Sixty Plates and One End Slice

The Ask

Then Lacey wiped her face with Mom’s napkin and sat up straight and said it. “The cafe is dying on Thursdays, Corinne. You know that. I need you back. I can’t pay you full time. But I could pay you two mornings a week. Saturday and Sunday breakfast. That’s where the money is.”

“What wage?” I said. Not to be hard. Because Mom raised me to ask.

“Seventeen,” she said. “That’s more than you made before. It should have been more than you made before, a long time ago. That was Mom’s doing, not mine, but I’m fixing it.”

Mom laughed out loud at that, and so did I, and so did Lacey, the three of us laughing at a nursing home table with mascara on Mom’s napkin.

“What about Vic?” I asked.

Lacey shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ll tell him tonight. He’ll understand. Or he won’t.”

“I can do Saturday and Sunday,” I said. “My job here is Monday through Friday. Dena gave me the schedule. I’ll be at the back door at five on Saturday.”

“Wear your own apron,” Lacey said. “It’s still folded on the shelf. I couldn’t bring myself to put it in the rag bin.”

Vic

Vic Porter came to the back door of the care center kitchen the next afternoon, Friday, at about two.

He knocked on the steel door like a man knocking on a stranger’s house, and Dena let him in.

He had his ball cap in his hands. He was a big man, forty-seven, with hands that had held a steering wheel for twenty-some years.

“I won’t keep you,” he said. “I wanted you to hear it from me. I took a job at the co-op elevator in Sterling. Running the dump pit and the leg. Starts Monday. Hourly, with insurance.”

“That’s a good job,” I said, and I meant it. Elevator work is hard work, dusty and cold in winter, and men who do it right are worth something to a whole county.

“It’s a better job for me than a grill,” he said. He turned his cap around in his hands.

“I’m not a cook. I knew it the first morning. I put eggshell in the hash browns. You probably heard about that.”

“I heard it through the door,” I said.

He laughed, a short laugh. “Lacey told me what she did to you. Some of it I knew and didn’t ask about. I should have asked. That’s on me. I’m sorry for standing in your spot, Corinne. It was never mine.”

“You didn’t take it,” I said. “You got handed it. There’s a difference.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I’m still sorry. And with me off the payroll she can make the house. That was the main thing. She was scared I’d leave. I’m not leaving. Sterling’s twenty minutes.”

He put his cap back on, nodded to Dena and to me, and went out the back door to his pickup.

Steve shook his hand at church that Sunday. He did not say a word about any of it.

He just shook it, the way men do here when they have decided something is settled.