The Door My Son Pointed Me To
I had figured it up once, on the back of a church bulletin during a long sermon. Fifty weeks a year, because they took one week at Christmas and one in July. Five days a week. Six in the morning until Brittany got home at half past five, later if she stopped at the store. Better than eleven hours a day. Four years of it.
I had never been handed a dollar. I had never asked for one. I bought the diapers when they ran out, because it was easier than sending a text about it and waiting.
I folded my napkin. I folded it in half and then in half again and set it beside my plate. I do not know why that is what my hands decided to do, except that my mother always said you leave a table the way you found it.
“Perfect,” I said.
Nathan looked up with the roll halfway to his mouth.
I kissed Molly on top of her head and worked her fingers out of my sleeve one at a time. She let me, but she watched me do it. I kissed Jack, who tasted like gravy. I went around the table to Ava and she caught hold of my wrist.
“Grandma, where are you going?”
“Home, sweet pea. I’ll see you soon.”
“You didn’t have pie.”
“You have my piece.”
“Mom,” Nathan said. “Sit down. Don’t be dramatic.”
“I’m not being dramatic, honey. You showed me where it was.” I took my purse off the back of the chair. “The roaster can come home whenever. No hurry.”
“Gail, come on,” Brittany said, in the voice a person uses on a dog that is headed for the road.
I went down the short hall and opened the white door and closed it behind me, not hard. The wind was coming steady out of the northwest, the way it does all fall in Buffalo County, and it took my church skirt and wrapped it around my knees.
I sat in my car in their driveway long enough to get my hands quiet. That took about a minute. Then I drove home.
I should tell you about the job, because that is the part nobody at that table remembered.
For nineteen years I worked in the kitchen at Meadowlark Elementary. I started when Nathan was a fourth grader there, because the hours matched his, and I stayed because I loved it. I knew which children ate breakfast at home and which ones did not. I knew who would take a second roll if I looked the other way, and I looked the other way a great deal. One year I had a little boy who would only eat his vegetables if I told him the green beans came out of my own garden, so for one whole school year they did.
I had a retirement building. I had a hook on the wall with my apron on it. I had Kim, the kitchen manager, who had been my friend since before either one of us needed reading glasses.
Then Ray died. It was February, a heart attack in the machine shed, and he was fifty-nine years old. Nine months after that, Brittany’s leave ran out with Jack, and the woman who had been keeping Ava in her home moved to Lincoln to be near her own grandchildren. The quote from the center out by the hospital came in at a number that made Brittany cry at my table.