PART 2: The Blue Pan on the Table
“Before we eat,” Pastor Wes said, “I want to say something.”
The room went quiet.
He didn’t have a microphone. He just stood there at the head table with his napkin still in his hand.
“Eleven years ago, a woman came into my office in December,” he said. “She asked me if she could cook for anybody in this town who had nobody.”
Somebody at the back said amen.
“I gave her forty dollars out of my own wallet, because the church had nothing that month. And she told me she couldn’t stand the quiet in her own kitchen. Her husband had been gone nine months.”
My face went hot. I never told a soul that part.
“Eleven years,” Pastor Wes said. “Two turkeys the first time. Then thirty-two people. Then sixty. Now look at this hall.”
He looked down at the buffet table.
“And I know that pan.”
Darla laughed. It came out wrong, too loud for the room.
“Wes, we’re giving Brenda a night off. She’s earned it. That’s all this is.”
“Did you ask her?”
“Darla — “
“Did you ask Brenda if she wanted a night off?”
Darla set the serving spoon down.
“We didn’t want to bother her.”
“You borrowed her mother’s pan,” Pastor Wes said.
Darla’s chin came up. “That’s my pan. That belonged to my mother.”
Nobody in that hall said a word.
I stood by the door with my coat on and my keys in my fist, looking at that blue pan on the buffet with the chipped side turned to the wall.
I found my voice. It came out quieter than I meant it to.
“Wes. It’s all right.”
“Brenda — “
“It’s all right.” I unbuttoned my coat but I didn’t take it off. “I’m not going to make a scene in front of these people. I’d like to say the blessing. Then I’d like my mother’s pan back, and then I’ll go home.”
Pastor Wes nodded once. “Say it.”
So I folded my hands the way I do.
“Lord, thank you for the food. Thank you for every person in this room, and for the ones who couldn’t come. Amen.”
A few people echoed it. Most of them just watched.
I looked at Darla. “The pan.”
She looked around the room. Aunt Paula was studying her plate. My cousin Mark was looking at the ceiling tiles. Nobody was going to help her.
She walked it over and held it out with both hands, like it weighed more than it did.
I took it. The lid slid, and I caught it with two fingers at the worn spot, the way I always do.
“Thank you,” I said.
Then I turned around and walked out.
*
I put the pan in the passenger seat and buckled the seatbelt across it.
I sat in the driveway a while before I went in.
Josie was at the kitchen table with her history book. She looked up.
“Did you get it back?”
“I got it back.”
“Good.” She went back to her book. Then she said, “Dad would’ve been so mad.”
“He would’ve.”
I washed the pan that night in the sink. I didn’t need to. It was clean.
*
What happened after was a lot of phone calls.
Darla posted in the family chat the next morning. “I’m sorry if anyone felt left out at the dinner last night. That was never my intention.”
Aunt Paula replied with a thumbs up.
My cousin Mark replied with nothing.
My brother Doug called me Tuesday while I was waiting for the bus to warm up.
“You made my wife look like a liar in front of half the town.”
“Doug, I asked what time to be there. Nobody answered me for two days.”
Silence.
“She told me you didn’t want to do it anymore. She said you were tired and you wanted to hand it off.”
“I never said that to her. Not one time.”
The line was quiet so long I checked my phone to make sure we were still connected.
“I’ll call you back,” he said.
He didn’t call back for nine days.
When he did, it was a Tuesday again, and he sounded like a man who hadn’t slept much.
“I talked to Aunt Paula,” he said. “And Mark.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve got some things to say to my wife.”
“That’s between you and her.”
“Brenda — “
“I’m not mad at you, Doug. I’m just not ready to act like it didn’t happen.”
“That’s fair,” he said. “That’s fair.”
Darla texted me that same week. “I’m so sorry you felt excluded. I never meant for you to feel that way.”
I wrote back: “That’s not an apology, Darla. But thank you for saying something.”
She didn’t answer that.
*
Pastor Wes came by two days before Christmas with a pound cake and stood in my kitchen not saying much.
“Are you all right?” he finally asked.
“I’m getting there.”
“I should have called you weeks ago. When I first heard about the new venue, I thought you knew.”
“You thought wrong. That’s allowed.”
He looked at the blue pan sitting on my stove.
“Are we doing it again next year?”
“Ask me in October,” I said. “I’ll know by then.”
*
Darla came to my house in January. Second week. She stood on the porch with two coffees and no excuse.
“You don’t have to let me in,” she said.
I let her in.
She sat at my table and didn’t touch her coffee for a long time.
“I wanted people to look at me the way they look at you,” she said.
“Nobody looks at me, Darla.”
“They do.”
I let that sit.
“I’ve never had anything that was mine,” she said.
“Neither did I,” I said. “I made one.”
She cried a little, and I didn’t get up to comfort her, and I think she knew better than to expect it.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Not about how you felt. About what I did. I took your dinner and I took your mother’s pan and I stood there and let people believe it was mine.”
“Thank you,” I said. “That one I’ll take.”
“What can I do?”
“I don’t know yet.” I walked her to the door. “But there is one thing, in November. When it starts, the first thing I do is write the names on index cards. Josie used to do it with me. She’s got finals and a job now.”
“You want me to write names.”
“I want you to write names.”
She nodded and left.
It isn’t fixed. I want to be honest about that. Some days I’m fine and some days I hear her saying my mother’s recipe and my jaw gets tight.
But I told her the truth, and she didn’t argue with it, and that’s more than we had before.
*
Josie came in from practice that night with snow in her hair and dropped her bag by the door.
She stopped when she saw the counter.
“Why’s the pan out? Are you making something?”
“No.”
She got the milk out of the fridge and drank straight from the jug, which she knows I hate.
Then she stopped in the doorway.
“I still have the cards, you know. From last year. They’re in my desk drawer.”
“I know.”
I lifted the lid by the worn spot and set it back on crooked, the way Mom always did.
It never fit any other way.
I left it right there on the counter and turned off the kitchen light.