The Meatloaf I Made for Sixty

The Regulars Follow

I did not think anything would come of that day past the gladness of it. But Delmar Pruitt went back to town and told the barber, and the barber told everybody who sat in his chair, and this is how it happened that the next Thursday there were four cafe regulars eating lunch in the dining room of the Prairie Haven nursing home.

The home let them. Donna said the state allowed guests in the dining room for a small charge, six dollars a tray, and she said the money went into the resident activity fund, and she said she would be happy to have them if I did not mind cooking a few extra.

A few extra became a dozen extra. By the fourth Thursday I was making meatloaf for seventy-five, and the dining room, which had been a quiet place where old folks ate alone, was loud and full the way the cafe used to be loud and full at noon.

The Hinkle sisters came and split a plate and each took a roll. Pastor Ewing came after his hospital visits and sat with a man from his congregation who had nobody left, and he left his bread crust on the tray, and I let him, because some things ought not to change.

And here is the part I did not plan. Ray started driving Mama’s old friends out on Thursdays in the transport van. There were four or five of them in town, women Mama’s age who could not drive anymore and who had missed her something awful since she went into the home. Ray would load them up careful, with their canes and their church purses, and run them out Route 13, and they would sit with Mama at the front table and eat meatloaf and talk about nineteen sixty-whatever, and Mama on her good days was the center of it all again.

The home, which had been the saddest place I knew, the place I cried the whole way home from, turned into the place I could not wait to get to on a Thursday.

Donna stopped me in the hall one afternoon with the week’s numbers on her clipboard. She said the guest trays had put near two hundred dollars into the activity fund in a month, and the activity fund had bought a new set of dominoes and a cart of library books and paid to have a man come play the fiddle on a Sunday. She said she had worked in county homes thirty years and had never once seen the dining room be the thing people drove out for.

“You know what you did,” she told me. “You made this a place somebody wants to visit. Do you have any idea how rare that is, for a home.”

I told her I only made meatloaf. She said that was exactly what she meant, and she went on down the hall shaking her head.