Louise’s husband had died the year before that. She’d stood in that same basement at his funeral with nothing either. And she never forgot it. That hollow feeling of a room full of people who’d come to hold up your grief, and found nothing on the table.
So the morning my mother was buried, Louise showed up on my front porch at six a.m. She had two casserole dishes of scalloped ham and a quart jar of her own canned green beans.
“Opal,” she said. “Get your coat. We’ve got a lunch to put on.”
And that was that.
Wanda and Eunice came within the hour. Marge joined us two years later, after her mother-in-law passed. She saw what we did that day, and she never left.
We built it the way you build anything in a small town. Out of whatever you have.
We kept a funeral shelf in the church pantry, stocked all year round, so we’d never get caught short. Canned green beans. Canned corn. Dried noodles for the hotdish. Two hundred paper napkins. A case of instant coffee for backup, in case the real grounds ran low.
