The Help Eats in the Kitchen
I did want to sit down. It hit me all at once how badly.
Deb dragged a metal stool over from beside the ice machine and wiped the seat with her towel. Tina took the paper plate out of my hand without a word, and when she gave it back it had brisket on it, the bark end, and beans, and a roll split and buttered.
“No slaw,” Tina said. “You said this morning you can’t stand slaw.”
I had said that. At seven-fifteen, unloading the van, as a thing to say. And she had kept it.
I sat on the stool in my good dress and my dirty apron and I ate with the caterers.
Nobody talked for a minute. Out in the pavilion the noise had come back up, forks and voices and some child shrieking down by the water. Through the window I could see the back of my husband’s head.
He had not turned around.
“My nephew was supposed to be here,” Maria said finally. She said it like an apology. “If he had come, you would not have been carrying pans. You would not have had the apron on. I am sorry for that.”
“That isn’t why,” I said.
And it wasn’t. The apron only gave her the words. The idea was eleven years old.
I married Greg Pruitt when I was thirty-five and his daughter was thirteen.
I did not break up anybody’s home. I want that understood, because it gets assumed. Greg’s first wife had been gone four years by the time he walked into the dental office where I work the front desk and asked could we squeeze him in for a cracked molar. Sherry had moved to Tulsa with a man who sold insurance. She called on birthdays, mostly.
So I came into a house with a girl in it who had been left, and I knew better than to try to be her mother. I never asked her to call me anything. I just did the things.
I drove her to volleyball. I sat through the band concerts. I learned how she liked her eggs and I hemmed her prom dress on my lunch hour, in the break room, with a patient’s chart for a pressing cloth. When she was nineteen and her transmission went out I put eleven hundred dollars on my own card and never brought it up.
She thanked Greg for the transmission. I was standing right there.
That was the shape of it. Nothing you could put your finger on and hold up to the light. She was never rude enough to be corrected. She just spoke to me the way you speak to a woman behind a counter. Pleasant. Brief. Already looking past me.
“Karen can get it.” I heard that for eleven years. “Ask Karen, she’ll know where it is.” “Karen, we’re out of ice.”
And Greg, who is not a mean man, who has never once raised his voice to me, would say, “She doesn’t mean anything by it.”
I believed that for a long time. It is a restful thing to believe.
The reunion was the same story, only bigger.
Greg’s mother, Ruth, ran it for thirty years, and then his sister Wanda ran it, and then the summer Wanda’s husband had his bypass there was nobody to run it. I remember the phone call. Greg stood in our kitchen saying, “Well, I guess we just skip a year,” and I saw his mother’s face in my mind, eighty years old then and counting her summers.