Day 698: 5 Minute Freewrite: Wednesday - Prompt: a bunch of excuses

Mrs. Magdalena Thornton greatly missed cooking for her husband and her daughter, both killed in a car accident, but she never let that keep her from doing what she loved.

Three times a week, she went over to the Church in the Midst of Life, taking her lunch break from her work as secretary to the commissioner at Big Loft's police headquarters to bring home-cooked food for those who were part of the church's ministry to battered women.

Mrs. Thornton's own cousin, Mrs. Margie Bell, was a formerly battered woman still ambivalent about church, but had settled in with the weekly activities, and relished the occasion to eat her cousin's cooking twice a day.

Every day, Mrs. Onyx Baxter, who ran the program, gave Mrs. Thornton a good Christian handshake, and in that hand, a little piece of money from the church to cover her costs.

Some days the handshake was a little bigger, when Mother Baxter, as she was called, steered certain people in Mrs. Thornton's direction. Another of Mrs. Thornton's talents was cooking up good object lessons.

Thus it was on this day, when one of the women being ministered to had been given some instruction about how to better her situation, but had come up with every excuse not to follow it. She was outdone when she, in the middle of her conversation, reached her fork down into her bowl and expected to get a fork full of Mrs. Thornton's delicious lasagna but got a mouthful of wet paper. She dropped the fork and then looked up into Mrs. Thornton's serious face.

“What kind of life do you want?” Mrs. Thornton said. “Keep on with a tear-soaked bunch of excuses, and that's the kind of life you'll get. But, the people here are trying to feed you what you need – .”

She put the bowl with the lasagna down in the proper place –.

“ – And if you just take it in, I think things will be a lot better for you.”

The woman looked at the bowl of wet newspaper, then at the bowl of lasagna, and then ate her lasagna without another word. She then went back to Mother Baxter and said she was ready to follow the steps necessary to change her situation.

Mrs. Thornton left an extra two servings of lasagna for the now-ready woman to take home, just to encourage her, and Mother Baxter encouraged Mrs. Thornton by giving her an extra big handshake.