The Head Table Moved to the Kitchen

“You always gave me two,” he said.

Then he went back to his pans.

I had held together through the place card. I had held together walking the length of that hall with my plate. Two pats of butter very nearly finished me. I had to look at the radio for a minute.

Every school cook I know has a list of children she slips a little extra. You are not supposed to. You do it anyway, and you assume they do not notice. I had assumed that for twenty-six years.

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Dale came in about ten minutes later. He let the door swing shut and stood there with the folder against his apron, and for a moment he did not come any closer.

“Carla,” he said. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Sit down, Dale. You’re making me nervous.”

He did not sit. He set the folder on the steel between the chafing pans and opened it, and turned it around so I could read it. He is an honest man and it was an honest bill. Supper for 180 at twenty-nine dollars a plate. The bar. The linens and china and glassware. The crew. The tax. The $2,000 deposit taken off the top. The balance at the bottom in his square handwriting.

$11,400.00.

“What happened with the card?” I asked.

“I don’t know for sure. It says declined, it doesn’t say why. Contract has the balance due before we serve. I ran it Friday and figured it was a glitch. Ran it again today at four.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I had three hundred pounds of meat done and people coming in the door. I wasn’t going to not feed them.”

“No,” I said. “You wouldn’t.”

“I meant to tell her quiet. I didn’t know that whole table was sitting there like a church.”

He looked at the place card standing by my plate.

“She put you out,” he said. It was not a question.

“It’s my son’s wedding, Dale. I’m not going to talk about her in your kitchen. Hand me my purse, it’s on the hook.”

I should tell you what I had.

I had $13,000 in a savings account at the credit union. It had taken me nine years to put it there. A school cook in a small Iowa district does not make what people think, and after Ron died I had the house and the truck and one income, and I put back what I could: fifty dollars some months, a hundred and fifty in a good one, my tax refund every spring.

It was for the roof. The shingles on my house were twenty-four years old and curling like potato chips. I had a bucket in the upstairs hall and another in the back bedroom. I had a written estimate from a roofer in town for $12,600, and I had planned to call him the Monday after the wedding.

I got out my checkbook.

“Here is how it has to go,” I said. “This account has about six hundred dollars in it. The money is in my savings. The credit union opens at nine Monday and I will be standing on the mat. You hold this until Monday noon.”

“I’d hold it till Christmas,” Dale said.

“You have nine people to pay tonight.”

“I’ll pay them. That’s my worry, not yours.” His voice had gone rough. “You fed my boys for seven years apiece. You think I don’t know who it was sent Travis home with a sack on Fridays that winter I was laid up?”