The women with their ladles ladling out gray gravy onto lumpy potatoes, pivoting from one serving dish to another in smart slacks and sensible shoes, taking care not to let too much dead time pass before one asks a question of another. Small talk is not too much a distraction from adding heaping piles of steaming lasagna and filling styrofoam cups with cider. More than one thought this might be her last year of going through these wretched motions, that next winter might fill up with a cruise to Juneau or ten day stay a Tucson condo or a respiratory illness for which convalescence was an impossible ask. One never could tell what might happen, even when what was happening had been happening here, in this church basement, for longer than anyone could remember.

The men, those few who still came, sat hunched over their plates, maneuvering forkfuls of limp green beans into their mouths without tasting them, because they had tasted them before, because they had been eating the same green beans for fifty years, because they knew that no matter how much time passed, a plate did not serve its function until it was clean, and belonging to the club whose members hewed to that rule was not just a point of pride, but the non-negotiable crooked timber of being. This might be the last supper to attend, if courage had any substantive say, and so might as well feast on the perversities at hand.