The Meatloaf I Made for Sixty

The Boyfriend at the Register

The man Sherry had been seeing up in Effingham was named Kevin, and within the month he was standing behind Mama’s register wearing a golf shirt and ringing up ham and cheeses.

He did not know the regulars. He called Delmar Pruitt “chief” and charged the Hinkle sisters for two plates when they always split one, and when Pastor Ewing left his bread crust on the table Kevin followed him out to the lot to tell him there was a trash can inside.

Sherry put herself on the grill. I will give her this: my sister can cook when she tries. But she had not stood a lunch rush in fifteen years, and the first Thursday she ran the meatloaf she ran out by eleven forty and sent a line of people back to their trucks hungry.

Word gets around a town like ours in about a day and a half. By the second week people were saying the Blue Plate had gone downhill, and they were saying it in the feed store and the barber shop and the church foyer, which is where a small-town business lives or dies.

I heard all of it secondhand because I was not there. I was home in the middle of the day for the first time since I was a girl, folding laundry at noon, not knowing what to do with my own two hands. Ray would come in from his route and find me standing at the window.

“You’re going to wear a path in that carpet,” he said one afternoon, and he put his arms around me from behind. “You’re too good a cook to stand here staring at the driveway. Somebody out there wants what you can do.”