The Pierogi We Pinched With Grandma

A man I did not know held a thermos. Somebody had brought a lawn chair, the aluminum kind with green and white webbing, and sat in it with a blanket over her knees.

I saw faces I have known all my life. The woman who runs the post office. The retired principal from the high school. The two brothers who plow the church lot every winter for nothing.

And at the very front, in a good wool coat and a pair of gloves older than I am, stood Mrs. Kowalczyk, who is ninety-six and had driven herself.

Uncle Ed held the door open with his back. We came through it in a row, carrying pans, and the line went quiet in a ripple, like wind going over a field.

Inside, the caterer’s trays stood along the near wall under silver foil, thirty of them, with a card taped to the front that said Potato and Cheese, Catered, nine dollars a dozen.

Behind them, at the pass-through to the church kitchen, stood my aunt Pam with her reading glasses on her nose and a clipboard against her chest.

She saw Grandma first. Then she saw the rest of us. I watched her take in the flour on fourteen pairs of sleeves, and the dish towels, and the thirty-four pans coming through the door in the arms of her own nieces.

She did not say a word. She did not come over. Her hand tightened on the clipboard, and she stood very still behind it like a woman waiting out a storm at a bus stop.

I had rehearsed a speech for two weeks, in the shower and on I-70. It had four paragraphs and it was calm and cold and cruel in just the way she had been cruel to us.

I had been proud of it. I looked at her face and I let it go, and I have never missed it.

“Don’t,” Grandma said to me, very low, though I had not moved. “Not one word to her. Not today. A thing like this is loud enough on its own.”

So we said nothing. We set our pans on the long table under the window.

Sophie propped up the sign she and Beth had made from poster board, potato and cheese, twelve dollars the dozen, and Sophie had added a little border of tulips along the bottom, because that is Sophie all over.

Grandma took her seat in a folding chair at the head of the table, in her apron, with her hands in her lap. And at one o’clock sharp Father Dominic opened the door.

I will not try to tell you what it was like.

Mrs. Kowalczyk came in first, on her cane, and walked straight down the length of the room past the caterer’s silver foil without turning her head.

She stopped in front of our table and lifted the lid of the first pan with one finger.

“That is her edge,” she said, loudly, to nobody. “I would know it anywhere.” Then she looked at Grandma. “Paula. I will take six dozen.”