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.
