Forty Years Behind the Lunch Line

He died in the spring of 2020, in the same week the schools closed for the virus. They shut the building, and there was no funeral that mattered, only eleven people in the yard of the Methodist church standing six feet apart.

I did not cry in front of anyone. I went back to the school when it reopened in the fall, and I tied my hairnet, and I stood at the line.

It was the only place in the world where I knew what to do with my hands.

Tammy lives in Columbia now with her husband and two girls. Dean is a nurse at the hospital in Kirksville. They both told me for years to quit. “Mom, your knees.” “Mom, you’re seventy.” “Mom, you could sleep past four.”

They were right. My left knee had gone first, then the right, and last spring a doctor in Kirksville held up an X-ray and told me, in a gentle voice, that I could keep standing on them or I could keep walking. Not both.

I gave notice in August.

I told Keith in his office and I told him I would stay through the first week of October, to get the new girl trained. He nodded. He looked at his desk for a long time, and then he said, “Miss Marlene, can I ask you something?”

“Go on.”

“Did you know you never once sat down in the cafeteria?”

I laughed. “I’m working.”

“Forty years. I looked it up in my head. Not once. I used to watch you from the back table when I was little. You’d stand at the end of the line with a bowl of leftovers and eat it standing up, in four bites, and then you’d go back.”

“There wasn’t time.”

“I know,” Keith said. “That’s what I wrote on the invitation.”

I did not ask what invitation. I was too tired. I thought he had a retirement card going around the staff, and that was that.

The last morning

By ten o’clock the kitchen was loud with the end of things.

The first-graders came through the line in a crooked row, in sweatshirts with the school colors, which are green and white, and the fourth-graders came through behind them with their usual air of being too old for lunch. I handed out trays. I said “Careful, it’s hot” a hundred and ten times, and every single time a child looked at me and said, “I know.”

A little girl named Josie, a kindergartner with a missing front tooth, put her tray down and said, “Miss Marlene, is it true you’re going away?”

“I’m retiring, sweetheart.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s when you get to stop.”

She thought it over. “But who’s going to do my roll?”

Her birthday was in January. Her card was in the box that Verna had hidden. I had no idea what I would say to her.

“The new lady will do it,” I said. “I’ve written everything down.”

By ten-forty, the last tray was out, the tables were wiped, and the cafeteria was empty. It was the quietest I had ever heard it. The sun came through the high windows and laid long squares across the floor, and I stood at the end of the line and looked at the room.

Keith came through the swinging door. He had put on his good suit coat.

“Ready?”

“I am wearing a hairnet.”

“Take it off.”