Thirty Suppers With No Charge

Twelve suppers

The second supper came on Thursday, a ham with scalloped potatoes and a little dish of green beans with bacon in them.

Tracy carried it in, checked my incision bandage like a nurse, and told me I looked better than I had on Tuesday.

An hour later the phone buzzed. Fourteen dollars, gas and groceries. I paid it before I could think too hard about it, the way you pull off a bandage.

Saturday was sloppy joes and a bag of potato chips and a container of her own coleslaw.

Doug was home that time. He carried the dish in from her car and thanked her, and they talked about the price of seed corn in the driveway.

The phone buzzed while we were eating. I didn’t say anything to Doug. I just looked at it under the table and paid it, and I passed him the coleslaw.

I want to be honest about what was going on in my head in those first two weeks, because I was not a saint about it.

I was hurt, and I was a little bit angry, and I was too sore and too tired to do anything with either one.

Doug’s mother brought a pot roast on one of the Mondays, and she did not send a bill.

Greg’s cousin Linda brought a lasagna on a Thursday, and she did not send a bill. I would have been glad to pay either one of them, and neither of them asked.

It was only Tracy. And Tracy had put her own name on most of the lines.

My friend Kim works the window next to mine at the bank.

She came over on her day off the third week with a coffee cake, and she was sitting at my table when the buzz came in after one of Tracy’s suppers. She saw my face change.

“What,” she said.

I showed her the phone. Kim read it, then read it again, then set the phone down very gently on the table, like it might go off.

“She charged you,” Kim said. “For a meal train. For a meal train for your hysterectomy.”

“Gas and groceries,” I said.

“Jill, she lives four miles from you. On a paved road.”

I laughed, because it was that or cry again, and I had done enough of that. Kim did not laugh.

“You’re going to say something,” she said. “Right?”

I said I didn’t know. And that was the truth.