The Job in My Mother’s Kitchen
“That list sits at the front desk,” Bev said. “It says who signs the visitor book. I didn’t hire a visitor. I hired an aide who showed up at five-thirty and caught a wrong ticket in her first hour.” She folded her arms. “Now. I will not lie for you. If Mr. Halloran asks me who you are, I’ll tell him, and so will you.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“You don’t sit down at her table on my clock. You don’t give her one thing you wouldn’t give anybody else in that room. And when you punch out, you go out the back door like the rest of us, and you don’t go down that east hall. That’s a visit.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“How does she like her eggs?”
“Over medium. Broken yolk makes her sad.”
For the first time, Bev nearly smiled.
“Well,” she said. “That’s more than we knew.”
I told my mother the truth that Thursday, when I brought her lunch tray to her room because she had a cold.
Bringing a tray into a room is the job. I set it down and opened her milk. I did not sit.
“What paper?” she said. She had been holding the question three days.
I had thought hard about how to say it. A mother of eighty-six does not need her children handed to her as enemies.
“I saw a charge on your bill I didn’t understand, and I asked about it at the office,” I said. “It embarrassed Keith. He thought I was saying he’d done wrong by you. He wrote the home that my visits were upsetting you, and asked them to hold them until things settled down.”
“Upsetting me,” my mother said. “Keith wrote that.”
“He did. I don’t believe he thought about what it would do. I think he was sore at me, and he wrote it fast, and then he didn’t know how to take it back.”
She was quiet a long time. She turned her milk carton a quarter turn on the tray.
“He was that way at ten,” she said finally. “Never a liar. He just couldn’t stand to walk in and say he’d done a thing wrong.” She looked at me. “Is he stealing from me, Susan?”
“No. I don’t think that for a minute. I think nobody’s looking, that’s all.”
She nodded slowly.
“Well,” she said. “Don’t you go to war with him over me. I’ve got two children and I mean to keep both.”
“I’m not at war. I’m just carrying trays.”
“See that you carry them well, then,” my mother said, and picked up her spoon.
So I carried them well. It was the only thing I had any say over.
I learned thirty-eight people in three weeks.
I learned that Lois, the little woman in the pink sweatshirt at Mom’s table, wanted her coffee half regular and half decaf and would know if you cheated.
And I learned Mr. Wendell.
He was ninety-three, the tall man with the enormous hands. He had put in forty-one years on the Union Pacific, most of it as a brakeman out of the Grand Island yard, and his hands had finally quit on him. He could lift a fork. He could not work a knife.
His ticket said regular. So every noon somebody set a pork chop or a slice of roast in front of him whole, and he sat with those big hands in his lap and ate his potatoes and his roll and left the meat, and the plate went back, and nobody wrote down why. His wife was gone and they had never had children, and he was not a man who would ask a girl to cut up his dinner.