The Kids Who Came to My Potluck

The Cars Kept Coming

The last Saturday in May came up warm and green. The wheat was already tall out past the ball fields.

It was the kind of Kansas morning that smells like cut grass and diesel and somebody’s barbecue. We got to the hall at eight.

The trustees had the long tables out, twelve of them, end to end. The ladies had the coffee going by nine.

The church secretary had made a banner on butcher paper. It said thank you for letting me feed you, in big friendly letters.

I taped it over the serving window. I wanted them to walk in under it.

I put on a clean cardigan, the blue one. I was not going to wear an apron to my own party, even though my hands wanted to.

At ten til ten the first car pulled in. A woman about forty, with a crock pot of meatballs and two kids in church clothes.

She came through the door and saw me. She set the crock pot down on the nearest table and walked straight into me with her arms out.

Mrs. Judy, she said, and started to cry. You fed me every day of fourth grade the year my mom was sick, she said, and I never got to say.

I did not even get her name out before the next car came. And then they did not stop.

They came in trucks and minivans and one of them on a motorcycle. The man in leather turned out to be a boy I remembered as a tiny asthmatic thing named Kevin.

They came with covered dishes and crock pots and foil pans. The twelve tables became a wall of food.

Green bean casserole and ham and three kinds of potato salad. A whole table of nothing but desserts. And still they came.

A woman brought her mother, who had been the cook before me. Ninety-one now, in a wheelchair.

The two of us held hands and did not need a word about what that kitchen takes out of you and puts into you. A man in a feed-store cap brought a sack of sweet corn from his own field and set it down like a tithe.

Pastor Dale counted heads at the door with the little clicker he uses for Easter. He kept catching my eye and holding up fingers.

Eighty. A hundred. A hundred and twenty.

Grown men I had fed as six year olds stood in clumps. They told each other the cinnamon roll story and the Friday roll story.

One told the one about the time I caught a boy stealing milk cartons and made him my helper for a week instead of turning him in. That boy was there. Fifty now, a grandfather, telling it with his voice shaking.

A woman I did not place at first came up with a casserole dish in two pot holders. She said she was the nurse, the one who went to Wichita and came home.

You would not remember, she said, but you kept a tally in your head of which of us looked hungry on a Monday, and you always had something extra. I did remember. I just never knew any of them had noticed.

Two deputies came in uniform on their lunch break, hats under their arms. They did not eat much. They stood by the door a while and then one of them came and shook my hand and could not look right at me, and I understood that fine.

Men do not always have the words. They drive two blocks and stand in a church hall and shake your hand, and that is the words.