The Meatloaf I Made for Sixty

The Week She Changed the Morning

The grill was already hot when Sherry came in through the back with the new schedule in her hand. I had the first bacon laid down and the flat-top scraped clean, the way I did it every morning at a quarter to five, the way I had done it for sixteen years.

She did not say good morning. She set a laminated sheet on the stainless counter next to my spatula and tapped it twice with one fingernail.

“New hours start Monday,” she said. “I printed them.”

I kept my eyes on the bacon and turned each strip with the fork, because if a thing is going to sting you may as well not burn the breakfast while it does. Then I wiped my hands on my apron and picked up the sheet.

My name was not on it anywhere.

“Sherry,” I said. “Where am I.”

She was already pulling the till drawer, counting the start bank into the register, not looking at me. “There’s not room on the grill for both of us,” she said. “Mama left the place to me. I get to run it how I see fit.”

I had come in at four forty that morning in the dark and the cold, the same as always. The parking lot still had Tuesday’s snow pushed up in a gray ridge along the fence. I had let myself in with my own key, a key that had hung on my ring since I was twenty-one years old, and I had turned on the lights and the fryer and the coffee and started the day, because that was my job and I loved it and nobody had ever told me different.

“You cut me to zero,” I said. It was not a question. I was only saying it out loud so it would be real.

“I cut you to zero,” she said. She slid the drawer shut. “You can pick up your check Friday.”