The School Kitchen Job I Took to Stay Insured

Why I Did Not Argue

People have asked me since, mostly women, why I did not just sit Ron down and have it out with him. I understand the question. I have asked it of myself.

The plain answer is that I did not have time to lose an argument. Once Ron signs a paper, he has already argued it out with himself, alone in the shop.

And I had two weeks before the port started earning its keep. I could spend those two weeks crying at him across the table, or I could spend them fixing it.

There was another reason, and I am less proud of it. I did not want to beg my own husband for my own life.

If he could circle a number in pencil and cross me out, then I would find somebody else who wanted me on the books.

Our son Cole was no help that week, or so I thought. Cole is twenty-four and has worked on his dad’s framing crew since tech school in Beloit.

I brought it up to him on Saturday when he came by to borrow the post driver. I said, “Did your dad tell you what he did with my insurance?”

Cole looked at the ground. He looked at the post driver. He said, “Mom, you should talk to Dad,” and then he found something that needed doing in the shop and stayed out there until dark.

I thought he had taken his father’s side. I went in the house and cried at the sink where nobody could see, and then I washed my face and fed the chickens.

The Posting on the Door

Our town has twenty-two hundred people, one grocery store, two churches that share a Vacation Bible School, and a school district that runs kindergarten through twelfth grade in two buildings across the street from each other.

That Sunday the church bulletin carried a line the school had sent over that week. Food service position open, grade school kitchen, apply at the district office.

My friend Sue had done that job for years before her knees gave out. Six and a half hours a day, on your feet the whole time.

Sue had told me once at a funeral dinner that the district gave full insurance to anybody working thirty hours a week. That was why she had stayed so long.

Monday morning I put on my good slacks and drove to the district office. The secretary, a girl I had taught in Sunday school, handed me an application and asked me nothing.

The pay was thirteen dollars and fifty cents an hour. For work history I wrote thirty years of farm books and four years at the elevator scale house.

The secretary looked it over and said the kitchen manager would want to meet me. She said Joan was usually free after the lunch rush, around one thirty.