The Apron at the Pantry Table
She looked down at the box. Then she looked back up at me.
“Mama,” she said. “Are we one of the families?”
I knew what she meant. Kaylee had told her about the plant. Maisie had heard me tell Owen there was no money for the book fair.
“Not this week, baby,” I said. My voice did not do what I wanted it to. “We’re the ones helping this week.”
She thought about that and nodded. Then she went back to the table, and I heard the crayons start up again.
I did not look in the shoebox. I should have. But I was so tired that week, and Josh had an interview Monday in Dubuque, and I just set it by the back door with my apron.
Saturday morning I asked Pastor Mike before I asked Dena, so I would not put her on the spot.
“Pictures from a five-year-old?” he said, smiling. “Amber, I’d put one in every box we ever packed if I could.”
So I carried the shoebox down the stairs and set it in the stockroom on the turkey shelf, on top of a case of cranberry sauce. Rick and I tucked one drawing into each box as it went out.
It was turkey Saturday, and Dena was right. It was worse. The Fareway had donated forty frozen turkeys, a farm family out east gave forty more, and the co-op paid for the rest. The line went up the stairs and out the side door by a quarter to eight.
I had the second table again. Leon was running turkeys out from the chest freezers in the stockroom, two at a time in a laundry basket, because Dena would not let him carry more.
Around eleven-thirty he came through my line himself, when he was done hauling. He had his seed cap pushed back on his head.
Leon has farmed 320 acres all his life. His wife’s medical bills ate their savings before she passed, and for four years now he has volunteered at the pantry every Saturday morning and taken a box home at the end.
He says those are both the same thing. I have come to believe him.
“Single box,” he said. “I’m just me.”
“I know, Leon. Here you go.”
I lifted the box across to him. It was a heavy one, with the turkey on top, and he took it in both arms the way a man who has lifted feed sacks for sixty years takes a box.
That was when I felt it. I looked past Leon’s shoulder.
Dena had stopped dead in the stockroom doorway with her clipboard against her chest. She was not looking at the line or her sheet. She was looking straight at me.
I do not know how long she stood there. Long enough that Leon turned his head to see what I was looking at.
Then she turned around and went back into the stockroom.
I kept working. Number seventy-eight, a young mother with twins in a double stroller. Number seventy-nine, Kevin Pruett from the paint line, who would not meet my eyes until I asked about his mother’s hip.
Dena did not come back out.
Leon set his own box down on the end of my table, very carefully, and walked back there himself. He took off his cap as he went in, the way old men do when they walk into a room where something serious is happening.