The Year the Suppers Never Stopped

The envelope

I am sorry to say that I was not done being a fool.

On the tenth day, I washed every dish that had come to my house, and there were nine of them by then, and I packed them in a cardboard box from the feed store.

I counted out two hundred dollars from the coffee can above the refrigerator and put it in an envelope. I wrote Odessa’s name on the front.

Two hundred was more than nine suppers cost. I did not want anybody to say Lowell Skeens had come up short.

I carried the box to church on Sunday.

After the service, I found Odessa in the fellowship hall at the coffee urn with a dozen women standing around her, and I set that box on the table in front of all of them and handed her the envelope.

I did not say a word. I did not have to. I had just paid her, in front of the whole church, like a man settling a bar tab.

I would give a good deal to take back the look on Irene Fitzwater’s face. Nobody said anything. The coffee urn ticked.

Odessa took the envelope. She read the name on the front, and she smiled at me, and she said, loud and clear, “Why, thank you, Lowell.” Then she walked straight across the room to Brother Arnett and handed it to him.

The following Sunday, he announced from the pulpit that an anonymous donor had given two hundred dollars toward the new church roof, and the congregation said amen.

I got my own back in one way. Nobody knew whose money it was except about thirty women.

Odessa caught me in the parking lot afterward. She leaned against the truck door with her pocketbook over her arm.

“You wanted to give it,” she said. “So I let you give it. The roof thanks you. Supper is at five-thirty.”

Then she got in the truck and Clovis drove her home. That evening at five-thirty, I heard two knocks.