The Lunch Lady at the Engagement Dinner

The question

Tom asked it while he was cutting his steak. He did not even look up at first. It was the most ordinary question in the world.

“And Brenda, what do you do?”

Nick’s knife stopped on his plate. I heard it stop.

Under the table, his shoe found the side of mine and pressed. Not hard. Just enough to remind me.

I set my fork down. I folded my hands on the white tablecloth, one over the other, the way I fold them in the front pew. I thought about the vestibule, and the word “management,” and the little boy in the second-grade line who used to wave at me with his whole arm.

Then I answered him.

“I’m the head cook at Hollis Elementary,” I said. “I’ve been there twenty-six years.”

Tom looked up.

“I feed three hundred and forty children a day,” I said. “And I know every one of them by name.”

Nobody said anything.

Linda’s wine glass was halfway to her mouth and it stayed there. Allison was very still. The gas fire ticked in the corner.

Under the table, Dave put his hand on my knee. He did not say a word. He did not need to. His hand was warm and heavy and it stayed there, and I have been married to that man for twenty-nine years, and that was the proudest he has ever been of me in public.

I did not look at Nick. I did not have to. I could feel him beside me, gone white, looking down at his baked potato like it had something written on it.

Tom Reeves set his fork down on the tablecloth. He did it carefully, the tines resting on the edge of his plate. The corner of his mouth moved, slowly.

“Three hundred and forty,” he said.

“Give or take. The bus from Garnet Corners brings us thirty more since the consolidation. Some days it’s three fifty-two.”

“How many of them,” he said, “would you know in the dark?”

In the dark

I thought about it. I wanted to give him a true answer, because he had asked a true question.

“All of them,” I said. “By their lunch numbers.”

He tipped his head.

“Every child has a four-digit number,” I explained. “They punch it in on a keypad at the end of the line, or they say it to whoever’s on the register.”

“I run the register most days, because I like to see their faces. So if you turned out the lights and had them say their numbers to me one at a time, I could tell you who they were.”

“Go on,” Tom said.

“Forty-one sixteen is Kaylee Brandt. Second grade. She will not eat anything that touches anything else, so she gets her corn in a separate cup.”

I did not have to think. It came up out of me the way the Lord’s Prayer does.

“Thirty-eight oh two is Mason Dvorak. Fourth grade. He says his number like it’s a secret code, every day, very serious.”

“Fifty-two twenty is the littlest Hernandez boy, and his number is the only English he had when he came to us in September. Now he tells me about his dog.”

I stopped. I had not meant to say that much. My face was hot.

Linda set her glass down. Allison had both hands over her mouth.

Tom Reeves looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked down at his own hands on the tablecloth, the rough ones, and he spoke more quietly than he had all night.