The Women Who Fed Us Anyway
Lavonne set her purse on the counter very slowly. She did not say one word about Tammy. Not one.
“What time do people eat?”
“Noon.”
She turned and looked at the big clock over the pass-through window. “That’s two hours and twenty minutes.”
“Lavonne, I don’t think we can.”
“Is that all,” she said, and it was not a question, and she was already unbuttoning her coat.
Behind her, women were coming through the door. I had not heard them arrive. Maureen Quinlan, who is 71 and farms with her son, came in carrying a baked ham in a foil pan. It was meant for her grandson’s birthday supper that night, and she set it on the counter like a baby she was glad to hand off. Lisa Strand came next, 77, who teaches the junior high Sunday school class and keeps a chest freezer in her garage the size of a coffin. Marcia Hendry came behind her, with her coat still on and her phone already at her ear.
Nobody asked me a single question. They had been in the sanctuary doing the flowers, and they had seen Lavonne cross the lot, and they had read the whole thing off her back. They began opening cabinets.
“Who has a ham thawed?” Lavonne said. “Not a frozen one. A thawed one.”
“I do,” Maureen said. “This one.”
“Lisa, you had one out for Sunday.”
“It’s been in the refrigerator since Thursday,” Lisa said.
“Then it’s ours. Marcia, call the circle. All of them. Tell them the Lathrop luncheon is on us. Tell them to bring what’s in the freezer, and nobody brings a thing that needs more than an hour.”
“I’m already dialing,” Marcia said.
“Lisa, how many casseroles do you have out in that garage?”
“Six,” Lisa said. “Four are cheesy potatoes. Two are green bean.”
“Bring them all.”
Lavonne turned back to me and put a paring knife in one hand and a ten-pound sack of onions in the other.
“You cut, honey,” she said. “Cry where it won’t show.”
I laughed, and it came out wrong, and she turned back to the range as if she had not heard it, which was the kindest thing she could have done.
When someone dies in Ellery, the church women do not wait to be asked. There is a freezer in nearly every one of their garages, and in every one of those freezers is a pan of something wrapped in foil with a strip of masking tape on top. Funeral potatoes. Chicken and noodles. A ham, sliced. It is put by the way other families put by a spare tire. Nobody mentions it. When the phone rings and a family in the congregation has lost someone, those pans come out of the freezers like they had been waiting.