The Pork Chop Supper on the Lawn

Why

It was not to shame her. I had thought about shaming her.

For three days on my route, I pictured every way of saying something cutting at the next family dinner, and every version made me feel a little sick.

It was not to let her off, either. She had already lost the fair week. She knew the whole road had seen her standing at that gate with her coffee.

That was a real price, and she had paid it, and I did not need to pile on top of it.

What I wanted was to tell the truth about what had happened that morning, out loud, in front of the people who were there. Because the truth was bigger than what Sherri had done.

The truth was that a woman opened a gate she should not have opened, and inside of fifteen minutes, twenty people came out of their kitchens in their pajamas and saved a boy’s fair.

Sherri was part of that truth. She started it. But she had also held a panel, and dropped the pin, and looked at it.

I wanted her at that table when we said thank you, because she was part of the reason anybody was saying thank you at all.

“And the other thing,” I told Blaine. “I want her to see what it looks like. When everybody comes out for a kid. When nobody yells. I want her to see it from the first chair.”

Blaine was quiet for a long time. Then he reached over and put his hand on my knee and said, “Okay. Then we do it right.”

The Chops

Pork chops for that many people is no small thing. I counted the households from my texts, plus the Pruitts and Hoffmans and Millers, and figured on about forty-five people, which meant about sixty chops with seconds.

I called the locker in town and ordered sixty bone-in loin chops, an inch thick. It came to a little over two hundred forty dollars.

Blaine did not blink. He said Moose had just paid for himself at the auction, and this was the best use he could think of for the money.

Clark brought his cooker down on Saturday morning on the back of his flatbed.

It is a homemade thing, a split fuel drum on a frame with a crank grate, the same one he has used at every family reunion since before I was born.

Trisha called me Friday and said she was bringing sugar cream pie, three of them, and that I was not allowed to argue about it.

The Pruitts brought sweet corn by the bushel. Cliff’s daughter brought sliced tomatoes and a shaker of salt.

Saturday morning, before any of that, I walked up the road and knocked on Sherri’s door.

The Invitation

She came out onto the porch. She did not invite me in, and I did not ask to come in.

We stood on the boards in the morning sun, her in her house shoes and me in my route sneakers.

“We’re having everybody over tonight,” I said. “Everybody who came out Monday. Pork chops on the lawn at six. Your dad’s running the grill.”

“I know,” she said. “He told me. He told me twice, actually, like I might not have heard him the first time.”

“I want you to come,” I said. “I mean that. I’m not asking to be polite.”

She looked at me for a long time. She has Blaine’s eyes, gray and steady, and I could see her trying to work out what I was doing.

“Why,” she said. Flat, exactly like her brother says it.

“Because you were there,” I said. “That’s all it is. You were there that morning, same as the rest of us.”

She did not say yes. She did not say no. She said, “I owe Cliff for his beans,” and I said she could talk to Cliff about that, and I walked back home down the road.

Later Cliff told me she came down to his porch that afternoon with two hundred dollars in an envelope for the trampled rows. He would not take it.

“Put it toward pie,” he said he told her. “Those beans have been knocked flat by worse than pigs. They’ll stand back up.”