I didn’t.
I untied my apron. I folded it the way my mother taught me to fold a dish towel. Thirds, then half. And I hung it on the hook by the door, where it had hung for thirty years.
“Well,” I said. “I suppose we’ll see you at church, Tamra.”
And I walked up the stairs into the sanctuary. I sat down in the pew where my husband would have been sitting if he’d lived to see this day.
I didn’t cry until I got home.
My name is Opal Deane. I’m seventy-two years old.
I’ve lived in this little Nebraska town my whole life. It’s so small you could walk every street in it in the time it takes a pot roast to brown.
And for thirty years, ever since I was forty-two and had just buried my own mother, I’ve been one of five women who cooked the funeral lunch at Zion Lutheran Church.
