Chapter 17: The Church Supper

I cooked all night in a church kitchen that Dominic had a key to.

He had been an altar boy there until he was fourteen, and the sexton still left the back door on the latch for him.

I made one dish, the way Nan's notebook said: baked rigatoni with sausage, from flour and eggs and a rolling pin I borrowed from the pantry shelf.

I kneaded the dough with my splinted hand and the other one.

Kari stayed with me until two, then slept on the folded tablecloths.

At four I slid the tray into the oven, and at five the hall began to fill.

Saint Anne's Hall held perhaps two hundred folding chairs.

By a quarter past five every one of them had somebody in it.

I could see the room through the pass-through, a wide window cut in the kitchen wall, with a counter along the sill.

The head table stood near it, under a banner that said Thanks Be.

Rosalie sat in the middle with her husband beside her, a heavy man with a gray mustache and a rigid back.

She wore a good blue dress. Her hair was pinned up.

She looked tired and certain, as she had looked at the civic center.

My father was not there. Neither was my mother.

Kari and I stood inside the pantry door, where the pass-through hid us from the hall.

Dominic carried the tray out.

He put it on the counter by Rosalie's elbow, and the room went quiet because he had not been seen in that hall since Thursday.

"Mom," he said. "I made something."

"You don't cook."

"I learned this week."

She looked at the dish and she looked at her son.

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