Forty, Sixty, Eighty
The next woman through was Kim from my kitchen. She hugged me across the table, bowls and all, and then she turned to Nadine.
“Thank you for doing that for them,” Kim said. “I hope it got the kids coats. Wade was in his daddy’s sweatshirt at school for a week.”
“It helped,” Nadine said.
The next was the 4-H mom. She asked if we had found a place with room for a swing set yet. The next was a young couple with a baby, who wanted to know if the money had covered the deposit on the farmhouse.
“It helped,” Nadine said. “It helped so much.”
I kept handing her bowls. That was all I did. I did not look at her when people said those things. I just handed her one foam bowl at a time.
Mr. Collins, the bus driver, came through and told Nadine she was a good woman for what she had done.
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The family from the next county came, the ones who had had their own fire in 2009. The mother held my hands across the serving table for a long time and did not say anything at all.
At forty, Nadine was still smiling. At sixty, she had stopped smiling and started saying, “Thank you for coming,” instead of, “It helped.”
Somewhere around eighty, her hands started to shake.
I saw it because I was watching the ladle. She would dip it in the roaster, and the chili would tremble a little on the way to the bowl, and twice she spilled some on the tablecloth and wiped it up with a napkin very fast.
A man I did not know, a big quiet man in a seed cap, held out his bowl and said, “Ma’am, my boy goes to school with your niece’s girl. He told me they lost everything. I’m glad you were there for them.”
Nadine put the ladle down in the roaster and held on to the edge of the table with both hands.
“Excuse me one second,” she said, and she took a drink of water from a paper cup.
I could have said something to her then. I thought about it. I could have leaned over and whispered, “Go sit down, I’ll take it.”
I did not. I am telling you that because it is true. I just stood there with my stack of bowls and waited, and after a minute she picked the ladle back up.