LeRoy had passed nine years ago. But his son still kept his father’s old flatbed trailer.
Inside twenty minutes, that trailer was backed up to the fellowship hall door. Eight folding tables and forty metal chairs stacked on it.
Dale and LeRoy’s boy and Harold himself hauled them down the ramp.
Three men who’d never cooked a funeral lunch in their lives. Doing the one thing they did know how to do. Carrying something heavy without being asked twice.
Louise opened three jars of her own green beans. Canned last August from her own garden. She’s canned green beans every August for fifty years, whether the church needed them or not. Because that’s simply what a woman like Louise does with a garden.
I had four pounds of ground beef in my freezer at home. It was supposed to be my meals for the week. It went straight into a roaster of tater tot hotdish.
Because tater tot hotdish is what this county eats when it grieves. And there’s no replacing it with a catered cold cut tray, no matter how lovely the spread.
Eunice, nearly blind in the dim basement light, worked the biscuit dough by feel. She could have made those biscuits in her sleep. Some mornings she probably nearly did.
None of us had slept well in the two months since our kitchen was taken from us. And this, God forgive the strangeness of grief, felt almost like relief.
We didn’t have time to bake a sheet cake.
But what every one of us had, every single week for thirty years without fail, was a tin of bars sitting in our kitchen at home.
A woman who’s cooked funeral lunches that long keeps a standing stock of lemon bars and rhubarb crisp the way a farmer keeps diesel in the tank. Ready before anybody asks.
Marge’s granddaughter drove the two miles to Marge’s house and back in eleven minutes flat with every tin in the pantry.
At eleven-fifteen, Pastor Shay came down the basement stairs.
He was looking for Tamra. He said she was up in the sanctuary trying to figure out what in the world to tell seventy mourners who’d be walking down to an empty table in fifteen minutes.
He stopped three steps from the bottom.
And he just looked at us.
Five women in their church dresses, wearing aprons borrowed off the hooks. Hooks that, it turned out, were still hanging exactly where we’d left them. Roasters steaming on every burner. The smell of fried onions and baked ham filling that basement, the way it had filled it for thirty years before anybody ever thought of a sign-up sheet.
“I don’t—” he started.
He didn’t finish that sentence either. Just like Harold.
He just said, “Thank you.” Very quietly.
And he went back upstairs to get his wife.
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