The Church Basement Where It All Began

There were dill pickle spears in glass dishes. There were pastel butter mints in pink and yellow and green, the kind that melt on your tongue. And in the middle of it all sat a big glass punch bowl full of green foam from lime sherbet.

There was a two-layer white cake with a little plastic bride and groom on top. Next to it, holding the knife with Dad, was a young man I recognized after a minute as Uncle Dale, Dad’s brother, who had died of a heart attack in 2009.

And in one picture near the end, somebody had caught my mother laughing. She was twenty years old. She had her head thrown back and one hand on Dad’s arm, and her veil was sitting crooked, and she looked happier than I had ever seen any person look.

Dad was not looking at the camera. He was looking at her like nobody else was in the room.

I sat on that closet floor so long that Mom came to find me.

“Did you fall in?” she said. Then she saw what I was holding. “Oh, my. I haven’t looked at that in years.”

She sat down on the step stool, slow, because of her knee, and I held the album up so she could see.

“That’s Bev Lindquist’s mother’s punch,” she said, pointing. “Everybody wanted that recipe. And look at Dale. He wouldn’t let your dad cut that cake alone. He said a man shouldn’t have to hold a knife by himself on his wedding day.”

“Who paid for all this?” I asked.

“The church ladies, mostly. And us. I think it came to about sixty dollars, and Grandma Jensen said we’d overspent.” She laughed. “We didn’t have anything, Lisa. We had a basement and a punch bowl. It was the best day of my life.”

She took the album out of my hands and closed it gently and set it on her lap.

“Don’t tell your brother I said that,” she said. “He’s worked so hard on this steakhouse.”

The key

I could not stop thinking about that picture of my mother laughing in the basement.

On Thursday I took my lunch break at eleven-thirty and drove the two blocks to the parsonage, still in my scrubs.

Pastor Ann answered the door with a dish towel over her shoulder. She has been at St. Paul’s for nine years, and she knows everybody’s business without ever once repeating it.

I told her about the album. I told her about the steakhouse. I did not tell her about the $2,800 or the guest text, because that was between me and my brother.

“I want to give them their reception again,” I said. “The Saturday before the steakhouse. Same basement, same food. Ham buns and mints and the punch. I’ll pay for it.”

She did not even let me finish. She went to the hook by the door and came back with a key on a red plastic tag that said Fellowship Hall.

“The Saturday before is open,” she said. “Nobody ever books October anyway. It’s yours, and don’t you dare try to pay the church for it.”

“Ann, I can’t…”

“You can,” she said. “Your mother has run the funeral lunches in that basement for thirty-one years. The church owes her this many times over.”