The Women Who Fed Us Anyway
The reception is better by the dumpster, so that is where I stood when I found out what my mother’s funeral lunch was worth to the woman I had paid to cook it.
It was 9:40 on a Saturday morning in October, and the gravel lot behind Ellery United Methodist was empty except for my husband’s pickup and Lavonne Tisdale’s old Oldsmobile. There was no white van. There were no folding carts of covered trays. There was no Tammy Reinhardt in a black apron with her hair tied up, calling me hon and telling me where to put the sweet tea.
I called her cell. It rang five times.
“Hello?” A radio was playing behind her, something with a steel guitar.
“Tammy, it’s Sheila Aldrich. Where are you? You were due at 9.”
“Oh, Sheila.” She sounded like I had caught her in the middle of something pleasant. “I’m in Salina. I took a wedding.”
I thought I had heard her wrong. “Today is my mother’s funeral. The service is at 11. You have sixty people coming at noon.”
“I know, hon. I’m sorry, but this one paid $2,400.”
I did not say anything. There was nothing in me yet to say it with. My mother had been dead for six days.
Tammy filled the quiet for me. “Honestly, a church crowd isn’t worth my Saturday. Ham and potatoes for a room full of folks who’ll tell me it needs salt. They’ll eat anything. Run to the Dollar General and put out crackers and cheese. Nobody at a funeral remembers the food.”
She laughed, a short little laugh, the kind you give when you think you have said something that is not as bad as it sounds.
“And I’m keeping the deposit,” she said. “You signed the sheet. I turned away other work to hold that date.”
“You did not turn away anything,” I said. “You took a better offer.”
“Call it what you want. I’ve got to go. Sorry for your loss.”
The line went dead.
I stood there with the phone against my ear for what must have been a full minute, looking at a gray sky and a dumpster with a church bulletin stuck to the lid by the wind.
I did not call the sheriff. It was a $390 deposit on a $780 job, a civil matter, and a deputy standing in a fellowship hall on a funeral morning would have fixed nothing. I did not call another caterer, because the closest one was in McPherson, forty minutes off, and no one in McPherson keeps sixty plates of ham sitting around on a Saturday. The grocery deli in town wants two days’ notice for anything over twenty people. I had called them first, three weeks earlier, when I was choosing.