Sixty Plates and One End Slice

Noon

At noon the big windows in the dining room were full of winter light, that thin white January light that makes everything look clean. The round tables were set and full.

I pushed the serving cart out myself. Usually the aides do it. Dena let me.

Plates under steel covers, tray cards tucked under each one, the soft plates on the bottom shelf with their own covers.

Gene got his first, at the round table by the big windows. He lifted his fork, cut a piece off the end of his slice, and put it in his mouth.

Then he stopped chewing, with his seed cap pushed back on his head.

“That’s Opie’s,” he said. He said it to nobody, to the table. Then he said it louder. “That’s Opie’s meatloaf. Who made this?”

Marge, across from him, set her fork down. At the next table, Doris, my old spelling teacher, turned all the way around in her chair to look at me.

I kept going. Plate, plate, plate. My hands are always steady at a stove. It is the rest of me that is not.

Mom was at the front table in her wheelchair. She had on the lavender sweater I bought her for Christmas, and her short white curls were set, because Thursday was beauty shop day at the care center too.

She had the table to herself, because Dena had them bring her down before anybody else. She already had her fork in her hand. She used to say a cook who doesn’t eat can’t be trusted.

I came around the table with the plate and set it down in front of her. Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans, with the roll and the little dish of peaches beside it.

She looked down at the plate. Then she looked up at me, and I watched her figure out the hairnet, and the white apron over my gray T-shirt, and the cart behind me.

She smiled. It was the smile she used to give me at two in the afternoon, when the last booth emptied and she poured us each a cup of coffee and put her feet up on a milk crate.

“Corinne Albrecht,” she said. “What on earth are you doing in that hairnet?”

“Cooking, Mom,” I said. “I work here now. Since Monday. Eat your lunch before it gets cold.”

She did not ask about the cafe. I think she knew something had happened there, and decided it could wait until after she ate.

She took one bite. She chewed slow, with her eyes shut, the way she used to taste the soup before she let anybody serve it.

Gene and Marge, over by the windows, were watching her and not their own plates.

Then she laid the fork down on the table.

The room went quiet in pieces, one table at a time, the way a church goes quiet before the first hymn. Sixty people were looking at a little woman in a lavender sweater.

Mom put both hands on the wheels and turned her chair around to face the room. It took her two tries.

She would not let me help. She cleared her throat the way she used to before she called an order back to the grill.

What Mom Told the Dining Room

“I want everybody in here to know something,” Mom said. Her voice was not loud. It did not need to be.

Thirty years of calling orders over a lunch rush had taught that room how to hear her.

“This is my girl Corinne,” she said. “She worked my grill for sixteen years. Every Thursday plate you ever ate in my place since she was thirty-two years old, she cooked it. Not me. I just took the credit and the end slices.”

A few people laughed. Gene took his cap off and put it on the table, which was the most Gene could do in the way of manners.

“That’s my meatloaf,” Mom said. “My recipe. My girl made it. She made it for every one of you, and she did it for sixteen dollars an hour in a hairnet, because that’s who she is. I’d like you to remember that.”

Then she turned her chair back to the table and picked up her fork and looked at me, and her eyes were wet, but her voice was the same as always.

“Where’s my end slice?” she said. “The crusty one. You know I like the end.”

I had it on the saucer on the cart. I had set it aside at eleven o’clock, before I knew if she would even eat.

I put it on her plate next to the other slice, and she picked it up with her fingers, the way she always had.

“The crust is the cook’s pay,” she said, and held it out to me. “Take half, honey. You earned it.”

I took half. I stood next to my mother’s wheelchair in the middle of the dining room and ate the dark end of a meatloaf with my fingers, and I did not care who saw me cry, and a lot of people did.

Doris, my old spelling teacher, started clapping. Then Marge did. Then Gene, slow and heavy, like a man clapping at a county fair for the 4-H kids. Then most of the room.

I went back into the kitchen and stood in the walk-in cooler for two minutes with the door shut.

When I came out, Dena handed me a dish towel and did not say a word about it.