Chapter 5: Lutefisk

The lutefisk supper at Our Savior's Lutheran fills the church basement every second Saturday in September.

Halle dragged me to it by the sleeve.

"It's tradition," she said.

"It smells like a dead dock," I said.

"That's the lye," Halle said.

"Eat the potatoes and the lefse and smile at the ladies."

There were long folding tables under fluorescent tubes and four hundred people in church clothes.

Half of them worked, or had worked, at Kvale Feed and Seed.

I could tell because they all said hello to the man at the head table with their hats in their hands.

He was fifty-eight, heavy-shouldered and going soft, with thinning gray-blond hair, a tweed jacket and farm boots.

This was Gunnar Kvale, chair of the board of trustees, and Aksel's father.

His eyes passed over me when the dean walked me to the end table by the kitchen door.

Then they dropped to his plate and stayed there.

He did not look at my face once.

It was an odd thing to notice, but I noticed it.

Most people at Halden looked at me because of who I had stood up to.

He looked everywhere else.

"Miss Solheim will sit here," Ragna said, pulling out a chair at the very end, beside the swinging door.

"There is a draft by the kitchen, but one must make do."

The draft was a cold fan blowing off a steam table.

Halle sat down beside me and tucked her napkin into her collar.

"I'm going to sit here and be loud about the weather," she said.

"You don't have to," I said.

"Thea, eat your lutefisk."

I ate the potatoes.

I watched the whole room the way I had learned to on the dairy, with my head down and my eyes up.

Aksel's table sat in the middle, eight rowers in team jackets and him at the head, in a white shirt with the sleeves turned back.

He was not eating.

He was looking at me, and he had not stopped since I came in.

Halle noticed.

"That's a lot of staring for a man who says he's not interested," she murmured.

"He isn't staring," I said.

"Thea, I can feel it from here."

One of the rowers got up and walked toward the kitchen door with a plate.

He was big and red-faced and grinning, and he stopped behind my chair.

"You must be the one," he said.

"The new girl who thinks the table's hers."

I didn't turn.

"It's a library table," I said.

"What I heard," he said, louder, so the whole end of the room could hear, "is that you've got a thing for sleeping in the Kvales' beds.