The Kids Who Came to My Potluck

The Boy With The Punch Card

Back when Brian was small we still used the paper punch cards. A child’s lunch card was a stiff little rectangle with their name typed on it.

You punched a hole for each meal until the card was spent. Then they brought a new one.

The free-lunch kids had a card too, same as everyone. That was the whole point. Nobody at the window could tell who was which.

That was the rule I loved most. At my window, every child ate the same and looked the same doing it.

There was a boy named Danny in those years. A skinny thing with a cowlick, whose card was always the free kind.

He was ashamed of it the way only a seven year old can be, which is total. The first week he held the card out flat and would not look at me.

So I started punching every child’s card the same slow way. I made a little production of it. I said the same thing to each one.

That way his card and the mayor’s son’s card got the exact same show. By October he looked at me. By spring he talked my ear off about his dog.

I did not think of it as anything. It was the job.

You do the job so a boy can eat and keep his face. Then you go home, and your feet hurt, and you do it again.

I tell you about Danny now because he matters later. And because when the candle came, I did not think about Danny for one second.

I thought about myself, which I am not proud of. I thought, twenty-eight years, and a gas station candle.

I thought, I made that boy for forty hours of labor, and this is the arithmetic he did on me. That is a hard thing for a mother to think, and I thought it anyway.

The Watch

I should tell you about the watch. The watch is the thing that turned the candle from a thoughtless gift into a sentence with a period on it.

Brian gave Lon a watch. Not a department store watch. An engraved watch, six hundred dollars.

I know the figure because Brian is the kind of man who tells you the figure. The back of it was engraved.

To Lon, it said, for teaching me how a man works. Then the month and the year.

He gave it to Lon at the co-op retirement supper, in front of Lon’s whole crew. Lon called me after and his voice was strange.

I thought something was wrong. Something was. He just did not have the word for it yet.

Lon is my second husband. He came into our life when Brian was eleven, after Brian’s father left us for good.

Lon never once tried to be a father, and never once failed to be one either. He showed Brian how to change oil and bait a hook.

He showed him how to shake a hand and look a man in the eye. He earned that engraving, every letter of it.

I do not begrudge Lon one dollar of that watch. I want that understood before I say the next part.

The next part is that I raised that boy alone for the years before Lon. Then with Lon for the years after.

I was the one in the chair at the orthodontist. I was the one who sat up with the fevers.

I was the one who drove to Hays at midnight the time he rolled his truck. And the arithmetic of a son who buys his stepfather a six hundred dollar watch and his mother a six dollar candle is an arithmetic that tells you exactly where you rank.

I did not call Brian to have it out. I knew how that call would go.

I would cry. He would say I was being dramatic. He would say it was a nice candle and I was reading into it.

By the end I would be the one apologizing for making him feel bad. I have had that call before. I did not want it on the month I retired.