The Help Eats in the Kitchen
“Now hold on,” Uncle Dale said. “There’s the can. We all put in the can.”
“The can.” Wanda turned on him. “Dale, last year that can had a hundred and twelve dollars in it. For sixty people. That’s a dollar eighty-seven apiece, I did it on my phone. You ate a dollar eighty-seven of brisket before you sat down.”
A laugh started somewhere and died quick.
“So here’s where your dinner went,” Wanda said. “The woman who bought it was up at five this morning. She carried pans because the caterer was a hand short. She fed the babies and she fed Mama, and when she finally took one minute to sit down next to her own husband, this one,” and she pointed the spoon straight at Alexis, “slid a paper plate at her and told her the help eats in the kitchen.”
Alexis had gone white right up to the hairline.
“And y’all laughed,” Wanda said. “I heard you clear over at the kids’ table.”
She turned, slowly, until she was facing her brother.
“And Greg laughed loudest.”
I have thought a great deal about the next half minute.
Greg was standing in the open floor of the pavilion, halfway between the head table and the kitchen door. His daughter was on one side of him. I was behind him, at the window. Sixty people he had known his whole life were looking at him, and there was no customer’s joke to laugh at.
“Dad,” Alexis said. Her voice shook. “It was a joke. Tell them. You know I was kidding.”
He did not say anything.
“Gregory.”
That was Ruth. She had not gotten up, she can’t easily, but she had turned her whole chair around. Eighty-nine years old in a lavender blouse, with her hands folded on the head of her cane.
“Is that so? What your sister said about the money?”
“Mama, I didn’t…” He stopped. “I didn’t know what it cost.”
“Did you ask?”
It was so quiet I could hear the ice settling in the tea urn.
“No, ma’am,” my husband said.
“Nine years,” Ruth said. “Your daddy would have asked the first year.”
I saw that land on him. I saw it from behind, in his shoulders.
He looked at Alexis. He looked at his mother. Then he turned all the way around and looked at me through that window, and I did not smile at him and I did not look away. I did not help him. I had been helping him for eleven years, and it had brought us to this.
He turned back to his family.
“Wanda’s right,” he said. It came out rough. He cleared his throat and said it again so the back tables could hear. “Every word of it. Karen’s done this whole thing by herself since before some of these kids were born, and I let all of you think it just happened. I let myself think it.”
Nobody moved.
“And I laughed,” he said. “My wife was standing there worn out in an apron and my daughter insulted her and I laughed, because it was easier than saying something. That’s the truth. I’m ashamed of it.”
“Dad.” Alexis was crying now, angry tears. “You’re taking her side? In front of everybody?”
“There aren’t any sides, Lex. There’s what you said, and there’s what I did.”