Prairie Table was booked to serve lunch for sixty people at eleven-thirty that Saturday.
I knew because Eunice’s daughter-in-law, who puts together the church bulletin, mentioned it to Eunice without thinking twice. The way you’d mention the weather.
Tamra had actually booked that order weeks before, for a different funeral. Old Mr. Riggle’s. But Mr. Riggle’s family asked to push his service back so a son could fly in from out of state. And rather than cancel the Prairie Table order, Tamra just moved it over to Dana Haney’s service, since the dates fell close enough together.
Six hundred and fifty dollars. Soup, rolls, a cold cut tray, and sheet cake.
A fair enough price for sixty people from a caterer forty miles away.
If the caterer showed up.
The caterer did not show up.
I heard about it from Harold Bruning, our council president. He called Louise at nine-thirty that Saturday morning, and Louise told me later that in seventy-four years she’d never heard Harold sound that rattled.
A hard frost had come through two nights before and caught half the county off guard.
Somewhere on the gravel between Grand Island and our town, Prairie Table’s delivery van hit a slick spot trying to swerve around a stalled grain truck. It slid right into the ditch.
Nobody was hurt.
The food was a different story. The soup had spilled all over the floor of the van. The cold cut tray got crushed under a case of bottled water that slid over on the turn.
The driver called his boss. The boss called Tamra at nine-forty. Forty-five minutes before mourners would start walking down those basement stairs.
There was no lunch coming. Full refund, of course. She was terribly sorry. But there was simply nothing left to deliver.
Harold called Louise because Harold, bless him, didn’t know what else to do. His wife had been gone eleven years. He’d never once in his life organized a meal for more than himself and a dog.
“Louise,” he said. “I don’t suppose there’s any way—”
He didn’t even finish the sentence.
He didn’t feel he had the right to ask. Not after what the church had done to the five of us two months before.
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