The School Kitchen Job I Took to Stay Insured

The Second Week

That second Monday, Joan moved Amy to the line and put me on the register on a stool. She said Amy needed the experience. Everybody knew it was not true.

All I had to do was punch in the student numbers as the kids came through. I could do it sitting down.

Deb set a sleeve of ginger snaps by the register without a word. Karen hummed “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” at the dishwasher, and I caught myself humming along.

By that Monday afternoon I felt nearly human. I asked Joan if I could go back on the line in the morning. She looked at me over her glasses and said, “One day at a time, hon,” and let me.

So on the second Tuesday, it was tater tot day. The kids love tater tots more than anything in this world except pizza, and the line backs up clear to the gym doors.

What Ron Saw

That Tuesday I put on a blue T-shirt and my white apron over it. I pinned up my auburn hair, shoulder length for twenty years, under the black hairnet.

I remember thinking I should enjoy that hair. The nurse had said it would start to go around day fourteen to twenty-one.

The steel trays came out of the warmer at ten forty-five. Plain tater tots in the pans. The fluorescent lights in that cafeteria are bright enough to show every line on your face.

Joan stood one step down the line from me, in her apron and her hairnet and her glasses. She likes to work the line on tater tot days, she says, because she likes to see the faces.

The kindergartners came and went. Then the third graders came through, holding their orange trays out with both hands, the way you do when you are eight.

Scoop, next. Scoop, next. My right arm ached up into the shoulder, on the same side as the port, and I switched hands and kept going.

Jacob was fourth from the front. He grinned at me and held his tray higher, which meant he wanted extra. I gave it to him, smiling, the first real smile of that week.

Then Joan stopped serving.

I felt her stop before I saw it, the way you feel a cow quit chewing in the barn. Her scoop was in the air over the pan. She was looking past me, down the line.

At the head of the line, just ahead of the third graders, stood a man in a tan contractor’s jacket, holding an orange tray. He was looking down at the tots, and then he looked up at me.

It was Ron.

I learned later that Kim had called him that morning. She was on a double at the nursing home, and Jacob had forgotten his lunch money again. Would Dad drop it at the school on his way through town?

The office had told him lunch accounts were handled in the kitchen. So he walked back through the gym and around the corner, and there I was.

He stood there perfectly still. Kids bunched up behind him like cattle at a gate. He looked at the hairnet. Then the apron. Then the scoop in my hand.

Jacob turned around and saw him and lit up. “Hi, Grandpa!” he hollered, loud enough for the whole cafeteria.

Ron did not answer. I am not sure he heard.

I put tater tots on the next orange tray. My hand did not shake. I was proud of that, and I am a little ashamed of being proud of it.

Joan leaned close to me. “You want me to take your spot, hon?”

“No,” I said. “I’m working.”

Ron stepped up to the steel, the children and their orange trays stopped behind him, until he was standing close with the tater tots steaming between us.

His eyes were wet. In thirty-one years I had seen that once, the day his father died in the hospital in Hays.

He set both hands on the steel rail. A little girl behind him asked if he was cutting, and he said, “No ma’am, sorry,” and did not move his hands.

“Tammy,” he said. “There’s something I haven’t told you.”