The Women Who Fed Us Anyway
We came down the steps at 11:50 with sixty-odd people behind us, and the dining room was exactly as it had been, eight tables and white paper and Madison’s triangles. But the pass-through window was open and I could see them in the kitchen: nine women in aprons, flushed and damp at the hairline, and a counter lined with food.
I will not pretend they had it all done. At noon, when the doors opened and the room started to fill, there was still no ham on the table and the second pan of potatoes was in the oven. That was the hardest twenty minutes of the day. Sixty-some people sat down at those long tables with their coffee and nothing else, and they waited, in their good clothes, looking at one another and at the pass-through window.
Nobody grumbled. That is the other thing about a church crowd.
Pastor Kroeker got up and started telling stories about my mother. About the time she drove forty miles in a snowstorm to bring a casserole to a man who didn’t know her name. About the time she put a ten-dollar bill in the Salvation Army kettle every Christmas and then reached in her purse for another, because she was sure she had misjudged the first. Ernie Platt stood up in the back and told one about the pie auction of 1982. People wiped their eyes. People laughed. The room kept itself company.
At 12:20 Lavonne swung the kitchen door open with her hip and came through with a roaster in both hands.
“Come and get it,” she said, “before it gets cold on you.”
That was the whole announcement. The women came out in a line, carrying everything: two baked hams, the cheesy potatoes in four pans, two green bean casseroles with the fried onions on top, the Jell-O salad with pretzels, the rolls in baskets, the coconut cream pie. They set it down along the serving table and the line formed and nobody pushed.
I stood at the end of the table with a plate in my hand. Lisa Strand came out of the kitchen last. She was wiping her hands on her apron, and she stopped beside me.
“I made your mother’s potatoes,” she said. “The cornflake ones. I watched her make them forty times, and I never wrote it down, and I don’t know if I got the butter right.”
I took a forkful. It was a little salty. I did not say so. I ate the rest of what was on my plate, and then I went back through the line for more of them.
“It’s right,” I told her.
She nodded and went back to the kitchen, and I stood there with my fork until Madison took my hand and said, “Grandma, you have to sit down, there’s pie.”