The Help Eats in the Kitchen
The paper plate came across the table like a card being dealt.
It spun once on the plastic tablecloth and stopped against my hip. An empty plate, the cheap white kind with the fluted edge, off the stack I had carried in from my own car at seven that morning.
“That seat’s taken,” Alexis said. She had her purse on the folding chair next to her father. “The help eats in the kitchen.”
She said it brightly. She said it the way you say a line you have been saving.
And the table laughed.
Not everybody. I want to be fair about that, because I have had a long time to go back over who did what. Greg’s cousin Jeff laughed with his mouth full. His wife Kim laughed and then looked at her lap. Two of the younger ones laughed because the others had. Uncle Dale gave one bark, the way he does at anything said loud enough.
And my husband laughed.
Greg was leaning back in his chair with a sweet tea in his hand and his sunglasses pushed up in his gray hair, and he laughed with his whole chest, easy, the way he laughs at the boat dealership when a customer tells a joke he has heard forty times.
He did not look at me while he did it. He looked at his daughter.
I was still wearing the apron. I think that is what gave her the idea. A black catering apron with a smear of barbecue sauce across the front, over the blue sundress I had bought for that day and nobody had seen yet.
I had been on my feet since five. I had not eaten since a banana in the car.
I picked up the paper plate.
“All right,” I said.
That was all. I did not say it sharp. I have never been a woman who can find the sharp thing in the moment. I find it three days later in the shower.
I turned around and walked the length of that pavilion with sixty of my husband’s relatives on either side of me, and I went through the swinging door into the kitchen.
The pavilion sits on a point of land on Table Rock Lake, about twenty minutes outside Branson, down a county road that turns to gravel for the last half mile. Cedar Hollow, the park board calls it. It is a big open timber shelter with a concrete floor and a stone fireplace at one end and a little block kitchen built onto the back, with a pass-through window and a screen door that slaps.
I knew every inch of it. I had rented it nine Junes in a row.
The kitchen was ten degrees hotter than the pavilion and smelled like hickory smoke and dish soap. Maria was at the steel counter pulling foil off a fresh pan of brisket. Tina, her niece, was filling a tub with rolls. Deb was at the sink with her sleeves pushed up.
All three of them had stopped moving.
The pass-through window was wide open. They had heard every word.
“Mrs. Pruitt,” Maria said.
“Karen,” I said. “I keep telling you.”
“Karen.” She set down the foil. She is a small woman, fifty or close to it, with forearms like a man’s from twenty years of lifting pans, and she looked at me the way you look at somebody who has just been in a fender bender and has not noticed yet that she is shaking. “You want to sit down?”