They Danced On by Carre Armstrong Gardner

Author:Carre Armstrong Gardner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION / Family Life, FICTION / Contemporary Women
ISBN: 9781496414656
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers
Published: 2016-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

For the third year in a row, Laura was helping her church team serve Thanksgiving dinner at the homeless shelter. This year, she was on desserts. Each of the clients was supposed to come through the line and pick up a piece of pie, either pumpkin or apple. Laura’s job was to replenish the supply by opening a stack of prepackaged frozen pies, cutting them into eighths, putting each slice onto a plastic plate, and adding a squirt of whipped cream from an aerosol can. As in other years, Laura could not help comparing this to the kind of Thanksgiving dessert experience she had always known growing up. Apple pie, not semifrozen from a box but hot from the oven, served with really good cheddar cheese or with vanilla ice cream melting on the side; vast wedges of pumpkin pie with her mother’s rum-spiked whipped cream and candied walnuts; cheesecake and rhubarb pie and pecan . . . For days after Thanksgiving, everyone in the Darling family ate pie morning, noon, and night until it was finally gone. Still . . . She pulled herself back to reality. No one here was complaining about dessert. In fact, she had become used to the eagerness and gratitude of the men, women, and children who came through the line. Who knew the kinds of Thankgivings any of them remembered? But she gave them all twice as much whipped cream as she was supposed to, and when a tiny black kid called Big Mike couldn’t make up his mind between pumpkin and apple, she winked at him and slid a piece of each onto his tray.

Afterward, she found herself washing pots in the big sink at the back, physically spent but emotionally invigorated and thinking of the evening ahead, when the whole team would go to Evan and Theo’s house for their own Thanksgiving celebration.

Tracy, the shelter’s volunteer coordinator, joined her at the sink, dish towel in hand. “How do you like working here, Laura?” she asked. Brandishing her towel, she picked up a clean pot and began to dry it.

“Very much. It feels good to know you’re being of material help to someone. And you know, I really like the clients. Some of them are amazingly intelligent, and nearly all of them have a great sense of humor. And they’re always polite and respectful, which I didn’t expect when I first started.”

Tracy laughed. “A lot of them were ‘raised right,’ as they say. I can tell you like them.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. You laugh and joke with them; you remember their kids’ names. You treat them with dignity. It’s a quality we look for in our volunteers.”

“Well, like I said, I enjoy them.”

“If you’re ever looking for more volunteer work, we’d love to have you.”

Laura raised her eyebrows. “You mean not just on Thanksgiving?”

“Why not? We serve three meals a day, 365 days a year. It takes a lot of volunteer staff.”

“How often did you have in mind?”

“Whatever you think you can commit to. One or two days a month is what most of our volunteers give us.

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