His eyes filled up.
“Dana used to call it her grandma’s funeral dish,” he said. “She said it was the only time anybody in her whole family ever sat down together at once.”
Wanda set down her serving spoon.
She came around the end of the table. She put both her hands on that young man’s shoulders. The way you’d steady a fence post that had started to lean.
“Well then, son,” she said. “You sit right down here, and you eat all you want of it. And when you’re done, there’s seconds. And there’s a woman in this basement who will sit with you just as long as you need sitting with.”
She walked him to a chair herself. And she sat down across from him.
And I watched a boy with no family left in this world eat a plate of ham and noodles across a folding table from a seventy-one-year-old widow he’d known for eleven minutes.
