She untied it instead, folded it over the chair, stood up straight, and looked Colleen dead in the eye. Then my wife said, “Colleen, go get the green book off the counter.”
Nobody moved, so Deb went and got it herself.
The bereavement committee at Bethel keeps a book. It has been kept since 1961 and Deb has kept it since 2004, and it is nothing but a spiral ledger with a line for each funeral dinner. Date, family, number served, who cooked, and what was sent to the house afterward and for how many days.
Four hundred and eleven lines in Deb’s handwriting.
She opened it flat on the table between the cake and the punch bowl and she did not read the whole thing, thank the Lord, we would still be sitting there. She read four lines.
March 2009, the Wrenn family, ninety served, ham and scalloped potatoes, meals to the house eleven days. That is Colleen’s husband’s mother.
August 2016, the Dunlap family, one hundred forty served, and there is a note in the margin about a cousin who could not eat wheat, so a separate pan was made and labeled and set at the end of the table where he could get it without asking anybody. That is Colleen’s own daddy’s funeral.
Then two lines Colleen did not know about at all. December 2018 and January 2019, no funeral, no church supper, just a name and a note. Colleen was in the hospital in Nashville for six weeks that winter and her husband was down there with her the whole time, and somebody drove out to that lake house every Sunday, let herself in with the key under the frog, and filled that freezer. Twenty-two containers, dated, taped, in Deb’s handwriting.
Colleen came home and ate out of that freezer for two months and thought her church had done it and never asked which member.
Inside the front cover of the book is a note from Wilma Radford, who kept it before Deb and who taught her the job standing at that same stove.
Whoever has this next — you are not the help. When a family cannot think, somebody has to know how many chairs and what the boy is allergic to. That is not serving. That is remembering on their behalf, and it is the closest thing to a ministry a kitchen ever gets.
Deb closed the book and said, “I have never once minded doing it. I have minded you calling it something it is not, in front of my husband, at his parents’ anniversary.”
Then she sat down and asked my mother if she wanted more cake, and that was the end of it, which is more grace than I would have managed.
Colleen came by the house eleven days later. She stood on our porch and cried and could not get a whole sentence out, and Deb let her in and put coffee on, because that is what Deb does with a person who is falling apart.
She is in the kitchen at Bethel most Saturdays now. She is not much of a cook and she knows it, so she washes.
I have stopped letting it ride, too. That is on me, and I told Deb so, and she said she knew, which was the hardest part of the whole evening.