The Sunday Meal the City Tried to Stop

Luther passed four years ago in March, on the porch swing, with the Sunday bulletin open on his knee. The Sunday after the funeral, I woke at five and my hands were already reaching for the roasting pans.

Our grandson Jonah took over the smoker the summer he turned fourteen. He is sixteen now, long and quiet and shy of strangers, and he stands over a fire the way his granddad did, like it is a conversation. Most Sundays we feed ninety or a hundred. The most we ever fed was a hundred and forty. A plate costs us four dollars and ten cents, and I keep the receipts in a coffee can.

Now let me tell you about Verlie.

Verlie is eighty-four, and she lives alone in a rented block house behind the old Western Auto. She has a cane with a rubber tip and a blue cardigan she wears in all seasons. She worked thirty-one years in the cafeteria at Willard Fork Elementary, and she does not drive, so every Sunday for eleven years she has walked the three blocks to the park.

She comes at a quarter past eleven, before anybody else, and takes the bench at the edge of the walk, and she folds her hands in her lap and waits. She brings her own spoon in a paper napkin in her purse. When I asked her why, she said, “A woman ought to eat with her own spoon in public.”

I have seen Verlie hungry only one way, and it was not the way I expected. It was not the stomach. It was that she hated to be seen wanting. She would wait until the line was three people deep so nobody would think she had come early for the food. Then she would take her plate with both hands and say, “That’s a pretty plate, Treas,” like I had set a table at her own house.

There are a lot of people like Verlie in our line. Men who drove log trucks. A woman named Opal who cleans two offices and works a third job on weekends. Kids whose mothers send them with a dollar and a prayer. Retired folks who run out of month before they run out of money.

I had not thought much about Councilman Prentiss.

Everybody in Willard Fork calls him that, Councilman Prentiss, as if the title were part of his name. He is fifty-six, silver haired, and wears pressed khakis and a quarter zip with the town seal sewn on it. He owns the insurance office on the square, and he has sat on the city council for fourteen years. He has never once been rude to me. That is the thing. He tips his head when he talks and says “ma’am,” and if you had asked me on Wednesday whether he was my enemy, I would have laughed.

I found out the whole of it Thursday evening, when Rufus came to my kitchen door.

Rufus is the city’s code and health inspector. He is a decent man, heavy and tired, who has a mother in the nursing home and a weakness for my banana pudding. He had been the man in the vest. He stood on my porch with his cap in both hands and would not come in.