“And Lord, bless Prentiss, who has the pavilion today. Bless his daughter, and the young man who loves her, and everybody on that roof. Make room for them, too. Amen.”
A hundred and sixty voices said it back, soft as a field. Amen.
I opened my eyes. Prentiss had not moved. His lips were parted and his eyes were wet. He looked like a man who had heard his own name said in a voice he had not heard in forty years.
Then Jonah lifted the first lid, and the steam went up into the noon light, and the line began to move.
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I clicked the counter for the first plate, and my thumb was steady.
By twenty past twelve, I had stopped being afraid and started being busy, which in a kitchen is the same as being brave. The women dished. Jonah carved, off Luther’s smoker, where he had put on four extra shoulders before dawn without telling me why. I stood at the head of the line with the clicker in my right hand and a plate in my left, and for every face that came up to the table, I said what I have always said. “Glad you came.”
I have said it five hundred Sundays. That was the first Sunday I understood it was true.
At a hundred and forty, the big pot of pinto beans scraped bottom, and the line behind it ran past the flagpole with children in it and old women on folding stools somebody had carried over. I felt my stomach go cold. Jonah did not look up from the carving board. “Granddad always said, if you smoke it, somebody will eat it,” he said. “Four extra shoulders, Gram.”
It was Carl who did the rest. He put his plate in his wife’s hands and walked off to his truck without a word. Twenty minutes later he came back with eleven boxes of fried chicken from the Fork Market, still hot, stacked up in his arms.
“Manager says pay him when you can,” Carl said. “Or don’t. Seems like I owe this table about forty dinners from the winter of my hours. Call it forty.”
I clicked the counter and handed him a plate.
At a hundred and eighty, I noticed the girl in the white dress.
She had been standing at the foot of the pavilion steps for a while with her hands clasped in front of her, watching the line. Her fiance stood a half step behind her. Her mother stood at the rail with a face like a held breath. Behind them, thirty relatives sat on the pavilion benches under a banner that said “She Said Yes,” and not one of them was eating cake.
The girl crossed the grass, and the line made room for her, and she stopped in front of my table.
“Mrs. Spangler,” she said. “May I have a plate?”
I stood there with a spoon in my hand and could not remember what you say.
“You may have anything on this table,” I said finally. “It is for whoever comes.”
“I am sorry,” she said. She was crying a little, and she was brave enough not to hide it. “I did not know. Daddy said the meal was moving to the church. I thought it had been arranged.”
“It has not been arranged, honey.”
“I can see that.” She took the plate with both hands, like Verlie does. “I think I am going to sit with somebody. If they will have me.”