The Name That Stopped the Legion Hall
She looked at that plate for a long time. Then she pushed the screen door open and stepped back to let me in.
Her kitchen was the same as always. The yellow curtains. The rooster canisters. The calendar from the feed store on the side of the fridge.
But there were stacks of papers on the table I had never seen there before, and an open laptop I did not know she owned.
I set the cake down on the counter. She did not look at it.
She sat down at the table and moved the papers into a pile and put her hand flat on top of them, like she did not want me to see.
“Sit down, Whitney,” she said. “You’re pregnant. Sit.”
“I’m sorry about Saturday,” I said. “I’m not sorry about the name. We picked that name in June, Mama. It wasn’t about you. But I’m sorry you had to find out that way, in front of everybody.”
She did not say anything. She looked down at her hand on top of the papers.
“And I need you to know something,” I said. “I never once wanted you to look bad. Not once. I could have said a lot of things in that hall. I didn’t say any of them. I just didn’t want to fight you in front of the whole town.”
“I know you didn’t,” she said quietly. “That’s what made it worse.”
I waited. With my mother you have to wait. If you push, she closes up.
“Why aren’t you at work?” I asked finally.
She laughed. It was not a happy laugh. She lifted her hand off the papers and turned the top one around so I could read it.
It was a letter on boot company letterhead, dated in April, and the first line said the plant would cease operations effective May 31.
“They closed it,” she said. “Back in the spring. Shut the whole thing down and moved the work to Mexico. Two hundred and forty people. Twenty-two years, Whitney, and they gave us a letter and a pizza party.”
I stared at the letter. “April?” I said. “Mama, that was five months ago. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you had just found out about the baby,” she said. “You were so happy. You and Josh both. I wasn’t going to walk in and ruin it with my troubles. I figured I’d find something else quick and you’d never have to know.”
She had not found something else quick. She showed me the papers, one after another.
Applications at the Dollar General, the Casey’s, the hospital laundry in Carbondale, the nursing home, the school district. Rejections, or nothing at all.
“I’m fifty-two years old,” she said. “I’ve got a high school diploma and twenty-two years of running a stitching machine nobody uses anymore. The Dollar General hired a girl of nineteen. The girl at the nursing home looked at me like I was asking to be a resident.”
“The electric’s due on the fifteenth,” she said. “Car insurance on the first. I’ve got my car payment, my phone, groceries. I sat down at this table and figured it every way there is. It comes to about eight hundred a month to keep the lights on and the car running.”
Eight hundred a month. Two hundred a week. I sat there and felt the whole Saturday afternoon turn over in my chest like a pancake on a griddle.
“That’s where the number came from,” I said.