The Meatloaf I Made for Sixty
When Sherry Came to the Door
Sherry heard about it, of course. You cannot move half a town’s Thursday lunch out to the county home and have your sister not hear.
She came out on a Thursday in March, in the afternoon after the lunch rush, and she found me in the kitchen scraping the steam pans. She stood in the doorway in her good coat and did not come in, the way she had stood over my grill with her laminated sheet, keeping to the doorway like a person who is not sure of her welcome.
“You’re taking my customers,” she said.
I set down the pan. “I’m not taking anybody,” I said. “I’m cooking lunch for the folks who live here, and their company’s welcome to a tray for six dollars. Same as the state allows. I’m not advertising, Sherry. I’m not out front of the Blue Plate waving people off.”
“They used to come to me,” she said, and her voice cracked on it, and for the first time in all of this I saw that my sister was not only grasping. She was scared, and she was alone up front of a cafe she had wanted her whole life and could not run, with a boyfriend at the register who called Delmar Pruitt “chief.”
I think I understood her a little, standing there. Sherry was always the one who wanted the thing Mama loved, and I was the one Mama handed it to without a word, every morning, for sixteen years. She watched me get the grill and the recipe and the trust while she stood off to the side, and she told herself the paper would even it up. It did not. All the paper got her was a quiet square and a line of folks who had followed the cooking out to a nursing home.
“You could have just asked me to stay,” I said. “I’d have cooked for you, Sherry. I’d have run your Thursday grill and never breathed a word about whose name was on the door.”
She did not have an answer for that. I do not think she had ever once considered it.
I wiped my hands and I thought about all the things I had a right to say. I did not say any of them. Mama raised us both in that cafe, and Mama was forty feet away through the wall, and I was not going to stand in a kitchen and tear my sister down with our mother’s meatloaf still warm in the pans.
“Sherry,” I said. “The Thursday card is still over the sink out there. Milk, not water. Two beef to one pork. Loose, never packed. You stood that grill when you were a girl, same as me. You can run that lunch as good as anybody if you want to.”
She looked at me a long minute. “It’s not the same,” she said. “You being here and me there.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not. But Mama’s here. And the door’s not locked, Sherry. You can come see her any Thursday you want. She’d know you today. She’s having a good one.”
She did not come in that afternoon. She stood in the doorway another moment and then she turned and walked back down the hall with her good coat and her high heels clicking on the county linoleum, and I heard the front doors sigh shut behind her, and I did not know if I would see her again.