The Benefit Supper at the Legion Hall
The girl at the card table by the Legion door did not look up when I handed her a ten and two ones. She tore a red ticket off a roll, said “Enjoy your supper,” and reached past me for the next person’s money.
I stood there a second longer than I should have. Taped to the front of her card table was a sheet of printer paper with a pink ribbon clip art in the corner. It said BENEFIT SUPPER FOR SHANNON, and under that, in smaller letters, FREE WILL OFFERING ALSO APPRECIATED.
I am Shannon. I was forty-four years old that Saturday, I had driven two hours from Lincoln, and I did not have cancer.
I put the red ticket in the pocket of my denim jacket and walked into the American Legion hall in Wisner, Nebraska, where I had eaten pancakes every Memorial Day of my childhood. It smelled the same. Garlic bread, floor wax, and coffee that had been on the burner since three.
The card
It had started on a Tuesday, eleven days before Halloween, with a card in my mailbox.
I knew the handwriting before I turned the envelope over. Arlene Fuhrman taught Sunday school at St. Paul’s Lutheran for forty-one years, and every child who went through her class got a Christmas card from her for the rest of their lives. I had gotten one every December since I was six.
This was not December. The envelope was a pale green get-well card with a watercolor bluebird on the front. Inside it was a twenty-dollar bill, folded in thirds the way she used to fold our offering money so it would fit in the little envelopes.
There was also a church bulletin. Somebody had circled a box on the back page in blue pen.
BENEFIT SUPPER FOR SHANNON RADEMACHER. Spaghetti, salad, garlic bread, dessert. $12 a plate, kids under 10 free. Saturday, October 24, 5 PM, American Legion Post. All proceeds to help with Shannon’s stage 3 treatment. Please keep her in your prayers.
Under the bulletin, Arlene had written in her careful, shaky cursive. “Shannon honey, we are all praying for you. Tracy says you are too sick for calls or visitors so I am writing instead. I am 88 and I have outlived three doctors, so you listen to me and get well. Love, Mrs. Fuhrman.”
I read that standing at the end of my driveway with the mailbox door still open. Then I read it again. A school bus went by and the driver waved, and I waved back without knowing I was doing it.
My sister Tracy is three years older than me. She still lives in Wisner, in the house on Avenue E that she and Doug bought the year Caleb was born. She works the deli counter at the grocery store. She is the one who stayed.
I went inside and sat down at my kitchen table and typed my own name into my phone.