The Soldier Bride Who Asked Mom for a Dish

Then she walked in. She walked past all of them, along the side of the room, past the long tables of food, with that casserole held out in front of her like it was the only thing in the world she was sure of.

Donna met her halfway. She did not say a word.

She just held out her hands, and Mom gave her the dish, and Donna carried it to the main table and set it down right in the middle, in a place she had been saving.

Mom stood there with her empty hands. She did not know where to go.

And Cody’s mother, who had every reason to be cold to her, pulled out the folding chair beside her own at the family table and patted the seat.

Mom sat down. Cody squeezed my hand. “Come on, Mrs. Lang,” he said quietly, and we walked the rest of the way out under the flags.

Then everybody ate. The auxiliary ladies served from behind the tables in their aprons, and the line went out the door into the heat, and people stood in the parking lot balancing plates on the hoods of their trucks.

I made a plate myself. I went down the line and took a little of everything, a biscuit and some burgoo and a deviled egg.

And at the end of the main table, right where Donna had set it, I took a big spoon of my mother’s chicken and dressing.

It tasted exactly the way it tasted at Daddy’s funeral dinner. Sage and black pepper and too much butter.

I stood there eating it standing up in my dress blues, and I had to turn around and face the wall for a minute.

Mom did not come up to me during the meal. I watched her.

She sat with Cody’s mother and ate almost nothing, and she kept her eyes on her plate, and people came by her table and some of them spoke to her and some of them did not.

That was her consequence, if you want to call it that. Nobody yelled at her. Nobody said a thing.

But she sat in a room with a hundred and forty people who knew, and she had to sit there and eat with them, and she did it.

When the meal was winding down, I saw her get up and go to the kitchen in the back.

A few minutes later I went to find her. She was at the big steel sink with her sleeves pushed up, washing roaster pans with the auxiliary ladies.

Donna was drying next to her. They were not talking. They were just working side by side the way women in our county do when the words are too big for a room.

Mom saw me in the doorway and turned off the water. She dried her hands on a dish towel. She looked so small in that floral dress, standing by that big steel sink.

“You look just like him in that uniform,” she said. “You stand just like him.”

“Thank you for coming, Mom,” I said.

“Thank you for asking me,” she said. Then she turned back to the sink, because I think if she had kept looking at me she would have come apart, and there were still roasters to wash.

Cody and I left that night at nine o’clock to a line of sparklers out the front door.

The two flag bearers held up their flags one more time in the parking lot, and Walt saluted me, and I saluted him back.