The Pantry Door Nobody Voted To Close
“Marlene, I have taken a dish to every church supper since 1962, and I am not going to be the one who walks in empty-handed.” She stood, which meant I was done. “I haven’t said I’m coming.”
“No.”
“I’ll wear my gray coat,” said Hattie Ruble, and showed me the door.
On Thursday the food bank truck came at 4:00 as it does every week, and the driver, a big quiet fellow named Wilbur who has been unloading our pallet for six years, backed up to the three concrete steps and found a brass padlock and a woman standing in front of it.
“Door’s locked, Mrs. O.”
“Yes, Wilbur. I’m sorry.”
He took off his cap. “I’ve got forty cases on here. Where do you want them?”
“Can you follow my car?”
My garage is a two-car garage I have not parked in since Alvin passed. Wilbur set the pallet down between the workbench and the deer antlers, and Teddy Halvorsen, whom I had called, carried cases into the back room with two of his boys. Nobody talked much. When the last case was in, Teddy straightened up, wiped his hands on his jeans, and said, “Sunday. We’ll come.”
On Saturday afternoon I went to Casey’s for milk, and Wally was at the register.
He had a loaf of bread in a sack and a pack of the butterscotch candies his wife used to keep in her purse. Genevieve died the spring before last, and since then I have seen him eat a lot of gas station dinners.
“Marlene.”
“Wally.”
We stood in the checkout line like two people at a funeral.
“I hear you’ve got the pallet in your garage,” he said.
“Word travels.”
He set his bread on the belt very carefully. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
“I’m not fighting with you.”
“The roof is leaking over the choir loft. The furnace is forty-one years old. I went to the bank in August and there’s nothing left. Nothing. We’re $9,000 behind for the year and I’m the one who has to stand up in January and say so. I have lain awake over that church. Do you think I wanted to lock a door on anybody? I didn’t make up that hall project to hurt you.”
“I know you didn’t.”
It was the truest thing I had said to him in four days, and I watched him take it in. He is not a cruel man. He is a frightened man who had been handed a ledger that did not add up, and he cut the one line nobody at the church would stand up and defend.
“I’m going to tell you something so you don’t hear it from Sherry,” I said. “I’ve invited some of the Tuesday families to church tomorrow. And to the dinner.”
His face did not move. “To do what?”
“To eat ham.”
“You’re going to sit them down in the front where everybody can see them.”
“No. I told every one of them they could sit wherever they like, and leave whenever they like. If anybody looks at them, that’s the looking, not me. They’ve been told that.”
“It’s going to look like something, Marlene. You know it will.”
“I know it will.”
“You could have come to me.”
“I did come to you,” I said. “Tuesday, in the hallway, with a baby standing right there.”
He picked up his bread and left the butterscotch on the belt.
“I’m always at the dinner,” he said, and walked out to his truck.