The Job in My Mother’s Kitchen
“Nineteen years at a school,” she said. “You’ll go back in the fall. Why do I want to train you for six weeks?”
“I can work Saturdays after school starts,” I said. “All year. And my own mother is in assisted living. I know what a hot meal means in a day like theirs.”
It was the truth. It was not all of it.
Bev looked at me a long while. I could hear the dish machine running on the other side of the wall.
“Can you be here at five-thirty?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“There’s a background check, and a skin test you’ll have to come back and get read. It takes about a week.” She wrote something on the top of my application. “Wear shoes that won’t slip.”
My first morning was a Tuesday, a week and a half later. That made five Sundays.
Dale got up at four-thirty with me and filled my thermos.
“Carry it level,” he said. That is what his father used to tell him about a full bucket, and it is the nearest Dale comes to a blessing.
They gave me a maroon uniform top, an apron, and a hairnet out of a cardboard box by the time clock. I pinned my hair back and put the net over it.
Bev handed me a stack of tray tickets, pale green, one for each resident.
“Thirty-eight people,” she said. “Three meals a day. The ticket tells you the diet and the dislikes. You read every ticket every time.”
My mother’s was the ninth one down.
Dorothea. Table four. Regular. Oatmeal. Skim milk. Prune juice.
My mother grew up on a quarter section north of Dannebrog with four milk cows. She has never drunk skim milk in her life. She calls it blue water. And she would sooner drink from the garden hose than touch prune juice. Somebody had filled that ticket out the day she moved in and nobody had looked at it since.
“Bev,” I said. “Can I change a ticket?”
“If you know something, you tell me and I change it. What’s wrong with it?”
I told her. Whole milk. Orange juice, the small glass. Brown sugar on the oatmeal, not white, and a pat of butter melted in before the sugar goes on, because that was how Dad made it for her every winter morning for forty-nine years.
Bev crossed out two lines and wrote in three.
“Go on, then,” she said. “Table four is by the window.”
I changed the carton on the tray. I put the butter in and watched it go gold, and then the brown sugar. I set the cover on the bowl. Then I picked up the tray, carried it level, and pushed through the swinging door with my hip.
The dining room at Cottonwood Court is a bright room, with a wall of windows facing east.
She sat by the window with her back to me.
Her hair was flat. She has had it washed and set every Friday since the Eisenhower administration, and nobody had set it. Her cardigan hung off her shoulders the way a coat hangs on a chair. She was smaller than she had been in June. Five Sundays smaller.
My own hands had started to shake, so I held the tray tighter.
I came up on her good side, the left.
I set the oatmeal down off the tray in front of her and lifted the cover, and the steam came up.
“Thank you, dear,” she said, to the bowl.
Then she saw my hands.