The Kids Who Came to My Potluck

The Lunch Ticket

Danny came. The skinny boy with the cowlick and the free card, grown into a broad quiet man who works for the county.

He brought his daughter. A little girl about eight, in a sundress.

He walked her up to me and knelt down to her level. Honey, he said, this is the lady I told you about.

The little girl looked up at me with her father’s eyes. My daddy says you were nice to him when nobody was, she said.

I had to sit down. One of the ladies brought me a chair and a cup of water.

I sat in the middle of all that noise and food. I thought, this is the arithmetic.

This is what twenty-eight years actually bought. Not a watch. This.

It was about half past eleven, the hall roaring, when Danny came back to me. He had something in his shirt pocket.

He took it out careful, the way you take out a photograph. He set it in my hand.

It was a lunch ticket. One of the old paper punch cards, Daniel typed on it in those typewriter letters.

Every hole was punched. Spent and finished. Someone had laminated it years ago, by the yellowed look of the edges, to keep it from falling apart.

My mom found it in a drawer after my last day of sixth grade, he said. She laminated it and gave it to me.

She said, Danny, this is proof that somebody fed you every day whether we could pay or not. She said do not you ever forget it.

I carried it in my wallet in my twenties when things were bad, he said. To remind me the world had at least one person in it who. And then he could not finish the sentence.

I am sixty-one years old. I have cried maybe four times as an adult.

I cried then, holding a thirty year old laminated lunch ticket, while a grown man and his daughter stood over me. The little girl patted my shoulder the way children pat you when they do not understand but know it is important.

I tried to give it back. Danny closed my fingers over it.

No, he said, I made a copy. That one is yours now. You keep the proof too.

I have it in the drawer by my bed. I take it out sometimes.

It is worth more than any watch that was ever engraved. I say that as a plain fact, not a dig, because by then I had almost forgotten to be angry at all.