And we watched the sign-up sheet on the kitchen door fill up with names.
The next three funerals were all small ones. Old-timers whose families had plenty of their own people to cook for them anyway. So Prairie Table’s lovely spreads went mostly fine. Soup in disposable bowls. Little plastic trays of cold cuts and cheese cubes. A sheet cake from the grocery store.
Nothing anybody complained about.
Nothing anybody remembered, either.
We came to those funerals in our good dresses instead of our aprons. We sat with everybody else, the way Tamra said would be nice.
It wasn’t nice.
It was just different. The way a room is different when somebody moves the furniture. And you keep walking into the spot where the chair used to be.
Then, the second week of October, Cole Haney’s wife died.
I didn’t know Cole well before that week.
