The Help Eats in the Kitchen
“I’d like you to pack up,” I said.
Nobody moved.
“You’re paid in full,” I said. “The check cleared Tuesday, I looked. And this is on top of it.” I had an envelope in my dress pocket with three hundred dollars cash in it, which I had meant to hand her at four o’clock with a hug. I put it on top of the apron. “You’re done for the day. All three of you.”
“Karen.” Maria came around the counter. She kept her voice down, on account of the window. “There is forty people out there who did not eat yet.”
“I know it.”
“What do I do with four pans of brisket?”
“Take it home,” I said. “Take all of it home. Feed your families. Tina, you’ve got those boys. Deb, you told me your mother’s on a fixed income. Take the cobbler. I bought it, and I am telling you whose it is.”
Tina’s eyes were very wide.
“I am not angry at you,” I said. “I have never had one minute’s trouble with you in six years. You’ll have my business again, whatever I end up needing a caterer for. But I am not going to stand here and pay to serve supper to people who think I’m the staff.”
It was quiet.
Then Deb, who had hardly said ten words to me all day, turned off the faucet.
“My church does a pantry supper Sunday nights,” she said. “Thirty, forty people. Mostly it’s spaghetti.”
“Then Sunday it’s brisket,” I said.
Maria let out a long breath through her nose. She looked through the window at the head table, at the back of my husband’s head, at the girl beside him tilting her phone to take a picture of her own plate.
“Okay,” she said. “Tina, get the lids.”
They were fast. I had forgotten how fast a good crew can break down a job.
Lids on the pans, pans into the hot boxes, hot boxes out the screen door to the van, which was backed up to the kitchen on the side away from the lake where nobody could see. Deb carried the cobblers two at a time. Tina went out front with a bus tub, smiling, saying “excuse me, just freshening up,” and came back with the half pan off the line and the bean crock and the serving spoons.
Nobody stopped her. Nobody stops a woman in an apron carrying a tub. That is the whole point of what my stepdaughter had said.
I told them to leave the tea urns and the lemonade and every bit of the paper goods. Those were mine anyhow, and I am not a woman who would see a child go thirsty in June.
At the van, Maria shut the back doors and turned around.
“Eighteen years I am doing this,” she said. “People say worse than that to me. To my face. I smile, I take the check.”
“I know you do.”
“Nobody ever sent me home with the food.” She took my hand in both of hers. Her palms were rough and warm. “You want to come with us? I mean it. You should not be here by yourself with them.”
That nearly undid me. Not the plate, not the laugh. That.
“No,” I said. “I rented this place till six. I believe I’ll stay.”
The van went up the gravel slow, so as not to raise dust. I watched it go around the cedars.