The Job in My Mother’s Kitchen
On my fourth day I cut his meat in the kitchen before I carried it out. Bite size, laid back in the shape of the chop so it did not look like a child’s plate. I set it down and said nothing about it.
He looked at that plate a good while.
“Much obliged,” he said.
He ate every bite. Bev changed his ticket that afternoon. Cut meat in kitchen. Do not mention.
She started cleaning her plate. Whole milk, eggs over medium, a small dish of the peach crisp on Wednesdays. The first of August they weighed her. She had four of the nine pounds back.
Bev showed me the number in the binder. She did not say anything. She just held it open with her thumb.
A letter came from the ombudsman’s office that same week. My file was open. A visit was being scheduled.
What changed things was ice cream.
The second Sunday in August, Cottonwood Court held its family social. Folding tables on the patio, families invited from two to four, and a flyer by the time clock asking for kitchen help.
I signed up. It was that or sit home in St. Paul.
So I stood behind a folding table in my maroon top and my hairnet in the August heat and scooped ice cream for two hours. And when my mother came through the line on her walker, I gave her one scoop of strawberry in a dish, and I said, “There you are, Mom,” and she said, “Thank you, dear,” and winked at me, and went and sat at a table by herself.
By herself. With Mr. Wendell, in truth, because she had waved him over. Two old people with no visitors, at a family social, and one of them with her daughter standing fifteen feet away holding a scoop.
Lois’s daughter was watching.
Her name was Kim. She came every day at eleven, a woman about my age who drove a mail route out of Cairo. She came up to my table with two empty dishes.
“Did I hear you call Dorothea Mom?”
“Yes.”
“Then what in the world are you doing back here? Bev can spare you ten minutes. Go sit with her.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
I told her. I kept it short and I kept my voice down, and I did not call my brother a single name. I said there was a list, and I was off it, and I worked here so that I could see her eat.
Kim looked at my mother, then at me.
“You’ve been cutting up that old man’s meat and fixing my mother’s coffee since July, and you can’t sit down in a chair next to your own mother for a dish of ice cream.”
“I gave my word I wouldn’t. Not on the clock.”
“And off the clock?”
“Off the clock I’m a visitor. I’m not on the list.”
“Well,” she said. “I am on the list. And I have a mouth.”
I asked her not to make trouble. I meant it.
“Honey, I’m not going to make trouble,” Kim said. “I’m going to make an appointment.”
She made it for Monday morning at nine. She brought Jeff with her, the son of the man in 109, a farmer from out by Wood River. And Bev walked down the hall from the kitchen and went in with them. She took the binder.
I was not in that room. Bev told me afterward what she said.