She was there in nine minutes, in her good cardigan, with the laminated card in one hand and a thermos in the other. She climbed into my passenger seat and set the card on the dash.
“I need to ask you something,” Dolores said. “Tell me the truth, because the Lord already knows it and I would hate to waste His time. What did you say to that man?”
I told her. The kitchen, the dish towel, the freezer prayer.
Dolores did not laugh, though I saw her want to. She poured coffee into the thermos cup and handed it to me.
“The freezer part I’d keep between us and the Lord,” she said. “He’s heard worse from me. But hear this. This chain has never once been used for a party. We use it for sickness and death. If I send out a request that says the church ladies should cater a reception, I’ll have thirty-one women who feel like they’ve been asked to work.”
“It isn’t a party,” I said. “It’s the only one he’s going to have.”
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Dolores looked at me for a good while. Then she nodded.
“Then that’s how I’ll say it. A soldier is shipping out Monday and his bride has nowhere to marry him on Saturday. It needs prayer. That’s what the chain is for. What the women do after they pray is between them and the Lord.”
“Dolores, I can’t ask them to cook for one hundred and forty.”
“You aren’t asking them to cook. You’re asking them to pray. If the praying turns into ham, that’s the Lord’s business.”
She said it with such a straight face that I laughed, and then I was crying anyway, and she let me.
“One more thing,” Dolores said. “Add a name to the request. Pray for Roone, too.”
I took my hand off the wheel. “I can’t.”
“You can’t yet. That’s why the chain is thirty-one women instead of one. You pray for Lindy and the boy. We’ll pray for Roone. A man who does what he did Thursday is a man something has gone wrong in, and it didn’t start Thursday.”
She opened her phone and made five calls from my passenger seat.
I do not remember her words. I was staring out the windshield at the churchyard, at the three sugar maples and the old iron fence and the lawn that rolled down toward Cherry Street. It was a big yard, flat and green, with a stone bench in the middle where a century of brides had had their pictures taken.
Dolores hung up on the fifth call, looked where I was looking, and said, “Well, now.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I only said, well, now.”
By two o’clock that afternoon my phone had rung nineteen times.
Pastor Wade was first. He is a big, careful man in his fifties who wears the same brown cardigan to every funeral. “Verda, the fellowship hall seats sixty, and that won’t hold the half of it, and I’ve been standing in the churchyard for fifteen minutes. I think we’re meant to do it out here.”
“Out in the yard?”
“There’s room for two hundred, if the weather holds. I’ll marry them in the sanctuary at eleven like we planned, and bless the meal out here at one, and I won’t charge you for either. And Verda, I’m sorry it took this to say it. That man has been getting away with that sort of thing for years.”