The Women Who Fed Us Anyway
And I did not call my brother, who had driven up from Tulsa and was at the funeral home with Grady Kaiser, bringing Mama’s things over. I did not call my husband, who was out front setting up the guest book. I did not call anyone, because I could not stand the thought of my mother’s last day being about a woman named Tammy and a box of crackers.
My mother was Frances Lathrop. She was 81. She had walked into the kitchen of this church every week for fifty years, and on the days when somebody died she walked in earlier.
So I went back inside.
The fellowship hall at Ellery United Methodist is in the basement, down fourteen steps, with a linoleum floor the color of weak coffee and a pass-through window between the dining room and the kitchen. Eight long tables stood in rows under the fluorescent lights, covered in white paper. My granddaughter Madison had set out the napkins the night before. She is 7. She had folded every one of them into a triangle, because her great-grandmother had shown her how at Thanksgiving, and she had set sixty-four of them out with her tongue between her teeth, one at each place, and then gone back and straightened the crooked ones.
I looked at those napkins and my knees went soft.
The kitchen was cold and shiny and empty. Two stainless counters, a six-burner range, the big coffee urn at the end that holds forty cups. Three nails by the door held three aprons, and one of them was my mother’s. Blue gingham, soft as a dishrag from a thousand washings, with the ties gone thin. She had hung it there herself the Sunday before she went into the hospital. Nobody had touched it since.
I took it down and tied it on. It did not smell like perfume, because she never wore any. It smelled like onions and dish soap and the lanolin hand cream she kept in her purse.
I stood at the empty counter and could not get a full breath.
The back door banged. Then it banged again.
Lavonne Tisdale came through first. She is 83 years old, small and straight, with white hair set every Friday at the Cut Above and a purse she carries like a hymnal. She has run the funeral kitchen at that church since 1974. She buried her own husband out of it. She has put up food for more families in Ellery than the Red Cross.
She had watched me from the church door while I stood by the dumpster. I could tell. She was still holding her car keys.
“Where is the Reinhardt girl?” she said.
I told her. All of it. The wedding, the $2,400, the crackers. I told her what Tammy said about a church crowd, and I heard my own voice go flat and quiet, which is how it goes when I am more hurt than I can afford to show.