Sunday Dinner Behind the Dugout

Jenna sat down. I made her a plate, two barbecues and a lemon bar, and handed it to her, and she held it on her knees the way women hold plates at funerals, like she didn’t quite know what to do with it.

“I haven’t sat down at one of these in two years,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I’ve seen the pictures. You’re always walking somewhere.”

“I’m always walking somewhere,” she said. “Concession stand. Car. Bathroom with Maddie. Back to the car to answer an email from work. I watch Carter’s games through a chain-link fence on my way to something else.”

She took a bite of the barbecue. She chewed it. And then, sitting behind the dugout in Marshall with a paper plate on her knees, my daughter-in-law started to cry.

I did not say anything. Forty years at a post office teaches you that most people will tell you everything if you just stand there long enough and don’t fill up the quiet.

“Every Sunday,” she said finally, “I walk into your house and I feel like I’m being graded. That’s not your fault. I know it’s not. But you’d say ‘Jenna, working again?’ And Nate’s aunts would ask when I’m going to cut back.”

I opened my mouth. She held up her hand.

“And you’d have this beautiful table, Bev. Every single week. Thirty-four years. And I’m fifty hours a week at the billing office. I haven’t made a pot roast in my life. I buy the rotisserie chicken at the grocery store on Thursday nights and I feel like a failure while I’m doing it.”

She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, the hand that wasn’t holding the plate.

“So when I said Sunday dinner was over,” she said, “it wasn’t because I hate it. It’s because if it was over, I didn’t have to feel like that anymore. I could just be at the ball field. I could just be tired. I wouldn’t have to walk into your kitchen and feel small.”

I sat with that. I sat with it a long time.

Because she was right. Not about all of it. But I had said “working again?” I had said it more than once.

I had said it the way people say things they think are just conversation, and they are not just conversation. They are a little stone in somebody’s shoe.

And just one Sunday earlier, standing at my own sink, I had told her I worked forty years and still had a roast in the oven.

I had said it to hurt her. I had meant it to hurt.

“Jenna,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry for ‘working again,'” I said. “I’m sorry for what I said at the sink last week. That was not about you. That was about me being scared nobody needed my table anymore.”

“Bev, I didn’t…”

“Let me finish, because I’m not very good at this and if I stop I won’t start again.”

She closed her mouth.

“When I was your age,” I said, “I had Lyle’s mother in my kitchen every Sunday, watching me make gravy. And every time I made it, she’d add a little more flour. Never said a word. Just walked over and added flour. I hated her for it for about ten years.”

Jenna laughed, a wet laugh, through her nose.

“And then she got old and couldn’t come anymore,” I said, “and I would have given anything to have her standing at my stove adding flour. I don’t want to be her. I don’t want to be the woman who adds the flour.”