The Apron at the Pantry Table
Josh came home at 4:30 in the afternoon, which he never did. He sat in the truck in the driveway a long time. I watched him from the kitchen window with a dish towel in my hands, and I knew before he opened the door.
“Well,” he said when he came in. “That’s that.”
He did not cry and he did not throw anything. Josh is not built that way. He washed his hands at the kitchen sink like he had just come off a shift, then he sat down at the table and asked me for the checkbook.
We have three kids. Kaylee is eleven, Owen is eight and Maisie is five. I work part-time at the Casey’s, mornings, twenty-four hours a week at fourteen dollars an hour. I make the breakfast pizza and know what every man in town takes in his coffee.
That is not enough to feed five people. We sat at the table with a legal pad and wrote it all out: rent, the electric, the truck payment, the propane. After everything that had to be paid that week, we had sixty-one dollars in checking.
The unemployment would come, but not for a couple of weeks. We had a pound of hamburger in the freezer, half a bag of frozen peas and two loaves of bread.
“The church does the pantry Saturdays,” Josh said. “Dena runs it.”
“I know who runs it.”
“Then go,” he said. “That’s what it’s for. I’d go myself, but I’ve got the job fair in Cedar Rapids, and I’m not missing it.”
So that was the plan. Josh would take the truck forty miles to stand in a gymnasium with three hundred other people. I would walk the six blocks to the church and bring home a box of groceries from my own cousin.
It never once crossed my mind that she would say no.
The kids were at the kitchen table when I came in with my empty bag. Kaylee looked at the bag and then at my face, and she did not ask. She is eleven and she notices everything.
Maisie asked.
“Where’s the food, Mama?”
“Not today, baby,” I said. “Mama’s going to make pancakes.”
I made pancakes for supper that night. The next night I made the hamburger into goulash with a box of macaroni and a can of tomatoes from the back of the cupboard, and I stretched it with the peas.
The kids ate every bite. I ate the scrapings from the pan standing up at the stove, and I told them I had eaten at work.
Monday morning, Kim, my manager at the Casey’s, found me wrapping up the last two slices of breakfast pizza at ten-thirty. We are supposed to throw out what does not sell by eleven. I had never once taken any home.
She watched me for a second.
“Take the whole tray, Amber,” she said. “I didn’t see it.”
I took the whole tray. The kids ate breakfast pizza for supper, and Owen said it was the best supper we had ever had, which tells you what kind of boy he is.
I need to say this part plain, because I have thought about it a hundred times since. I could have gone over Dena’s head. There was no rule.