The Meatloaf I Made for Sixty

Sixteen Years on That Grill

Mama opened the Blue Plate on the courthouse square in nineteen eighty-eight, the year I turned twelve, and I grew up in the back of it. I rolled silverware in paper napkins at that corner booth before I could reach the counter. I learned to crack eggs one-handed over the number six griddle before I learned to drive.

When I was twenty-one I took over the grill for good, and Mama moved up front to the register and the pie case, where she knew everybody by name and knew what they wanted before they sat down. That was how it ran for a long, good while. She was the face and I was the hands.

Our meatloaf was the Thursday special, and it was the reason half the county came in on Thursdays. It was Mama’s recipe, written on a grease-spotted index card that lived thumbtacked over the prep sink, and I had made it so many thousands of times that I did not need the card anymore. Two parts beef to one part pork. Saltines crushed by hand, never bought crumbs. Milk, not water. A little grated onion and a little sage. The glaze was ketchup and brown sugar and a spoon of yellow mustard, and you laid it on in the last twenty minutes so it set up shiny and did not scorch.

People drove in from Marion and from the little townships out past the reservoir just for a Thursday plate. Meatloaf, mashed with the skins on, green beans cooked down soft with a piece of bacon, and a roll. Four dollars and seventy-five cents for years, then five and a quarter when beef went up, and still the cheapest honest lunch in that part of southern Illinois.

I knew the regulars by their order. Delmar Pruitt wanted his meatloaf well done at the edge, cut thick. The Hinkle sisters split a plate and each took a roll. Pastor Ewing came in after his Thursday hospital visits and always left the crust of his bread for the birds in the lot, which drove Mama half crazy and which she pretended not to see.

Sixteen years I stood at that grill. I missed two days for my gallbladder and one day when my boy Ray and I got married at the courthouse across the square, and I was back the next morning at four forty with the bacon down.

I never once thought about owning the place. That tells you something about me, I suppose. It was Mama’s cafe and then it would be ours, mine and Sherry’s, and that was so plain and so settled in my head that I never asked a single question about paper. You do not ask your mother for a contract. You just show up in the dark and cook.

Mama started to slip the winter she turned seventy-three. Little things first. She would ring up a ham and cheese twice, or she would give a twenty back for a ten, or she would stand in the pie case not able to find the word for lemon when the meringue was right in front of her.

Then it was bigger things. She called me at home one night at two in the morning, scared, because she did not know whose kitchen she was standing in. It was her own. She had lived in that house forty years.