The Envelope Under the Casserole Dish

“Julie,” she said. “We moved out of your pew on Sunday. Joan and I. That was wrong of us, and I’m sorry. We should have come and asked you.”

Joan nodded hard. “I’m sorry, too,” she said.

Marlene said, “Donna’s home with a cold, but she called me this morning sick about it. She told her husband, and he told the coffee counter at the Cenex. She’ll tell them the rest of it tomorrow, Julie. Every one of them.”

One by one, around that table, the women said their piece. Not long speeches. Just, I should have known better.

Or, I’m sorry, honey. Joan just reached over and squeezed my wrist.

And Evelyn sat there and listened to all of it. That was the hard part for her, I think. Hearing her friends apologize to me, one after the other, for something she had started.

She didn’t look away from any of it. I’ll give her that.

She sat up straight in that folding chair the way she always had, and she heard every word, and when they were done she said, “They’re right. It was me. I’m the one who said it.”

Then she said to the whole table, “Julie never took a dime from me. Not one. I want all of you to know that, and I want you to tell anybody I told different.”

She said it clear and firm, the old Evelyn voice, the one that used to carry across a hayfield. Every woman at that table heard it. By the next morning, so did everybody else.

Pastor Ann looked at the clock. It was almost five. “We usually close in prayer about now,” she said gently. “Evelyn, would you like to stay for it? Or would you like to go home?”

Evelyn looked at me. Then she held out her hand across the corner of the table, palm up, the way she had held it out to me in a hospital room twenty-two years ago.

“Will you hold my hand?” she said. “While Ann prays. I don’t want to let go of anybody right now.”

I took her hand. It was cold and it was shaking, and it was the same hand that put her mother’s rolling pin in my lap.

I held onto it like it was the last warm thing in Wisconsin.

We all held hands around that table, the three of them and me and Pastor Ann, with the scalloped potatoes going cold in the middle.

Pastor Ann prayed for Evelyn by name, and for me, and for courage.

She prayed that we would not be afraid of what we didn’t know yet.

And that we would remember we were not carrying any of it alone. I heard Evelyn whisper amen right along with her, very soft.

When she finished, nobody let go right away. We just stayed there a minute, a circle of hands in a church basement, with the February light going blue in the high windows.

We didn’t let her go home alone that night. Marlene drove her in the Buick, and I followed in my car with the casserole on the seat beside me.

Joan rode with me. Pastor Ann said she’d be along after she locked up.

Evelyn’s farmhouse sits across the road from ours, a white two-story with a porch Walt built in 1971.