The Pantry Door Nobody Voted To Close

“I want to ask you something,” I said. “And you can tell me no, and it won’t change a thing on Tuesdays.”

“Go ahead.”

“There’s a dinner at the church Sunday after the service. First Sunday. Anybody can come. I’d like you and Shelly and the boys to come, if you’d care to.”

He laughed once, short. “Mrs. Ostrander, church isn’t for people like us.”

“It’s for exactly people like you. I’ve read the book.”

“You know what I mean. You walk in there in your good shirt, and everybody knows.”

“Knows what?”

“That you’ve been to the pantry.”

I had drawn a picture in my head at the kitchen table, in spite of my rule: a pew on the left and a pew on the right, and the families filling them side by side. I looked at Teddy’s ears and understood what the picture was. I took it out of my head and did not put it back.

“Here’s what I can promise,” I said. “Sit anywhere you like. Back row by the door, if that’s where you’re comfortable. Leave before the last hymn and come back for the ham, or don’t. Nobody will say your name out loud. I won’t point at you.”

He said nothing for a while. Down in the yard one of his boys was throwing a football at a hay bale and missing.

“They’re going to look anyway,” he said.

“Some of them might. I can’t promise you they won’t.”

“What time?”

“Service is at 10:30.”

“We might,” he said. “We might not.”

I wrote that on my list as a maybe and went on to the next house.

I went to the houses over two days. Nine people said no, and every one of them said it kindly, and I wrote down each no with exactly as much care as I wrote down the yeses. Eight said maybe. Five said yes.

The one I think about most was Hattie Ruble.

Hattie is 82. She lives alone in a small white house on Pine Street with a pot of geraniums on the stoop that she brings in every night in the fall, and she has come to my Tuesday shelf for seven years, ever since her county pension stopped covering both her prescriptions and her propane. She is tiny and straight-backed and sharp-tongued, and she is not a woman who asks for things. The first time I set a box in her hands she looked at it as though I had given her a live snake and said, “I can pay.”

“I know you can,” I said. “Take it anyway.”

She let me into her kitchen on Wednesday evening, and I told her what Wally had done and what I was asking. She listened to all of it with her hands folded on the oilcloth.

“That’s a sorry thing,” she said, when I had finished.

“Yes.”

“You want me to come to church.”

“I want to invite you to come. If you want to. There’s a dinner.”

“I haven’t been inside that building since Burl’s funeral. Eleven years in March.”

“I know.”

“I used to sit fourth pew on the left, behind the radiator. Forty years.”

“That’s where I sit now,” I said. “I took it the year after Burl died. It seemed a shame to leave it empty.”

“Is it.” She looked at me with those pale, direct eyes. “Well, I’m not sitting up front like something at a county fair. If I go, I sit where I always sat. And I’m bringing rolls.”

“You don’t have to bring anything.”