The Lunch Lady at the Engagement Dinner
“Mom, can I ask you a favor before we go in?”
My son caught my elbow in the little vestibule of the steakhouse, between the two sets of glass doors, where the wind off the parking lot still found your ankles. It was the second Saturday in February. I had snow on my good shoes and my hair was doing what short hair does under a stocking cap.
Dave had dropped me at the door and gone to find a spot for the truck. The lot was full of Tahoes and Lexuses, and he drives a 2011 Silverado with a toolbox in the bed, so he was going to be a while.
“Of course, honey,” I said. “What is it?”
Nick looked over his shoulder at the hostess stand. He had on a blue dress shirt I had never seen, and a haircut that cost more than mine. He is twenty-seven years old and a CPA at a firm in Des Moines, and in that moment he looked about nine.
“When Allison’s dad asks what you do,” he said, “could you just say food service management?”
I did not understand him at first. I thought he was telling me a joke I had missed the front half of.
“Food service management,” I said.
“It’s not even a lie. You manage the kitchen. You do the ordering, you do the schedule.”
He was talking fast, the way he did when he was little and had broken something. “It’s just, Tom is a regional manager for the seed company, and they’re paying twelve hundred dollars for the room tonight, and Linda planned all of it. I just want it to go well. That’s all. I want it to go well.”
Twelve hundred dollars. He said it the way you would say the name of a church.
The vestibule
I want to be honest about what went through me, standing there between those doors. It was not anger. Anger would have been easier.
It was the feeling of reaching for a step in the dark and finding it is not there. I have been the head cook at Hollis Elementary for twenty-six years. I started the fall Nick turned one. I have worn a hairnet more days of my life than I have worn earrings.
I make seventeen dollars and forty cents an hour, a hundred and eighty days a year, and I am in the building at six-fifteen every one of them. Breakfast goes out at seven-thirty. Lunch starts at ten-fifty with the kindergartners and does not stop until the sixth grade comes through at twelve-forty.
It is not a glamorous job. I have never once said it was. But I have never once been ashamed of it either, and until that vestibule I did not know anybody in my family was.