The Door My Son Pointed Me To
“I can be there at half past five.”
“A quarter to six is plenty. Wear your good shoes. That floor has not gotten any softer.”
I set my alarm for a quarter to five, which was fifteen minutes later than I had set it for four years. Then I went to bed, and I slept better than I had in months. I am a little ashamed of that, and a little not.
The kitchen at Meadowlark smelled exactly the way I remembered. Yeast and bleach water and the warm metal smell of the big ovens coming up to temperature. Kim had the lights on and the radio low, tuned to the farm report out of the station in town.
My apron was on the hook. It had my name inside the collar in laundry marker, faded to gray. Somebody had washed it. Somebody had been washing it, I think, every so often for four years.
Kim handed me a hairnet and did not make a speech. “Breakfast burritos,” she said. “Then rolls for lunch. You remember how the proofer sticks.”
“You have to lift it and pull.”
“Lift it and pull,” she said, and that was the whole of my welcome home, and it was plenty.
At six o’clock, I was cracking eggs into a steel bowl the size of a washtub. At four minutes past six, my phone buzzed in my apron pocket.
I knew who it was without looking. It buzzed again at seven minutes past. Then a text, and another one. When I had the eggs on the flat top I took the phone out and read them standing by the walk-in cooler.
“Where are you?”
“Mom.”
“Mom the kids are up. I have to open the parts counter at 6:30.”
Then Brittany. “Gail are you okay? Did something happen? Nathan has to leave.”
Then, “Hello??”
Then the calls started again. By a quarter to seven I had eleven of them.
I wiped my hands and sent one message to both of them.
“I am fine. I used the door. I’m at work. The children are yours this morning.”
He called before I could get the phone back in my pocket. I watched his name on the screen until it quit. Then I turned the phone off, put it in my old locker, and went to see about the rolls.
The first graders eat at twenty past eleven. Jack came around the corner in the middle of the line with his shirt on backward, looked up at the serving window, and stopped so short the boy behind him ran into his back.
“Grandma!”
“Hello, mister.”
“You’re the lunch lady!” He turned around to the whole line. “That’s my grandma. She’s the lunch lady. She made this.”
He carried his tray to his table like a boy who had been handed the keys to the place.
That was Jack. Six years old does not ask why. Six years old thinks it is Christmas.
The third graders eat at ten till noon. Ava came in near the front of her class, behind her teacher. She saw me from all the way across the room. She did not call out. She came down the line slowly, and when she got to my window she looked at my hairnet and my apron and my plastic gloves, and then at my face.