My Boys Worked the Food Bank Line

“Nobody asks why you’re here. If you’ve got a Saturday, we’ve always got a line that needs working.”

I had not taken her up on it. I did not know why I was taking her up on it now, except I could not think what else a man does when his son is learning a word for him at another man’s supper table.

Friday morning I called Deb to make sure it was all right to bring the boys.

She said kids ten and up could work the floor, and kids under ten could pack with a parent standing right there. Wyatt was nine. She said she would put all three of us at one table.

“They know?” she asked. She meant the boys. She knew I had been keeping it quiet.

Saturday morning it was nine degrees. The truck took three tries to turn over, and the windshield had a skin of frost on the inside where the boys had been breathing on it the night before.

Jackson had his red hoodie pulled up over his head and his hands jammed in the front pocket.

“Why do we have to do this?” Jackson asked when I got in. “It’s Saturday.” I told him, “Because we eat it.”

He gave me a look. “The chili,” I said. “The bread. The milk. The peanut butter Wyatt had for breakfast. It comes from where we’re going.

“I go every other Thursday. I’m going to show you where it comes from, and then we’re going to hand it to the next people.”

We went out past the elevator and the rail yard, and the river was white with ice along both banks, with a dark channel down the middle where the current kept it open.

“Is that why you never let me carry the bags in?” Wyatt asked from the back. I told him that was why.

He said, “I thought it was because of your arm,” and I told him some of it was my arm, and some of it was not.

Inside, the food bank was bright with fluorescent light, the long tubes in the old showroom ceiling, and it smelled like cardboard and floor wax and coffee.

The metal shelving ran in rows clear to the back, milk crates and boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling.

There were maybe a dozen volunteers already working. Most of them were retired. A couple of men from the Lutheran church came every Saturday.

Deb put us at a folding table near the front, where the line came through. The job was simple. Families came up with their number.

The boys packed a box from the list, and I checked the number on my clipboard and handed the box across the table.

“You going to hand it with that arm?” Deb asked me, nodding at the brace. I told her I would hand it with the other one.

The first hour, Jackson did not say ten words. He packed boxes like he was mad at them.

He put the cans in hard, and Wyatt kept fixing them behind him so the cereal would not get crushed. I let them both be and did not say a thing.

The line was longer than I expected. It always is the last Saturday of the month, Deb said, because that is when everybody’s money is already gone.

Old people. A man in a work jacket from the window plant. Young mothers with babies in car seats.