The Women Who Fed Us Anyway
We fed 68 people that day. Eight more came in from the funeral home and the grocery and the road than I had told anyone to expect, and there was still ham left over when the last cup of coffee was poured. Ernie Platt went through the line twice and told Lavonne he had not eaten that well since the Lions Club fish fry. My brother Randy ate two plates with his elbows on the table, and when he finished he looked at me across the napkins, and I saw that he knew. He did not say a word. He stood up and went into the kitchen, and I watched through the pass-through window as he took a dish towel off the rack and began drying plates beside a woman who had been his Sunday school teacher in 1979.
It was after three when the room was finally empty, and Lavonne and I were the last two in the kitchen.
The others had gone home to their own families, their own Saturday suppers. Chuck had carried the last of the folding chairs to the closet. Madison was asleep on two coats in the nursery. I stood at the long sink with my hands in warm water and watched the light through the high window go from white to gray.
Lavonne dried the roasters one at a time, and she set my mother’s on top of the others.
“Are you going to post about her?” she asked. “Put it on the computer?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Are you going to lie if somebody asks you what happened?”
I thought about it. I had had a lot of people want me to say something harsher, and a few who wanted me to say something softer.
“No,” I said. “If somebody asks me, I’ll tell them what she said. The same words. I won’t add to it and I won’t leave any out.”
Lavonne looked at me for a long time. Then she nodded once, like a woman signing off on a form.
“That’s about right,” she said.
She hung the dish towel over the oven door and went to find her purse.
Seventy-some people had eaten at my mother’s funeral, and by Sunday morning every one of them had asked someone the same question: who did the food? It was a good meal, and people wanted to know, the way people always do. At the Ellery Cafe, and the post office, and the grocery counter, and the stands at the high school football game on Friday night, the answer came back the same, in Lavonne’s voice, in Maureen’s, in Lisa’s husband’s: the caterer never showed. She took a wedding. She said a church crowd wasn’t worth her Saturday.
That was all. Nobody embroidered it. Nobody needed to.