Sixty Plates and One End Slice

Lacey

Lacey called me on the Monday after the second Thursday. It was eight at night. I was folding laundry and Steve was asleep in his chair with the news on.

“You’re doing this on purpose,” she said. No hello. “You know Thursday is the biggest lunch of the week. You know what that does to me.”

“I’m doing my job,” I said. “Meatloaf was on the menu in that building before I ever walked in. I just made it the way Mom makes it.”

“You made it so the whole town would watch,” she said. Her voice cracked on the last word, and she stopped, and I heard her take a breath.

“Lacey,” I said. “Mom asked us not to fight in front of anybody. I’m not fighting. I’m cooking in a kitchen where Mom lives. If people want to come eat with her, I can’t stop them.”

She hung up on me. I stood in the laundry room holding one of Steve’s work shirts for a long time.

I did not tell Mom. But Mom knew. Mom always knew. On the Wednesday before the third Thursday she said, out of nowhere, while I was brushing her hair, “Your sister hasn’t been in to see me in nine days.”

“She’s busy at the cafe,” I said.

“She’s scared,” Mom said. “There’s a difference. You never could tell the difference, Corinne. You think everybody is as brave as you are just because they’re standing up.”

The Third Thursday

At 12:20 on the third Thursday, I came out with the cart for second helpings and saw my sister standing in the doorway of the dining room in her winter coat, with her car keys still in her hand.

She looked smaller than I had ever seen her. Her hair was pulled back the way she wore it when she had not slept.

The coffee men saw her and went quiet, and Gene put his fork down.

Mom saw her too. She lifted one hand off the table and patted the empty chair beside her wheelchair, twice.

Just like she used to pat the stool at the end of the counter when we were girls and came in after school.

Lacey walked across that whole dining room and sat down next to Mom. She did not look at me.

She did not look at anybody. She took Mom’s hand and held it on the table.

I filled a plate. Meatloaf, potatoes, green beans, a roll, the peaches.

I bought her a seven dollar guest ticket out of my own pocket on the way, and set it in front of her.

She looked at the plate for a long time. “I can’t eat this,” she said quietly.

“Yes, you can,” Mom said. “Your sister made it. Pick up your fork.”

Lacey picked up her fork. She took a bite. She put the fork down and put both hands over her face and cried, right there at the front table, in front of thirty-one guests and sixty residents.

I pulled out the chair on Mom’s other side and sat down in my hairnet and my apron. Dena could handle the line for ten minutes.

What Lacey Was Carrying

“I’m four months behind on the house,” Lacey said, when she could talk. She said it to the tablecloth.

“You knew I was behind. You didn’t know it was four months. The bank sent a second letter at Christmas. I haven’t told anybody.”

“Oh, honey,” Mom said.

“And Vic got laid off from the trucking outfit in October. He had an offer to drive out of Salina, over the road, gone three weeks at a time. I knew if he went he wasn’t coming back. Nobody ever comes back.”

She took a breath. “So when I got the bank card, I did the math. I could pay him eighteen an hour and he’d stay. I could not pay two cooks in January. I picked him. That’s what I did, Corinne. I picked him over you.”

I did not say anything. I let her finish. Mom taught me that at the grill. You let the order come all the way out before you start cooking it.

“And I picked him because it was the only time in my whole life I ever got to decide anything about that cafe,” Lacey said.

She looked at me for the first time. “You were always Mom’s cook. I was always the one who broke the yolks.”

Mom squeezed her hand. “I said that to you once,” Mom said. “At Thanksgiving. About the gravy. I’ve been sorry for it for eleven years, and I never told you. I’m telling you now. I was wrong to say it in front of people.”

Lacey cried harder. I put my hand on her back. I could feel her shoulder blades through her coat, sharp as a girl’s, and I thought about how long she had been carrying all that without telling one person.

“Why didn’t you just tell me about the house?” I asked her. I said it gently. I meant it gently. “Steve and I could have helped. We’d have figured something out.”

“Because then you’d have saved me,” she said. “Again. And I’d have had to say thank you, again, in front of Mom. I wanted one thing I didn’t need you for.”