Sixty Plates and One End Slice

Thirty Years on Main Street

Mom opened the cafe the year I turned eighteen. Dad was still farming wheat then, a little under a thousand acres north of town, and the cafe was supposed to be her hobby for the slow months.

It was never a hobby. By the second spring she had the coffee crowd at six, the elevator men at nine, the bank and the courthouse at noon, and the high school kids for pie after Friday night games.

Everybody called her Opie. Her real name is Opaline Albrecht, but nobody except the preacher and the hospital has used it since about 1970. Opie’s Cafe was on the window in gold letters.

She made one thing better than anybody in Rice County, and everybody knew it. Thursday was meatloaf day.

It had been meatloaf day for thirty years, and people planned their trips to the doctor in Hutchinson around it.

It was not fancy. Ground beef, an egg, oatmeal instead of breadcrumbs, a grated onion, a little milk, salt and pepper.

Then a glaze on top of ketchup, brown sugar, and a spoon of mustard, baked until the ends went dark.

Those dark ends were Mom’s. She would slice the loaves and set the two end pieces on a saucer by the coffee pot, and when the rush was over she would eat them standing up, with her fingers.

“The crust is the cook’s pay,” she told me the first week I worked the grill full time.

I was thirty-two. My son, Nate, was in fourth grade, and Steve and I needed the money.

Dad died in 2011, in the cab of a grain truck in the middle of harvest, and the neighbors finished cutting his wheat without anybody asking them to.

After that the cafe was Mom’s whole life, and I was the one standing next to her. Lacey had waited tables there in high school, but she left for Wichita at nineteen.

She came back eleven years ago, after her divorce, with the Doane name and two boxes of dishes and a bookkeeping certificate from the community college.

She does the books for the feed store and two farm families. She is good at numbers.

She was never good in Mom’s kitchen. I do not say that to be cruel.

I say it because Mom said it, once, out loud, at Thanksgiving, and I watched my little sister’s face fall and never quite come back up.

The Fall

Mom fell on the first Tuesday of December, on the ice behind the back door where the gutter drips.

She was carrying out the grease bucket. She was seventy-nine and should not have been carrying out anything.

I was the one who found her. I had gone to the walk-in for butter and heard the bucket hit the step.

She was lying on her side in the alley, and she said, “Don’t you dare call an ambulance, Corinne.”

I called the ambulance. The hip was broken in two places. They took her to Hutchinson, and the surgeon put in a pin and a plate, and told us at her age the recovery would be long.

She did two weeks of rehab at the hospital and then came home to us in a wheelchair.

Steve built a ramp onto our porch in one afternoon out of treated lumber. But Mom needed help at night that I could not give her and still work.

The care center on the east edge of town had an opening right after Christmas. It is a one-story brick building with sixty beds and a big dining room with tall windows.

Mom cried the day we moved her in. Not about the room. About the cafe.

She sat in her chair by the window with her purse on her lap and asked who was going to make the pie crust.

“I’ll make the pie crust,” I said. “I’ll make all of it, Mom. Same as always. You just get strong.”

Before she went in, while she was still in the hospital, she did two things.

She signed papers putting Lacey on the cafe’s bank account, because Lacey kept books for a living and I did not.

And she made us both promise. She took my hand and Lacey’s hand in her two cold ones and said, “This whole town eats in my place. Don’t you girls fight in front of them. Not over me, and not over that cafe.”

We promised. We were standing on either side of her bed, and I remember looking across at Lacey and thinking she looked tired, more tired than me, and I did not ask her why.