The List On The Fridge
The list was taped to the refrigerator in the church kitchen, and my daughter found her own name crossed out before I did.
Ella is nine. She reads everything. She stood on her toes in her Sunday coat and ran her finger down the column of names, and I watched her face change the way a field changes when a cloud crosses it.
“Mom,” she said. “Why is there a line through me.”
I came over and looked. There were two columns, one for the early hayride at six and one for the late ride at seven. Both were full, twenty-four names in careful pen, and near the bottom somebody had written Ella Boyd and Sam Boyd and then drawn one straight line through both.
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I did not understand it yet. I thought it was a mistake, a name written twice, a pen that slipped. That is the kind of thing I always think first. My husband Dale says I will give the benefit of the doubt to a hailstorm.
Behind me the coffee urn was going, and the women were setting out the bars for after the service, and somebody’s toddler was running laps around the folding tables.
It was the second Sunday in October. The whole church smelled like coffee and wet wool and the cold that comes in on everybody’s coats that time of year.
I took the list down off the fridge, which I should not have done, and I carried it out to the fellowship hall to find Roberta.
Roberta is my husband’s sister. She has run the fall hayride at Zion Lutheran for eleven years, and she will tell you the number.
She is the kind of woman who keeps the sign-up sheets in a plastic tub in her trunk and knows where every folding chair in the building came from.
I found her at the welcome table with her reading glasses pushed up in her hair.
“There’s a line through my kids,” I said. I tried to say it light. “Did I sign them up wrong.”
She did not look up right away. She finished writing something in her little notebook, and then she set the pen down and squared it to the edge of the table, and then she looked at me.
“No,” she said. “You signed them up right. I crossed them off.”