The Forty One Families at Wednesday Supper

Saturday

On Saturday morning, at about ten, there was a knock at the rental door. I was at the kitchen table with the insurance forms again.

Ryan was in the garage, which in the rental was a lean-to, trying to get the snowblower started.

It was Kristi. She was standing on the top step in her winter coat with Mark behind her and Pastor Tom behind Mark, all three of them on those four steep concrete steps like ducks in a row.

Pastor Tom said, “Can we come in for a few minutes, Amy?”

Ryan came in from the lean-to, stamping snow off his boots, and when he saw Mark he held out his hand and Mark shook it.

We sat around the kitchen table that somebody’s uncle had hauled in on a flatbed, the five of us. Paige and Sam were in the back bedroom watching cartoons, and I closed the door.

Kristi took an envelope out of her coat. A long white one, from the bank. She set it on the table in front of me and slid it across with two fingers.

“It’s a cashier’s check,” she said. “Thirty-four hundred. Every dollar.”

“The refund came Thursday,” she said. “Thirty-one hundred of it went to this. Mark sold his snowmobile to the Thompson boy on Friday for the rest. And then some.”

Mark nodded. “It was a 2011,” he said. “Ran good. I wasn’t using it.” He said it plainly, the way men say things that cost them, and Ryan looked at him a long time and did not say anything.

Pastor Tom put his hand flat on the table between us. “I asked to come,” he said. “Not to make anybody say anything. Just because I think this is how it’s supposed to end. At a kitchen table. With all of you.”

The Porch

Ryan and Mark went out on the front step after a while, in their coats, with their coffee.

I could see them through the window. Ryan was doing most of the talking, which is not like him.

He told me later what he said. He told Mark that the co-op was putting on a second man at the elevator for spring loading, and that the manager owed Ryan a favor from the fall, and that Ryan would put Mark’s name in on Monday.

“It’s not much,” Ryan said. “It’s grain. It’s cold. But it’s forty hours and it’s insurance.”

Mark did not say anything for a while, Ryan said. Then he said, “You’d do that? After this?”

And Ryan said, “Your wife made a bad choice. You lost your job. Those aren’t the same thing, and I’m not going to pretend they are.”

Then Mark wiped his face with the back of his glove and the two of them stood there looking at the snow and drinking their coffee.