The Six Card Tables On My Lawn
“I’ll need the kitchen key, Hazel.”
Mr. Pfeifer said it in the vestibule, quietly, with his hand already out, the way a man asks for a pen back.
My mother was eighty-four years old. She had one hand on her walker and the other on her purse, and for a second I do not think she understood what he was asking for.
Then she did.
She set her purse on the seat of the walker and took out her key ring. The kitchen key was the old brass one with a loop of red yarn through it, so she could find it by feel in the dark of a winter afternoon. She had carried it since 1992.
Her fingers do not work the way they used to. It took her a long time to get that key around the ring.
He waited. I will say that for him, and I am not sure it is a kindness. He stood there with his hand out the entire time.
Ten minutes earlier he had stood up at announcements, in his gray suit, and read from a sheet of paper.
“The board met Monday night. After a good deal of discussion we have voted to discontinue the Wednesday community supper, effective immediately. We thank everyone who has served.”
Everyone who has served.
My mother was sitting in the third pew on the left, where she has sat since before I was born. Her walker was folded in the aisle beside her. Nobody turned around to look at her, and that was worse than if they all had.
I felt her hand find mine on the pew cushion. It was cold. She did not look at me. She looked straight ahead at the cross on the front wall, with her chin up, and she sang the closing hymn in the same thin, true alto she has always had.
Now, in the vestibule, with people filing past us into the October sunshine, Mr. Pfeifer closed his hand around her key.
“I know this is hard,” he said. “But it has gotten away from us, Hazel. It attracts the wrong people. You know it does.”
Mom looked at him for a moment.
“I thought those were the ones we were supposed to attract,” she said.
She did not say it sharp. She said it the way she would tell you your slip was showing.
He colored up a little. He put the key in his coat pocket, nodded to me, and went back down the aisle to count the offering with the deacons.
I got Mom’s walker turned around. I got her down the three steps and across the street, because I live directly across from the church and she lives with us now, in the downstairs bedroom that used to be my sewing room.
She did not say one word until she was in her chair by the front window.
Then she said, “Lorene, I had four hams in that freezer.”
And she put her face in her hands.
I need to tell you what that supper was, or none of this will make sense.
My father died in the spring of 1991. He was fifty-three. It was his heart, out in the machine shed, and my mother found him.
She was fifty years old, and that fall she told me the worst hour of the day was six o’clock. Not the nights. Six o’clock, when she would catch herself setting out two plates.
“There have to be other people in this town eating over the sink,” she said.