The Job in My Mother’s Kitchen

She knows these hands. She taught them to roll pie crust on an oilcloth table when they could barely reach it. There is a white scar across the left thumb from the summer I was nine and she taught me to peel potatoes.

Her spoon stopped halfway.

I stood there in my hairnet with her milk still on the tray, and I made myself smile.

And my mother turned in her chair and looked up.

“Susan Marie?” she said.

“Good morning, Mom.”

Her chin started to go. She put the spoon down so it would not rattle.

“They said you weren’t able to come anymore.”

“I know they did.”

“I thought.” She stopped. She is a Nebraska farm woman and she does not cry in a dining room. She pressed her lips together until they were white. “I thought maybe you’d gotten tired of it. All the driving. I wouldn’t have blamed you.”

I could not sit down. An aide does not sit. So I bent at the waist with my hand on the back of her chair, close to her good ear, the way I would have bent for anybody who could not hear me.

“I never missed one Sunday, Mom. Not one. I came every week and stood at that front desk. There was a mix-up with a paper, and they couldn’t let me past.”

“What paper?”

“I’ll tell you all of it. Not this minute. I’ve got twenty-nine more breakfasts to carry.”

She looked at the hairnet. And then, Lord love her, she started to laugh, a little dry laugh that shook her shoulders.

“So you hired on,” she said.

“It was the only door they had open.”

She reached into the pocket of her cardigan then and brought out some folded papers, soft at the creases. She put them in my apron pocket herself, and patted the pocket flat.

“I saved you these,” she said. “For when you came back.”

I did not unfold them until I was in the kitchen again.

They were the bulletins from the Sunday chapel service they hold in the activity room. Five of them. She had written the date at the top of each one in her schoolteacher hand, and on the second one, beside the hymn numbers, she had written, “Sue would like this one.”

I had to go stand in the walk-in cooler for a minute.

Bev found me there. She had seen table four through the pass window. She shut the cooler door behind her.

“That’s your mother,” she said.

“Yes ma’am.”

“You didn’t put that on your application.”

“It didn’t ask. I should have told you Monday, and I didn’t, because I was afraid you’d say no.” I held out the bulletins so she could see what they were. “My brother is her health care agent. I asked the office about a charge on her bill, and he told them my visits agitate her and had me taken off the visitor list. I’ve been turned away at your front door four Sundays. I’m not on that list today. You can let me go this minute and I won’t hold it against you.”

Bev looked at the bulletins. Then she looked at me.

“Dorothea,” she said. “Table four. Sends back half her plate since the middle of June. She’s lost nine pounds since April. I flagged it to nursing.” She nodded toward the dining room. “She just ate that whole bowl. I watched her do it.”

I could not say anything.