Thirty Suppers With No Charge

The ice

The second week of January we had freezing rain on top of four inches of snow, and the whole town turned into a skating rink.

Tracy fell on the steps outside the post office on a Wednesday morning.

She went to mail a birthday card to one of her nieces, and her feet went out from under her on the bottom step, and she put her right hand out to catch herself the way everybody does.

Doug’s mother called us that night. The wrist was broken in two places.

They had set it at the hospital in Logan City and put her in a cast up past her elbow, and the doctor wanted to see her again in a week to decide if it needed a plate.

“She’s right-handed,” Doug’s mother said on speaker, her voice thin. “She can’t cook, she can’t drive, she can’t do her own hair. And Greg’s gone from five in the morning till dark with that propane truck. This is the busiest time of year for him. He can’t just take off.”

I stood in my kitchen with the phone in my hand and looked at the calendar on the side of the refrigerator.

Doug was watching me from the table. He knew me well enough by then to see what I was thinking before I said it.

“Jill,” he said quietly.

“I know,” I said.

“Do you?”

I did not answer that. I hung up with his mother, and I went down to the basement, and I came back up with my biggest roaster, the speckled blue one my mother gave me when I got married. I set it on the stove.

I want to be honest here too. I did not do what I did next out of pure Christian love. Some of it was love.

Some of it was the plain fact that she was hurt and family takes care of family, and that is how I was raised. But a part of me, I am not proud to say, wanted Tracy to feel exactly what I had felt lying on that couch.

I wanted her to know what it was like to open your door to a kindness and wonder what it was going to cost you.

And I wanted her to find out that this time it would cost her nothing at all.

So I decided I would bring her supper. Not a few suppers. Every supper, every night, until she could hold a spoon again. And I decided I would not send her a single request.