The Guitar They Laughed At

I buried my dignity in small pieces over eight months of scrubbing another family’s kitchen floor, and I got every single piece of it back in the four minutes it took to sing one song in a VFW hall in front of two hundred people who all thought they knew exactly who I was.

I am not writing this to get even with anyone. I am writing it because a woman in that hall told me something that night I have turned over in my hands every day since, and because somewhere out there is another woman scrubbing somebody else’s floor, believing the job she’s ashamed of is the whole truth of who she is. It almost never is.

Our Cook

The Loyal Creek Volunteer Fire Department holds its Rescue Truck Fund dinner the same Saturday every March, in the same cinderblock VFW hall that’s hosted every fish fry, funeral luncheon, and wedding reception in this county since 1961. Forty thousand dollars was the number the fire chief needed by midnight if the department was going to put a new pump on the old truck before planting season, when grass fires run faster than any volunteer can drive.

Halloran had bought the head table again that year, the way he did every year, four thousand dollars for eight seats and the right to stand up whenever the mood struck him and remind the room who was really saving them.

I was standing behind the curtain at the side of the little stage, in the one good dress I own, my hands still smelling faintly of the dish soap from the church kitchen where I’d spent the afternoon plating two hundred servings of chicken fried steak that I would not be sitting down to eat. My son Arvid stood next to me holding my grandfather’s guitar case flat across both arms like it was something you carried in a procession.

I had been cooking and cleaning for the Halloran family five nights a week for eight months, ever since the processing plant in Enid where I’d worked fifteen years shut its doors on a Tuesday with no warning and no severance, just a padlock and a notice taped to the glass. Fifteen years of my life, and I walked out of that building with a cardboard box, a coffee mug with my name worn off it, and a ten-year pin I didn’t have the heart to throw away.

Halloran had hired me through a woman at the feed store who knew somebody who knew somebody, and the pay was decent enough that I’d stopped saying no to it, even on nights I’d rather have been home. Tonight the fire department had asked the Halloran family, as its biggest single donor, to help staff the kitchen line, and Halloran had volunteered his own cook without asking me first. That was how I’d ended up spending my Saturday night plating steaks in a hairnet instead of sitting in the audience like every other mother in that county.