Birthday Dinner Page 7

Chapter 7

  Zach toted the heavy large blue and white cooler. Becca carried the covered stainless steel warming tray she’d borrowed from the church with an oven mitt on each hand. They were pleased to see a few school-aged children playing in the dusty street and a smattering of adults rocking in chairs on the open front porches of two of the houses between the main road and Mrs. Brackett’s house. They were also pleased to see the porch opposite empty in the broiling sun. The school children had stopped and watched as they’d unloaded the food from the trunk of Becca’s car and carried it to the cool shade of Mrs. Brackett’s front porch. Zach set the cooler down and knocked on the screened door. The heavy wooden door beyond was closed, the windows shut and the blinds drawn. The room inside was bound to be hot as an oven.

  Mrs. Brackett opened the inner door and unlatched the screened door. She pushed the door open and held it from closing with her thin leg. She stepped out onto the porch and reached for the warming tray.

  “It’s hot,” Becca warned.

  Mrs. Brackett released a faint grin, the first Becca’d seen from the old woman since meeting her. “Nary you mind,” she said. “Can’t harm these dull fingers.” She grabbed the hot rim of the pan without the least sign of discomfort.

  Becca shook her head and followed carrying the useless mitts. Zach trailed behind with the cooler.

  Contrary to their expectations, the inside of the house was an oasis of cool and shade after the sweltering glare of the outdoors. Both Zach and Becca exhaled loud sighs of relief. “How do you keep your house so cool?” Becca asked.

  Mrs. Brackett set the tray on the long wooden table in the center of the kitchen. “Don’t need no air conditioning long as the night stay cool,” she said. “Bring the cool in at night, lock it in during the day.”

  “We’ll have to try that,” Becca said. “Or come over here to sleep when it’s hot.”

  “You be welcome in my house,” she said. “But you don’t want to be in this neighborhood after dark. Need to find your cool somewhere else.”

  Becca nodded, sorry for the awkward moment her off-hand remark had created.

  Zach put the cooler on the floor beside the table. He raised the lid and unpacked a large bowl of home-made potato salad, a plate of deviled eggs, and a pitcher of iced tea, and set each on the table. From the bottom of the cooler he took out heavy-weight divided paper plates, plastic forks, and a stack of plastic cups, and spread the utensils on the table. He reached for the handle of the warming tray but jerked his hand back from the hot surface. He laughed and said, “Becca, could I borrow one of those mitts?”

  Becca tossed the mitt across the few feet of air between them. “Mrs. Brackett tougher than a big strong guy like you?” she joked.

  “Did you ever doubt it?” he said as he slid the mitt onto his hand.

  “As a matter of fact, no.”

  Mrs. Brackett said, “No toughness about it; just too old to worry about pain.”

  “One and the same,” Zach said. He lifted the cover off the tray and checked the steaming chicken Becca’d fried that morning and the casserole of New England baked beans he’d mixed together yesterday and slow-cooked over night. Both had survived the trip intact. He set the cover back on the hot food and left the plastic wrap over the cold dishes. He looked to Becca. “All ready.”

  She nodded. “Where’s Jonah?”

  Mrs. Brackett pointed toward the open door of one of the bedrooms. “He hiding.”

  “Is he O.K.?”

  “He being Jonah.”

  “May I?” she asked, gesturing toward the room.

  The woman gave a slight nod accompanied by a resigned shrug.

  Becca walked silently across the pine floors and into the bedroom. It was so dark in there she had to let her eyes adjust to the dim light. Once her eyes had acclimated to what little light there was, she saw that the one window had been covered with black paper taped to the window casing. Inside the small room was a twin bed with a simple wooden frame, a small dresser with a mirror on top, and a wooden chair beside the dresser. The wood-paneled walls were unadorned, at least by anything that Becca could make out in the grayness. And the young boy was nowhere to be seen.

  Becca waited for the room’s stillness to re-establish itself around her, then she sat as quietly as she could on the floor at the end of the bed. She crossed her legs and leaned back against the bed’s footboard and waited in silence for several minutes.

  “You not scared?” Jonah whispered from under the bed.

  “By what?” Becca whispered back.

  “The shooters outside.”

  “When?”

  “In the night.”

  “Last night?”

  “Every night. Momma tell me lay under the bed to hide from the bullets.”

  “She tell you that last night?”

  “She tell me every night. I hear her tell me every night.”

  Becca slowly extended her upper body onto the floor and looked around the end of the footboard. She saw Jonah’s eyes staring back at her from the darkness under the bed. “It’s daytime, Jonah,” she whispered. “The shooters are gone.”

  “You sure?” he asked.

  She nodded. “I checked outside.”

  “How you know? They could be hiding with their guns.”

  “You remember Zach the soldier from my hiding place at the church?”

  She saw Jonah’s face nod in the dark.

  “I brought the real Zach with me today. He checked the streets. He told me it’s safe.”

  “You trust him?”

  Becca could smile at that. “With my life.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.” She extended her hand slowly toward the dark under the bed. “We brought you some dinner. You like chicken?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Then let’s go eat some.”

  “Soldier be there to keep us safe?”

  “On guard in the kitchen.”

  She felt his hand close onto hers.

  The four of them stood around Mrs. Brackett’s long, low, well-worn wood table. When Zach had seen Becca emerge from the bedroom with Jonah following, his hand in hers, he’d gone ahead and taken the lid off the warming tray and the plastic wrap off the eggs and potato salad. A mix of appetizing odors filled the low ceilinged room, and everyone was suddenly very hungry. But no one moved as they waited around the table with their hunger growing by the second. First Becca then Zach and finally Jonah turned to the head of this household, the one present far most meriting of deference and respect.

  Mrs. Brackett saw their gazes and nodded, closed her eyes, extended her arms, and held her dark hands with their beige palms up toward the bright sky lurking beyond the shadowed ceiling. “Lord, as we live by your grace alone, we ask that you would sustain us this day and protect us through the coming night. Bless this food, bless the hands and souls of these good people who prepared it, bless us all that eat it, that we might see in this earthly meal a glimpse of the heavenly feast where there will be no more pain only joy in your presence and peace with all people. Amen.”

  Zach smiled at Jonah and said, “Good food, good meat, good gosh, let’s eat!”

  Jonah hid behind Becca’s legs from the tall white man and his booming voice.

  Becca continued to stare at Mrs. Brackett, still mesmerized by the eloquence of her impromptu grace, thinking again that she’d landed in the midst of an elemental struggle between good and evil, and somehow found God’s side in this fight.

  “Becca?” Zach called.

  She looked up at him.

  “How about helping Jonah get a plate?”

  She laughed sheepishly. “Sorry.”

  Behind her, Jonah whispered, “She still at the heavenly feast.”

  The other three could laugh then, before digging into the earthly one.