The Forty One Families at Wednesday Supper

The First Weeks

We stayed the first week with Ryan’s mother, Joan, in Morris, forty minutes away.

Her house is small, and the four of us slept on her living room floor on couch cushions and an air mattress with a slow leak.

We had insurance. People always ask that first, and they should.

We had a policy with a $1,000 deductible, and the adjuster was kind and quick, but kind and quick from an insurance company still means weeks of forms.

They covered a rental, which turned out to be a little two-bedroom house on the edge of town that had been empty since fall.

It had brown carpet, a furnace that ran loud, and four steep concrete steps up to the front door.

The contents claim meant listing every single thing we owned, room by room, with what it cost and when we bought it.

I sat at Joan’s table with a legal pad and tried to remember how many forks we had.

Ryan went back to work at the co-op elevator on the following Monday, because the elevator does not stop and neither does a mortgage on a house that is not standing.

He came home every night with his jaw tight and his hands raw.

That first Wednesday after the fire, Kristi Haugen drove to Morris with two cups of gas station coffee and a sack of donuts.

She sat on Joan’s step with me in the cold and held my hand in her mitten.

Kristi was forty, six years older than me, and she had been my friend since I joined the church after Ryan and I got married.

She taught Paige in Sunday school. She held Sam at his baptism. She knew my coffee order.

“The church wants to do something,” she told me. “I’m going to take up a little something at Wednesday supper. Don’t argue with me, Amy. People want to help and they don’t know how.”

I told her not to. I said we had insurance, that other people had it worse, that the Olsons had just lost his mother. She squeezed my hand and said, “You don’t get a vote. I’ll handle it. You just get your kids settled.”

I let her. That is the truth, and I will not pretend otherwise.

I was so tired and so ashamed of needing anything that I let her handle it so I would not have to think about it.

The Basket

We did not go to church for most of January.

So I was not there on the Wednesday that Kristi stood up at supper and passed a wicker basket down the tables.

She had a clipboard with a sheet on it. She said, “This is for the Lindstroms. Anything you can give. Write your name on the sheet so Amy can send a thank-you when things settle down.”

People put cash in the little offering envelopes from the pew racks, and some of them wrote our name on the outside in pencil.

Kristi carried the basket into the church office afterward and said she would get it to us that week.

That Sunday the bulletin had one line at the bottom of the announcements page. It said: Thank you, church family. $3,400 was collected for the Lindstrom family after their house fire. God bless your generosity.

I did not see that bulletin until much later.

I knew Kristi had taken up “a little something.” In my head that was a few hundred dollars, maybe some gift cards to the grocery store. When nothing came, I assumed it had been small and she was embarrassed to say so.

I did not ask. I want to be honest about that too. I was not going to call my friend and ask where my charity was.

My mother raised me that you do not count what people give you.