The School Kitchen Job I Took to Stay Insured

The Third Graders

I went back to work in a soft scarf Kim bought me, under my hairnet. The kids noticed. Kids notice everything, and they are not polite about it.

“Mrs. Albrecht, where’s your hair?” a little boy asked me on the first day, with his tray out.

“The medicine took it,” I said. “It’ll come back.”

“Okay,” he said, and held his tray higher for extra corn.

That was the whole conversation. Children take a thing straight and move on. I wished the grownups in my life could have done half as well.

Jacob, it turned out, told his class. I did not know it until a Friday in late October, when his teacher came into the kitchen after lunch carrying a big sheet of orange construction paper folded in half.

She was a young teacher, in her second year, and she was nervous. She said the class had asked if they could make something for Jacob’s grandma, and she had said yes, and here it was.

On the front, in green marker, it said Get Well Mrs. Albrecht. Under it somebody had drawn a lunch tray with tater tots on it, every single tot colored in yellow, maybe forty of them.

Inside, every child in the class had signed it. Twenty-two names, some printed, some in cursive just learned and leaning over. A few had written notes.

One said, You give the most tots. One said, I will eat my green beans for you. One said, My grandpa had cancer and he is fine now and he says hi.

And at the bottom, in the biggest letters, in pencil, Jacob had written, Grandma I am not scared of your head.

I sat down on the stool by the dish window and held that card and cried like I had not cried since the day of the biopsy. Karen stopped humming. Joan put her hand on my back and kept it there and did not say anything at all.

That card is on our refrigerator to this day. The tape has been replaced four times. Ron replaced it the last time, and squared it up with a tape measure, because that is the kind of man he is.

Ron in the Kitchen

Ron came to the school once more that fall, and not by accident. The latch on the walk-in cooler had been sticking since August. Joan had put in a work order and the district had not gotten to it.

I mentioned it at supper one night, just in passing. The next Saturday morning Ron drove into town with his toolbox and a new latch and hinge set from the hardware in Concordia, and he called Joan to let him in.

He spent three hours on that cooler door. He reset the hinges, replaced the latch and adjusted the gasket. Joan watched him the whole time with her arms folded.

When he was done, he swung the door shut and it latched with a sound like a bank vault. Joan opened it and shut it three times.

“Well, Ron Albrecht,” she said. “I guess you’re good for something.”

He took it. He took it with his head down and his hat in his hand. Joan never warmed up to him all the way, not that whole year, and he never once complained about it. He understood why.

Deb was harder. When he held the gym door for her at the Christmas program, she walked through the other one. Ron said he had it coming.

That was the consequence. Not a fight, not a scene. Just a kitchen full of women in hairnets who knew exactly what he had done, in a town of twenty-two hundred.

And a truck he was proud of, gone down the section road to Leroy Schmidt’s place, where he saw it every time he drove by.