The Man at the Hired Help Table
She stopped. She breathed in.
“This morning I saw a man digging in the dirt and thought, that is a hard-working man, God bless him. And forty minutes ago I saw the same man with his shirt pressed and his hair combed, and I put him by the kitchen door because I decided he was staff. I made up my mind about him because of his clothes. And I was wrong in both directions.”
She turned her head, and for a moment I thought she would cry. She did not. She held her chin up and looked him square in the eye.
“I was wrong. Not just about the table. I am sorry, Mr. Trombley.”
I will say this for Ms. Vance: she did not make it about herself. She did not say she was having a hard day, though she was. She stood up and took it.
My father looked at her for what felt like a long time.
“Ma’am,” he said. “You came out in the heat to bring a stranger a bottle of water. A lot of people would have just sent the boy.”
“Mr. Trombley…”
“You had a list and a hundred and forty people and you didn’t know me. I’d have done the same.” He paused. “But here’s a thing, if you’ll let an old lineman say it. Next time a man comes to your door in a work shirt, ask his name before you ask his business. You’ll find a lot of them will tell you. And some of them have been up since four so your people can eat.”
“Yes, sir,” said Ms. Vance. She had to say it twice. “Yes, sir. I will.”
“That’s all.”
I thought that would be the end of it. But Mr. Deel had come up beside her while my father talked, still wiping his hands on the rag. He did not take anything from her. He did not raise his voice.
“We’ll talk Monday, Marlene,” he said, so quietly that I only caught it because I was sitting right there.
“Yes, Harold.”
That was all he said about it. I have thought since that it was a kindness, and I think she did too.
She stood a moment longer. Then she laid her clipboard on the empty chair, pushed her headset back, and said to my father, “Mr. Trombley, if the kitchen will let me, I would like to carry your plate out myself.”
“I’d be obliged,” said my father.
Mr. Deel told the kitchen to send our table out first, and nobody argued about the order.
She went through the swinging door and came back with a plate in each hand and a third balanced up her arm, the way the old waitresses do. It was chicken, with green beans and a scoop of mashed potatoes and a roll with the butter already on. She set the first one in front of my father.
“Mr. Trombley.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“It’s hot,” she said. “Be careful.”
There is one more thing, and it is the thing I think about most.
Between the chicken and the cake, with the whole barn buzzing and people coming up to the table in a line to shake my father’s hand, men from the co-op, women from our church, a boy from the grain elevator who had never met him, Dad leaned over to me.