The Meatloaf I Made for Sixty
The Drive Out to the Home
It was Ray, really, who put the idea in my head, though he did it sideways.
He drove the medical transport van part-time, running folks to their appointments in Carbondale and Marion, and he ran out to the Prairie Haven two or three times a week. One evening he came home and set his cap on the hook and said, “They lost their kitchen cook out at the home. Fella retired and moved to be near his daughter. Flyer’s up on the board by the dining room.”
I did not say anything that night. But I lay awake thinking about it, about Mama out there eating off a tray, and about the sixty-some other folks out there eating off trays, and about whether anybody was making them anything worth the name of a meal.
I drove out the next morning. The dining room was bright and clean and smelled like steam-table green beans and bleach, and the food on the trays was the kind of food that keeps a body alive and does nothing else for it. I found the administrator, a tired, kind woman named Donna Satterfield, in a little office with a grandbaby’s drawing taped to the file cabinet.
“I ran the grill at the Blue Plate sixteen years,” I told her. “The meatloaf on the square. That was mine. My mother is a resident here. Fern. Room eleven.”
Donna looked at me a good while. “Fern’s girl,” she said. “She talks about the cafe. We can’t match what you made out there, honey. County pays what county pays. Eleven and a quarter an hour and your feet hurt every day.”
“I know what a kitchen pays,” I said. “I’ve never made real money a day in my life. I want to cook for people who’ll be glad of it.”
She hired me on the spot. She said the state had rules I would have to learn, a dietitian who signed off on the menus, sodium limits for the heart folks and soft textures for the ones who could not chew and thickened liquids for the ones who could not swallow right. She said it was not a cafe and I could not just cook whatever struck me.
“But Thursday,” she said, and she almost smiled, “Thursday the old menu says meatloaf. You do with that what you can do.”