said. “I just can’t keep doing this. I can’t keep showing up here at two o’clock and pretending I’m not three days behind on everything.”

I want to say I was gracious. I was not. I set the plate down harder than a plate needs to be set down, and I said the thing I had been thinking for two years.

“Lots of people work, Jenna. I worked forty years at that post office and I still had a roast in the oven every Sunday at seven in the morning.”

She looked at me for a long second. Then she pulled the plug on the sink, dried her hands on her jeans instead of my towel, and walked out to the car without saying anything else.

Nate came in a minute later with his cap in his hand.

He looked at me, and he looked at the empty sink, and he did what Nate has done since he was six years old when two people he loves are upset. He got very quiet.

“Mom,” he said. “She’s just tired.”

“I know she’s tired,” I said. “Everybody’s tired.”

He kissed the top of my head, which he has to bend down a long way to do, and he went out and buckled his kids into the back seat, and they drove off down our gravel road with the dust hanging behind them.

I should tell you what Sunday dinner was, so you understand why it felt like somebody had pulled a board out of my floor.

I started it in the fall of 1992. Nate was two. Lyle’s dad had just had his first stroke, and Lyle’s mother could not manage the big meal anymore, so I said bring everybody here.

I was twenty-six and I had no idea what I was doing.

That first Sunday I burned the rolls and undercooked the roast, and Lyle’s dad, who could only use one side of his mouth by then, ate every bite and told me it was the best meal he’d had all year. He was lying. I loved him for it.