The Women Who Fed Us Anyway
That was the cheapest thing Tammy Reinhardt had ever misjudged. She thought a church crowd was a room of people who would put up with whatever she set in front of them. She had not once considered that a church crowd is also a kitchen.
By 10:05 there were nine women in the room.
Marcia Hendry had a phone tree working that I would have paid money to watch on a map. Maureen had her ham sliced and in two electric roasters. Lisa’s husband carried in four pans of potatoes from the garage freezer and set them in the oven at 325, and Lisa stood over them with an oven mitt on each hand like a woman guarding a county line. Two others from the Wednesday Bible study showed up with a lime Jell-O salad with pretzels and a pan of rolls, and one with a coconut cream pie she had made for no reason at all on a Friday.
My husband Chuck came down the steps around ten, looking for me. He is a tall man and quiet, a retired lineman for the electric co-op, and he took one look at the kitchen and set his jaw.
“What do you need?” he said.
Lavonne did not hesitate. “Ice. Forty pounds. Tea, five gallons. Four dozen rolls if Boyd Hess has them. And the other roaster out of my pantry. It’s on the second shelf behind the Christmas tin.”
“I’ll go to the house for the roaster and the store for the rest.”
“The key’s under the geranium on the porch,” she said, without looking up from the ham.
He nodded once. He came around the counter and kissed me on the top of the head, which he does not do in front of people, and he went up the steps two at a time.
He came back at 10:50 with the ice, the tea, the rolls, and the roaster. Boyd Hess at the grocery had loaded the rolls himself and would not take a dime.
“Tell Frances she was a pistol,” Boyd had said, according to Chuck. “She used to bring us a pie every Christmas Eve and never said what it was for.”
My mother had left a lot of pies in a lot of places.
At 10:15 Maureen knelt at the bottom cabinet looking for a second roaster, and she went quiet.
It was the cabinet beside the stove, the one with the sticking door. She pulled out a big white enamel roaster, the old kind, chipped on the lid, with a black handle that had been wrapped in electrical tape. She turned it over to see if it was clean.
Then she sat back on her heels.