Nine Grandparents and a Four Dollar Lunch
Cindy had put a visitor ticket on my cardigan and said, “I didn’t see a thing.” Seven of us sat down at the long tables among the second graders as if it were the most ordinary day in the world, and ate corn dogs.
Austin came down the line. He slid his tray along the steel rail with both hands. Corn dog. Tater tots. A cup of applesauce. A carton of milk.
Mrs. Whitlock ran his card through the reader.
It gave one long beep.
She looked up, then, straight at his face. She just smiled at him, shaky and wide and wet, and she put a second applesauce on his tray, which was against the rules, and I would have stood in front of a firing squad before I let anyone take it back.
“There you go, hon,” she said.
“Thank you, Mrs. Whitlock.”
“You’re so welcome.”
Behind him in the line, tray against her chest, stood Candace Aldridge.
I held my breath. Wilma was across the room, her whole body leaning toward that line.
Candace slid her tray along the rail. Corn dog. Tots. Applesauce.
The register gave one long beep.
The girl stood looking at Mrs. Whitlock. “Go on, sweet pea,” Mrs. Whitlock said, in a perfectly ordinary voice.
Candace carried her tray to the end of the table and sat down next to Austin. He scooted over to make room. Neither of them said a word, and she ate every bite of that corn dog, and then the tots.
Across the room, Wilma Aldridge picked up her fork and started on her own lunch.
The Orrin school board meets on the second Tuesday of every month in a room at the administration building that holds about forty folding chairs and a long table with five microphones. Most nights there are six people in the audience and two of them are asleep. That Tuesday there were fourteen.
Nine of us sat in the front row, as promised. Lloyd wore his bus-driver jacket. Jon sat in the back with his cap on his knee. Austin was not there. Lynn had traded her shift at the care home to stay home with him, and when I read her my paper at the kitchen table on Monday night, she listened to the whole thing and said, “Say it. Just do not bring him.” I had never meant to.
The board president is Forrest Rowland. He is seventy, he farms wheat and milo west of town, and he has been on that board twenty-six years. He is a big, slow-talking man with a face like a weathered fence post. He looked at the front row as he sat down, and his hands went still on the gavel.
“Well,” he said. “We have company.”
The old people in the front row sat with their hands folded and said nothing through the bleacher bids and the bus route, which is a more frightening thing to do to a school board than you would imagine.
At 7:42 Forrest said, “We have a request to address the board, from Mrs. Donna Ruppert. Mrs. Ruppert, you have five minutes.”
I stood up. I had a single sheet of paper and, folded under it, the district’s June business report, which Cindy had handed me across her counter on Monday afternoon with the remark that it was public record. I did not go to the lectern. I walked to the long table and set the paper down in front of Forrest Rowland, and then I went back and stood where I could see his face.