Sixty Plates and One End Slice

Saturday Morning

I unlocked the back door of Opie’s Cafe at five o’clock that Saturday morning with my own key, which nobody had ever asked me to give back.

The flat top was cold. The kitchen smelled like old coffee and bleach.

My apron was folded on the shelf above the hand sink, right where Lacey said.

Somebody had washed it and ironed it, and Mom’s mending on the pocket had been mended again, in the same blue thread.

By seven the booths were full, and Lacey was running plates in her reading glasses.

She broke two yolks carrying them. I laughed. She laughed. Nobody else in the cafe knew why that was funny, and we did not explain it to them.

At nine o’clock, when the rush thinned, she poured two cups of coffee and set them on the end of the counter, and we sat on the stools and put our feet up on the milk crates, the way Mom always did.

“The bank said if I make February and March, they’ll take it off the list,” she said. “I’ll make it. With Vic in Sterling and you on weekends, I’ll make it.”

“I know you will,” I said. “You’re good with numbers.”

“I’m good with numbers,” she agreed, and that was all we ever said about it.

Every Thursday Since

I still work Monday through Friday at the care center. Dena gave me a raise in the spring, fifty cents, which in that building is a parade. The consulting dietitian has since approved Mom’s pot roast, too.

Opie’s Cafe does not serve meatloaf on Thursday anymore. Lacey moved meatloaf to Sunday, after church, and the Sunday crowd has never been bigger.

On Thursdays the cafe serves chicken fried steak, and it is doing fine.

The guest tickets at the care center still sell on Thursday, usually a dozen. Gene’s coffee men still come.

Lacey comes every single Thursday now, on her lunch break, and sits on Mom’s right side.

Mom is walking a little now with a walker, down the long hall and back, twice a day.

She says she is going back to the cafe by the Fourth of July. Nobody argues with her. Nobody ever has.

Every Thursday at eleven o’clock I pull the loaves out and probe every one of them.

Every Thursday I cut the two darkest ends off the best loaf and set them on a saucer on the cart, before anybody else gets a plate.

Every Thursday at noon I push the cart out into that winter light, or spring light now, or summer light, and I set a plate in front of my mother at the front table.

And every Thursday she looks up at me and says the same thing. “Where’s my end slice?”

It is always there. Sixty plates and one end slice.