The Forty One Families at Wednesday Supper
The Names
“Most of you know our house burned in January,” I said. “Some of you were there that night. Some of you have been in our rental with a casserole or a car full of towels. I never got to say thank you properly. So I’d like to do that now.”
I read the first name. “The Olsons.” I looked up and found them, at the far table. “You lost your mom two weeks before our fire, Gene, and you still gave. Thank you.”
Gene Olson is seventy-four and does not cry in public. He looked down at his plate and nodded twice.
“The Dahls,” I said. “Lisa, Kevin. You gave us the recliner Ryan sleeps in every night when his back is bad. Thank you.”
“Arnie and June Pederson. Arnie, you plowed Joan’s driveway in Morris at five in the morning, forty minutes from your own farm, and you never said a word about it. Thank you.”
I went through all of them. Slowly. I did not skip one.
Forty-one families, and with every name I looked up and found their faces, and every family nodded or put a hand to their mouth or looked away.
Behind the pass-through window, the water had been off for a while now.
When I got to the end, I read the last name, which was Pastor Tom and Carol Reese, and I thanked them for the space heater and the clipboard and the eleven years.
Then I folded the list in half and held it.
“All forty-one of you,” I said. “Thank you. I didn’t know until a few weeks ago that you had given us anything. And I’ve been trying since then to find out where it went.”
The room got quieter, which I would not have thought possible.
I turned to the next table. I did not raise my voice. I did not say the word flowers.
I did not say the word steal. I said what Pastor Tom told me to say and what Ryan told me to say.
“Kristi,” I said. “You carried every one of these gifts to us. You were our friend before any of this, and you were the first person on Joan’s step with coffee. Would you tell them what it bought?”
What Kristi Said
Forty-one families turned to look at her.
I will remember that for the rest of my life. Not the shouting, because there was none.
Just the sound of folding chairs shifting on the tile, every head in that hall turning the same direction, and then nothing.
Kristi sat there with her hands in her lap. Her face was white under that short frosted hair, and I saw her mouth open and close once with nothing coming out.
Mark put his hand on her shoulder. He did not say anything for her. He just put his hand there.
She stood up. It took her two tries, because the chair caught on the table leg, and when she was standing she held onto the back of it with both hands.
“It bought flowers,” she said. Her voice was so small the back tables could not hear her, and she said it again. “It bought flowers. For Megan’s wedding. White roses.”
Somebody at the far table let out a breath. Nobody said a word.
“Mark lost his job on the 18th of December,” she said. “We didn’t tell anybody. We didn’t even tell Megan until after Christmas. The florist needed the balance by February 1st or she’d release the order, and the hall needed theirs, and we had already spent the savings on the deposit back in the fall.”
She was crying now, but she kept going. I have to give her that.
“I was going to pay it back,” she said. “Our tax refund was supposed to come. With the child credit for our youngest, it’s almost four thousand dollars. I thought I’d take the Lindstroms’ money for two weeks and put every cent back before anyone knew. Before Amy knew.”
“Then the refund didn’t come,” she said. “They hold them now, the ones with the child credit, and ours didn’t land until the end of February. I didn’t know that. And every week it didn’t come, I couldn’t look at Amy, and the longer I couldn’t look at her, the worse it got.”
She looked at me then, straight across the table. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You were standing in the snow in your socks and I bought roses with it. I don’t know what I was. I’m so sorry.”
Then she sat down and put her face in her hands, and Mark put his arm around her, and the whole room sat there.