The Meatloaf I Made for Sixty

The doctor in Carbondale said it was the kind of thing that only goes one way. We moved her over to the county home out on Route 13 that March, the Prairie Haven, because she needed more hands on her than Ray and I could give and still keep the cafe open. It was the hardest drive of my life, following the car that carried her out there, and I cried the whole way back to town.

She had good days still. Some days she knew me plain and asked about the Thursday count and whether Delmar had been in. Some days she called me by my sister’s name, or by her own mother’s name, and I learned to just answer to whatever name she reached for, because correcting her only frightened her.

Sherry did not come around much in those months. She lived up in Effingham then with the man she was seeing, and she would blow into town every few weeks, stay a day, and blow back out. I did not hold it against her at the time. Somebody had to keep the cafe running, and that somebody was me, and I told myself Sherry grieved in her own way.

How the Cafe Got Her Name

I found out later that one of those quiet visits, Sherry had driven Mama to a lawyer in Marion and had the cafe signed over into her own name.

She did it legal. That is the part that sat in my chest like a stone for a long time. There was no forging and no breaking in. Mama still had days she could sign her name and understand the general shape of a thing, and on one of those days my sister sat her down with papers and a pen and a witness, and Mama signed the Blue Plate over to Sherry, free and clear.

Why Mama did it, I will never fully know. Maybe Sherry told her it was only so the bills could get paid. Maybe Mama, on a foggy day, just signed where the nice young man pointed. Maybe some old corner of her still worried most about the daughter who had always seemed to need the most worrying.

I did not even know it had happened. I kept opening the cafe at four forty every morning like I owned a piece of it, because in every way that mattered I did, except the one way that holds up in a courthouse.

So when Sherry turned up that cold Monday in January with her laminated schedule, she was not stealing anything. She was the legal owner of a cafe telling an employee her shifts were cut. That was the whole ugly truth of it. I had no paper, no deed, no clause, nothing with my name on it but sixteen years of early mornings and a grease card over the sink.

I thought about a lawyer. I will be honest, I sat at my kitchen table with the phone in my hand. But a lawyer costs money I did not have, and the paper was signed, and dragging my failing mother into a courthouse to argue over whether she knew what she was doing the day she signed was a thing I could not make myself do to her. It would have cost me the little peace she had left, and it would not have given me back my grill.