Thirty Suppers With No Charge

Doug

The last supper on Tracy’s sheet was a Saturday, the beginning of April, a pan of chicken enchiladas and a little tub of sour cream.

I remember she looked tired. I put that down to her running back and forth to my house three times a week on top of everything else she did. I even felt a little guilty about it, God help me.

The phone buzzed that evening while Doug was standing behind the couch, reading the paper over my head. He saw the screen before I could tip it away.

He did not say anything for a second. He set his coffee cup down on the end table very carefully, the way he does when he is choosing words.

“How many of those have there been,” he said.

I could have lied. I didn’t. I said twelve. I said fourteen dollars every time, so a hundred and sixty eight dollars.

Doug took off his reading glasses and rubbed his eyes. Then he walked into the kitchen and picked up his own phone off the counter.

“I’ll call Greg,” he said.

“Don’t,” I said.

He turned around and looked at me, and I could see he was not angry at me. He was angry for me, and he did not know where to put it.

“Jill, that’s not right. That’s not how we do.”

“I know it’s not right,” I said. “But think about how that phone call goes, Doug. Think about it all the way through.”

He stood there and thought about it all the way through. I watched him do it.

I watched him get to Sunday dinner at his mother’s, with Greg on one side of the table and us on the other, and his mother looking from one son to the other and not knowing why.

Doug and Greg had been close their whole lives. They had shown steers together in 4-H, they had hauled each other out of ditches in blizzards, and they had carried their father’s casket side by side.

I was not going to be the woman who put a crack down the middle of that table. Not for fourteen dollars. Not for a hundred and sixty eight.

“If it was Abby she was doing this to,” Doug said finally, “I’d be over there tonight.”

“I know you would,” I said. “It’s not Abby. It’s me. And I’m telling you I’d rather pay it.”

He put the phone down. He came back and sat on the arm of the couch and put his hand on my hair.

We didn’t talk about it again for a long time, but I knew he hadn’t forgotten it. Doug doesn’t forget things. He just files them.

So I paid it. All twelve. And every time Tracy came to the door, I said thank you, and I meant the part of it I could mean.

The summer in between

I healed the way you are supposed to. By the middle of May I was back behind my window at the bank, and by June I was carrying laundry baskets up the basement stairs again and pulling weeds in the garden on my knees.

Life went on, and so did Sunday dinners at Doug’s mother’s house.

Tracy and I passed the potatoes to each other and talked about Abby’s track meets and her boys down in Des Moines. Neither of us said one word about the meal train.

But something had shifted, at least on my side. I noticed I didn’t call her anymore just to talk.

Greg sold his pickup in June. It was a nice one, a three-quarter ton he had bought new a few years before, and one Sunday he pulled up to his mother’s in an old Buick with a cracked windshield.

He said the truck was more than he needed. Doug raised his eyebrows at me across the yard, and I shrugged.

At the Fourth of July picnic down at the park, Tracy brought store brand hot dog buns and a bag of generic chips.

Tracy, who used to make her own buns for the family reunion and would not be caught dead with a pickle that did not come out of her own canner.

Greg was quiet that whole summer. Greg is not a talker either, it runs in the Sorensen men, but he was quieter than usual.

He stood by the grill turning bratwurst and looking at nothing. When Doug asked how things were at the plant, he said they were fine and went back to the grill.

Greg had worked at the window factory over by the interstate for twenty two years. Everybody in our town knows somebody who works there.

That spring, I had heard there were layoffs, the way you hear everything in a town of three thousand, from a woman in line at the bank. I did not put it together. I did not even try.

Tracy did not bank with us. She and Greg had always kept their accounts at the credit union in the next town over.

I used to think that was a little bit of a snub, honestly, with me working right there on Main Street. It turned out it was something else entirely, but I did not know that yet.

In the fall Greg started driving a propane route for the co-op. Doug told me about it one night.

He said Greg told him he just wanted to get out of the factory and see some country. I said that was nice. I thought nothing more about it.