The Jar I Kept for Twenty Nine Years

The Lunch Card

Now I have to tell you the thing I have never told anybody, not Neil and not my mother. I have carried it since March of 1997, twenty-nine years and a little over.

My father left in January. In February the school sent home a notice that my lunch account was in the red. In those days the account was a manila index card in a metal file box at the end of the serving line, and the cook wrote the balance in pencil as you went through. I was twelve, a sixth grader at Ruthven Elementary, and I owed a hundred and eighty-seven dollars and sixty-five cents. I know the number to the penny. A hundred and eighty-seven dollars and sixty-five cents was my mother’s grocery money for a month and a half, and she did not know. I had been going through the line on credit because when your father has left you do not think about the card. You think about getting through the line without anyone looking.

In the second week of March, Mrs. Keeler, who managed the cafeteria, caught me at the end of the line. She was not unkind. She said, “Marnie, honey, your account has run over. I need you to bring a note home to your mother. Go on and sit down for today.” I took my tray to the back table and could not eat the roll.

I thought about the note I would not bring home and my mother counting quarters. Then I stayed behind after the last bell, when the kitchen was washing up, to see if I could look at the card.

The cafeteria kitchen had a half door, the kind you could see over if you stood on the bottom rung of a chair. I stood on the rung. And I saw a woman in a hairnet and a white apron take a manila card out of the file box, a card I knew was mine because I could read my name on the tab. She took a worn brown purse down from a hook behind the door and counted bills onto the steel counter. She wrote on the card. She dropped the cash in the slot of the office envelope and tucked the card back with the tab turned to face the wall.

I got down off the rung and went home and said nothing. The next morning I went through the line expecting the note. Mrs. Keeler said, “Morning, Marnie,” and never mentioned it. On Friday, when nobody was watching, I looked at the card. It said paid, and in the corner, in the same pencil, two initials. V.C.

The woman in the hairnet was Mrs. Collier. She was big and round-shouldered, with forearms like a baker, a loud laugh and a quiet way of handing you the roll. She said, “You want the corn or the green beans, Marnie?” and I said the corn, and she gave me a double scoop and an extra roll, and not one word. In twenty-nine years she has never said one word. Not at my wedding, not at the births of my children, not at her husband’s funeral lunch, when I stood beside her at the ham and she put a hand on my arm.

I decided right then that I would pay it back before anybody knew, and that I would never be somebody who took a thing she could not return.

That is the whole secret. A reader will think, you were a child, she was kind, it was a lunch. But I have spent twenty-nine years being the girl on the rung of the chair.