The Shoe List at Sunday Dinner

On Sunday after church I put on my lavender blouse, the one Kaitlyn says makes me look less tired, and I brushed my hair and loaded all four kids in the van.

I sat in Evelyn’s driveway with the engine off for five minutes. Kaitlyn finally leaned up from the back seat and said, “Mama, are we going in or not?” and I said we were.

Evelyn’s house sits on a county road outside of Farmington, a little white frame house with a carport and a garden plot she still turns every April by herself. Duane’s truck was already in the yard.

Inside, it smelled like fried chicken and cornbread, and there was a chess pie cooling on the counter under a dish towel.

There is always a chess pie at Evelyn’s. I have never once seen her cut it before the plates were cleared.

We all sat down. Evelyn said grace. She thanked the Lord for the food and the hands that made it and the children at her table, and she said each of their names, the way she always did.

Duane said amen and reached for the chicken. He did not look at me. I think he knew Ethan had told me, and I think he had been dreading this Sunday all week.

I waited until the platter had gone around once. Then I took the list out of my purse, and I reached across the table, and I handed it to Evelyn.

She unfolded it beside her plate and pushed her glasses up her nose. Her white curls were still set from Saturday, and she had on the floral blouse she wears every Sunday of spring.

She read it the way she reads a recipe, every line, one finger moving down the paper.

She read the whole thing. Then she read it again. Then she looked at me over the top of her glasses, and I could not tell anything from her face at all.

“What’s this about, Shawna?” she asked. She did not say it unkindly. She said it like a woman who wanted to be sure before she did anything.

I had practiced what I would say in the car. I said it now, quiet, so only the grownups would really hear.

“Duane got the refund for the kids this year,” I said. “He gave me forty-five hundred of it. The rest of it went to a four-wheeler. This is what they need for spring.”

Evelyn did not answer me. She looked down the table at her son.

Duane kept his eyes on his plate. He had a fork in one hand and he had not taken a bite off it.

His jaw was working under his goatee the way it does when he is trying not to say something.

“Duane,” she said.

He did not look up.

Evelyn turned to Kaitlyn, who is fifteen and misses nothing, and who had just come in from the kitchen with the tea pitcher and stopped in the doorway.

“Honey, take the little ones out back for a few minutes. There’s a new litter of kittens under the shed. Pie in a little bit.”

Kaitlyn did not argue. She got Ben by the hand and Rosie by the shoulder and pushed Ethan ahead of her with her knee.

Rosie looked back at me from the kitchen doorway, and I gave her a little nod that everything was all right.

When we heard the back door bang shut, Evelyn folded her hands on top of the list.