The Tenderloin at My Sister’s Window

Nobody made a fuss. That was the best part. A couple of the ladies said, “Zelda, you look so good,” and she said, “Thank you, I got my teeth,” and that was all.

Kenna wasn’t there. She was working the Sunday lunch shift. But that afternoon, Mom told me later, Kenna’s truck pulled into her driveway instead of driving past, and Kenna came in and sat at the kitchen table and had a cup of coffee with her for the first time since June.

The first Friday after the drive-in, I came out of the house at first light to go flag on the culvert job, and there was an envelope under the windshield wiper of my pickup.

It was a plain white envelope, slightly damp with dew. Inside were two twenties and a ten. No note. Just the money, folded once.

I stood there in the driveway in the gray morning with my vest on and held it. Then I put it in the coffee can on top of the fridge, where it had come from.

The next Friday there was another one. And the one after that. Some weeks it was crisp new bills from the bank. Some weeks it was fives and ones, and once it was a roll of quarters wrapped in a drive-in napkin.

Merritt found one in January, after a snowstorm, frozen solid under the wiper. He brought it in and set it on the heat register to thaw, and when it was dry he counted it, and he put it in the can, and he didn’t say a word about Kenna. Not then and not ever.

Mom still eats there every couple of weeks. She walks up to the window herself and taps on the glass with one knuckle, and Kenna slides it open, and they don’t need to say what Mom wants.

She sits at the picnic table out front, the one in plain view of the window, in her coral cardigan when it’s cool and her short sleeves when it’s not. She eats the whole tenderloin now, the edges and all.

Sometimes, if I’m off work, I sit across from her with my chin in my hand and just watch her eat.

She doesn’t cover her mouth anymore. Not at the drive-in, not at church, not when the mailman comes. When something’s funny, she laughs with her whole face, and that crooked front tooth catches the light.

I have thought a lot about what I would have done if I’d called my sister from the shoulder of that road. I think I would have gotten a story about the lab. I think Mom would have eaten oatmeal through Christmas.

Instead, she ate a tenderloin in the sun, and my sister came out the side door and sat down across from her. That is the part I keep.

Thirty-two Fridays. Through the fall and the snow and the spring mud and into the first hot week of road season. The last envelope came in June, a year almost to the day after Mom’s teeth came out.

That one had a note in it. Just one line, in Kenna’s round handwriting.

Tell Mom I’m buying the tenderloins from now on.

Kenna paid me back fifty dollars a week, in an envelope left under the wiper, and she never missed one.