Forty Years Behind the Lunch Line

I did not want to. I told him so. I said I had not gone out in front of the children without it in forty years, and that I was not about to do it now for a sheet cake.

He said, “Please.” Just that.

I pulled the hairnet off. My hair underneath was flat and gray and damp. I smoothed it with my hands, and I took off my apron, and I folded it over the end of the steam table where it had hung every afternoon of my working life.

Verna took my arm. She did not say a word. She had a hand on her mouth.

We went out through the back hallway, past the nurse’s office and the stairwell to the library. The school was quiet in a way schools never are. I could not hear a single child. I should have asked about that. I thought they were already in the gym.

At the side door, Keith stopped and held it open for me.

The parking lot was full.

I want to be sure you understand how strange that was. At Trenary Consolidated School on a Thursday in October, there are eleven cars in the lot. Teachers, the secretary, the bus barn man, and my own old Buick.

That morning there were pickups on the grass. Pickups on the gravel by the ball field. Two cattle trucks with the gates up. A school bus I did not recognize with the name of a church on the side. A dark green Army Guard truck, parked crooked.

And cars on both shoulders of Route K, as far down as the Hendersons’ mailbox.

“Keith,” I said. “What on earth.”

“It rained Tuesday,” he said. “Nobody’s cutting beans.”

“Keith.”

“Come on, Miss Marlene.”

There is a hallway, short and wide, between the side door and the gym. It has a trophy case on one wall, with the 1991 regional runner-up basketball trophy gone green on its base. The gym doors at the end are double doors with narrow windows set at the height of a child.

I could hear nothing from behind them. That frightened me more than noise would have.

Verna let go of my arm. Keith stepped back.

“We’ll be right behind you,” he said.

I put my hand on the push bar. The metal was cold. My knees hurt, and my heart was going the way it had not gone since the day they handed me the keys to the kitchen in 1992.

I pushed.