Forty Years Behind the Lunch Line

The sacks on Friday

Brett Ruehl was seven when I wrote “Hungry Mondays” on his card. It was the fall of 1996.

He was a small boy with a cowlick and a way of eating like somebody might take the plate. His mother worked nights at a processing plant forty minutes away. His father had left after the plant cut hours, and his grandmother, who was supposed to be watching him on weekends, had a bad heart and did not cook.

I noticed the Monday thing before I understood it. Every Monday morning he went through my line twice. Once at breakfast, once again when I thought he was gone. He would eat the biscuit and gravy, and then he would put a second biscuit in his pocket.

On the third Monday I put a hand on his shoulder. He went rigid, like a cat.

“You hungry, Brett?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m making extra rolls today. Come see me at the back door before the bus.”

At the back door, I handed him a brown paper sack with two peanut butter sandwiches, an apple, two packets of crackers, and a little carton of milk.

“For the weekend,” I said. “If you want it. If you don’t, throw it out. I’ll never ask.”

He took the sack. He did not say thank you. He looked at me for a long time with his chin set, and then he nodded.

He came to the back door every Friday after that.

I paid for it myself, out of the grocery money. It was never much. A loaf of bread, two jars of peanut butter, whatever was on sale at the Hy-Vee in Kirksville. I told Hal, and he said nothing, and the next week there was a flat of canned peaches in the back of the truck.

By the second year there were six sacks. By the fifth there were fourteen.

None of the children ever said a word about it, and neither did I. The teachers knew. A couple of them started leaving a five-dollar bill under the sugar jar, and I never thanked them either.

It was the one thing I did that I never put in a card.

Brett grew up. He grew to be six-foot-three, with shoulders like a feed bin, and in the eighth grade he shook my hand across the lunch counter and said, “Miss Marlene, I want you to know I’m going to farm.”

“I figured you would.”

“I’m going to have hogs. And I’m never going to run out.”

He was fourteen. I put that on his card too.

The years that took things

I will not make it sound like a happy forty years from beginning to end. It was not.

In 2003 we lost the farm. Not all at once. We sold the sows first, then the machinery, then the last eighty acres to a young man from the next county who was kind about it. Hal took a job driving a milk truck. He never complained out loud. He just got quieter, and the quiet sat in the house with us like another person.

I kept working. The school lunch check was the steady thing. It paid the electric. It paid the truck. It paid the property tax on the house we kept, and I never once felt sorry for myself, because there were a hundred and ninety children waiting on me every morning and none of them cared what we had lost.

That is a thing I have never been able to explain to anyone who has not stood behind a counter. The line does not care about your sorrow. The line wants its mashed potatoes. It is the kindest thing in the world.

Hal got sick in the winter of 2019. It was his heart, and then it was his kidneys, and for six months I drove him to Columbia every Tuesday for treatment and drove home and set my alarm for four. Verna covered me twice a week and never let me thank her.