The Wedding Supper in the Machine Shed

The widow from church

Doris Halvorson had been a member at Our Savior’s as long as we had. Her husband Clarence ran the hardware store in town until his heart gave out on a Sunday in the parking lot, six years ago now. Her daughter Becky lives in Marshall, over the line in Minnesota.

Doris played the organ for funerals when the regular organist couldn’t. She was on the quilting committee with my mother for twenty years.

When Mom was sick, Doris sent a pan of bars every Thursday, without a note, and we only knew they were hers because she always cut them in diamonds.

It was about eight months after the funeral that Dad started sitting in her pew. I don’t think he planned it.

The Petersons had sat in the fourth pew on the left since before I was born, and one Sunday he just walked up the other aisle and sat down beside her, and she slid her hymnal over so he could see.

I watched it happen from the fourth pew on the left, and I will be honest about how it felt.

It felt like somebody had moved a piece of furniture in my mother’s house. I sat through the whole sermon with my jaw tight, and I could not have told you afterward what the text had been.

Then I saw him laugh at something she whispered during the announcements. My father, laughing in church, with his shoulders shaking.

I had not heard him laugh in two years. I went home and cried in the pickup in our yard for twenty minutes before I went in.

Steve found me there. He opened the passenger door and got in and sat with me, and when I was done he said, “Your mom would be glad somebody made him laugh.” He was right.

That was the hard part. He was right, and I didn’t want him to be.

Coffee after church turned into Friday suppers at the café in Arlington. By the second summer they were doing the crossword on her porch in town, and she had come out to the farm to help him put up the strawberry jam, because Mom’s strawberry patch was still producing and nobody had touched it.

Gary saw her car in the yard one day in July when he came to check the bull.

He drove out without stopping. That was the start of it, I think. Somebody else’s car in Mom’s yard, next to Mom’s garden.