The Women Who Fed Us Anyway
Grady Kaiser called me Tuesday. He owns the funeral home, and since last spring he had slipped Tammy’s card into the folder he hands every family, right next to the casket brochures and the obituary forms. He was embarrassed to the roots of his hair.
“Sheila, I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I recommended her.”
“You couldn’t have known, Grady.”
“I’m taking her card out of the folder,” he said. “I’ve taken it out of every folder in the office. I’ll be honest with you, I’d have done it anyway, but I would have liked it better if you’d told me yourself that morning.”
“I didn’t want my mother’s funeral to be about it.”
He was quiet. “No,” he said. “I see that.”
By the end of that week, I am told, the circles at the Lutheran church and St. Mary’s had each quietly crossed her off their lists, and a woman in the next county who had booked her for a fiftieth anniversary found a reason to cancel. I did not cheer when I heard it. It is simply what happens in a town where seventy people eat at one table and one woman’s name comes up afterward. It does not require anyone to be cruel. It only requires that nobody lie.
Tammy called on Sunday night. I let it ring. She left a voicemail eight seconds long.
“Sheila, it’s Tammy. I’m sorry about your mom. I’m sorry.”
I saved it. I did not call back, not that week and not the next.
The following Wednesday I found a plain white envelope in my mailbox at the end of the road, no return address. Inside was a cashier’s check for $390 and a single sheet of notebook paper: The deposit. I had no good reason. T. Reinhardt.
I read it twice and I put it in the drawer with the napkin rings. I did not know what to do with it.
On Sunday I took it to Lavonne instead. She read the note standing at the pantry shelf, with her glasses down her nose, and she did not say one word about it. She opened the tin cash box where the circle keeps the kitchen money, the one that pays for dish soap and new oven mitts and the folding-table paper, and she laid the check in flat on top of the bills.
“Next family that needs a luncheon and can’t cover it,” she said. That was all.
Ivan Jessup died the first week of November. He was 91, a bachelor farmer who had never missed a Sunday and who tipped his hat to every woman in Ellery, married or not. They held his service on a Saturday at 11, and the circle was in the kitchen by nine.
I came with a pan.