The Two Chairs On The Lawn

It was a plain white sheet cake out of her own kitchen, the kind she makes for funerals and showers, with white icing and a little wax paper over it, and she had taken a tube of blue and written on it with her own unsteady hand, Harold and Eunice, 50.

I asked her later how she had a cake. She said she’d heard Saturday from her husband who’d heard from me at the Marsh, and she’d thought, that old couple ought to have a cake, and she’d baked it that very evening on the chance it would be wanted. On the chance.

Somebody else had coffee going in the fellowship hall before I even knew it was being made. Somebody’s wife had paper plates. The young mother had a camera on her phone and took the only pictures that exist of the whole thing, and she sent them to me that night, and I have one printed and framed on the sill now: the two chairs, the maple, Pastor Reed with his tie loosened, the ring of folding chairs, and two old people holding hands.

Nobody passed a hat. Nobody booked a thing. It cost, I would guess, the price of Delores’s cake mix and a can of coffee, and it was the finest party I have ever been to in my life.

What came out later

I know what you want to know. You want to know about Gary and Sheryl, and about the three thousand dollars, and whether they ever had to answer for it.

They did. But not by my hand, and that matters to me, so let me tell it right.

I did not call them. I did not call the family and say look what your money bought and look what mine did. I let the day be the day.

But a churchyard full of people is a churchyard full of mouths, and Kay’s Ray was there, and so was Harold’s nephew, the trailer one, who had driven in on the chance there might be something after all. They had both put money in. And standing on that lawn watching Harold hold my hands and fail to speak, they did the arithmetic that I had not made anybody do.

There was supposed to be a dinner. They had paid for a dinner. There was no dinner, and here were the old folks saying their vows on borrowed kitchen chairs with a grocery-store funeral cake, looking like two people who had never cost anybody three thousand dollars in their lives.

I did not have to say a word. The arithmetic said it.

Ray is not a soft man. He went to Gary. Not me, Ray. And he asked Gary flat where the money went, the money the family had given in good faith, and he did not ask it gently.