The Year the Suppers Never Stopped

The knock I started waiting for

After that, something loosened.

I started opening the door at five twenty-five. Not to catch anybody, just so I would be standing there when they arrived. I would say, “Evening, Irene,” or “Evening, Verna,” and they would say it back, and put down the dish, and go.

They never stayed. I noticed that. I noticed that none of them ever came up to the door asking after me, or looking past my shoulder into the house, or saying poor Lowell with that tilt of the head people give a widower.

They said evening. They said it like I was a neighbor and not a project.

I could not have borne the other way. I did not know yet how carefully somebody had thought about that.

In April, the whole church held a ramp dinner, and half of Laurel Fork’s kitchens put a mess of ramps and potatoes on somebody’s doorstep. My house smelled like a wild onion patch for three days. Biscuit rolled in it.

On the nineteenth of April, Evie would have been sixty-five.

I had been dreading that day for a week. I sat at the kitchen table that morning in my work boots and did not do a thing.

Around noon I took her good apron down from the hook and held it, and then I hung it right back up where it belonged.

At five-thirty I heard two knocks. When I opened the door, it was Odessa herself, with a pan of chicken and rice.

She set it on the rail. Then she did a thing she had never done. She sat down on my top step and patted the board beside her.

I sat. We did not say anything for forty minutes. We watched the road and the light go off the ridge, and a pair of wood thrushes started up in the maple.

When the light was gone, Odessa stood up and brushed off her skirt. “She’d have been sixty-five,” she said.

That was the whole conversation. She went home, and I went in and ate every bite of her chicken and rice, and I slept that night all the way until morning, which I had not done since January.