The Wedding Supper in the Machine Shed

The church ladies

I am not a planner. My mother was the planner. But I knew who to call, because I had watched her do it for every funeral and graduation in that church for thirty years.

I called Marlys Berg, who runs the quilting committee now, on a Monday morning.

“Marlys,” I said, “I’m throwing Dad and Doris a wedding supper in our machine shed on the tenth, and I don’t know what I’m doing.”

There was a pause on the line. I thought she might say something about the boys. Everybody in town knew by then.

You cannot keep a thing quiet in a town of nine hundred people. But all she said was, “Is it a hot dish supper or a ham supper?”

“Both?”

“Both,” she said. “Good. How many?”

“I don’t know. Fifty? Maybe more?”

“Plan on ninety,” she said. “Doris has been in this church forty years and your folks have been in it longer. Plan on ninety. Get the tables from the church, the eight-foot ones, twelve of them. And the big coffee urns. I’ll call the circle. Don’t you bake a single thing.”

I made one phone call. The quilting ladies made the rest.

Within two days I had a list of who was bringing what that went on for two pages.

Ham buns from the Lutheran women. Three kinds of hot dish: tater tot, chicken and rice, and the hamburger noodle one with the cream of mushroom.

Jell-O salad with the pretzel crust. Bars of every kind there is.

Pastor Dale called to ask if he could say the table prayer. The man who runs the elevator, where I keep the books on Fridays, said he would bring a cooler of pop and a case of the good coffee.

Steve’s cousin said he had a speaker and a microphone from the Legion. My daughter Amy ordered a three-tiered cake from the bakery in Brookings and would not let me pay her back.

Nobody asked about Gary and Jim. Not one person. That’s the thing about people in a small town. They know everything, and they know when not to say it.