Sunday Dinner Behind the Dugout

After that it just kept going. Lyle’s folks came until they couldn’t. My sister Kim came with her boys when they lived close.

When Nate went to college in Mankato, he drove two hours home most Sundays with a bag of laundry, and I would send him back with a cooler of leftovers that his roommates fought over. When he got married, Jenna started coming too.

I worked at the post office in town for most of those years, and the last eighteen of them as postmaster.

A town of 3,500 does not have a big post office, but it has a busy one, and I was there by six most mornings.

I am telling you that because I want you to understand I knew about tired. I knew about getting up in the dark and getting home in the dark.

And I still put the roast in on Sunday mornings, because to me that table was the one thing that held.

What I did not understand, and what took me a month to see, was that the table holding me up was the same table pressing down on Jenna.

Lyle came in from the shed that Sunday night, and he found me sitting at the kitchen table with the bars still on the counter.

Nobody had cut them. The kids had left before dessert for the first time in their lives.

“Well,” he said, and he sat down across from me. Lyle is sixty-three and he farms six hundred acres of corn and beans with his cousin. He says about forty words a day, and he spends most of them on the weather.

“She ended it,” I said. “Thirty-four years, and she ended it rinsing my gravy boat.”

He picked up a knife and cut the corner piece out of the pan of scotcheroos and ate it standing at the counter, which he knows I hate.

Then he said, “Those kids are going to be hungry at those ball fields, you know. Nate says they eat out of the concession stand all weekend.”

That was all he said. Then he went up to bed. But I sat there and thought about my grandkids eating nachos out of a paper boat for breakfast, lunch and supper, and I did not sleep much.

On Monday I called my sister Kim, who lives in Sioux Falls now. Kim has always been the one who tells me when I’m wrong, and I needed somebody to tell me I was right.

“You said what to her?” Kim asked.

I told her again. The part about forty years at the post office. The roast at seven in the morning.

I heard how it sounded the second time, out loud, to somebody who was not standing in my kitchen.

“Bev,” Kim said. “You know that girl’s working fifty hours a week at that hospital billing office. You know Nate’s at the shop until six most nights. You know they’re driving those kids to Worthington and Pipestone and Sioux Falls every weekend.”

“I know,” I said.

“So what do you want? Do you want to be right, or do you want to see those babies?”

I did not answer her. I didn’t have to. I had already decided, sometime around three in the morning, that I was not going to argue with Jenna.

I was not going to call Nate and get him in the middle of it. He had been in the middle of enough.