The Chair We Saved for Arlene

People think a big meal is about the cooking. It is not. It is about the borrowing.

I spent most of October on the phone, and I learned that a farm community will give you just about anything if you tell them what it is for.

The parish hall at St. Wenceslaus lent us eight long folding tables and seventy chairs.

Father Buck said they would not need them that week, and he sent the maintenance man out with his own trailer to deliver them.

The Altar Society lent me five eighteen-quart electric roasters, the big white ones they use for the funeral dinners.

Each one would hold a twenty-pound turkey if you pushed it, and I pushed it.

We bought five turkeys from the locker plant in town, twenty and twenty-two pounds, and two spiral hams.

Tracy’s cousin works the counter there, and she gave us the commercial price without my asking.

Tony figured out the power. Those roasters pull a lot, and you cannot run five of them off one circuit in a shed.

He ran heavy extension cords to two separate outlets and put the last roaster in our kitchen.

I made a list of who might come. Tony’s two hired men, Tom and Percy, both bachelors. Percy’s mother had died that summer, and Tom’s people were all in Montana.

Then the widowers. Leonard Kucera from my parish, who was eighty-one and still drove his own pickup to Mass every morning.

Two old men from Zion Lutheran, who sat in the same pew every Sunday and ate Sunday dinner at the café in Wahoo.

Then the Novaks, a young family two miles east, whose furnace had quit in October and who were living in their kitchen with a space heater, waiting on a part. They had four little kids.

I told one person, and they told two. That is how it works out here.

By the middle of November, the extension office secretary had heard about it, and the Methodist pastor in Cedar Bluffs had called me about a family of his.

Every person who called asked the same question. “What can I bring?”

I said, “Bring a dish if you can. Bring yourself if you can’t.”

I ended up with eleven kinds of potato salad promised and not one person bringing rolls, so I baked rolls for three days.

I called Arlene the Monday before Thanksgiving, at ten in the morning, from my kitchen.

I knew she would be home, because Monday is wash day and she still hangs her sheets out on the line when the weather allows.

I had practiced it. I had written it on a notepad by the phone so I would not get rattled.

I wanted to say it kindly and plainly and leave no room for her to hear anything I did not mean.

“Arlene, it’s Amber,” I said. “I wanted you to know Tony and I are having Thanksgiving here this year, at one o’clock, in the machine shed. We’re opening it to anybody who wants to come. You’re welcome. We’d love to have you.”

There was a long silence. I could hear the radio in her kitchen, the farm news on the AM station, the cattle market from Columbus.

“I have my own dinner to put on,” she said. “Thank you.”

“I know you do,” I said. “You’re still welcome after, if you want. There will be pie.”