The Tenderloin at My Sister’s Window

She shook her head and put her hand up over her lips. It was a habit she’d picked up over the summer. She did it at the door when the mailman came. She did it when I made her laugh.

“Please,” I said.

She lowered her hand. Her gums were pink and healed smooth, the way they’d been healed for a long time. There was nothing wrong with them except that they were empty.

I didn’t say anything. I put the apples in the crisper drawer, and I cut her a slice of the soft bread and tore it into little pieces for her, and she ate four of them and said she was full.

When I left, I hugged her on the porch, and I could feel her shoulder blades through her cardigan like the backs of two spoons.

On Monday morning I was flagging on a resurfacing job out on the blacktop north of town. It was a clear, cold morning, the beans mostly out and the corn coming down field by field.

I spent the whole morning turning my sign from Stop to Slow and back, waving at farm trucks and school buses, and thinking about my mother’s shoulder blades.

At ten, when the paver crew took their break, I walked back to my pickup on the shoulder and sat inside with the door open and looked up the number for the office in Ottumwa.

A woman answered on the second ring. She had a nice voice, the kind that sounds like she has been answering that phone for twenty years and still likes it.

“I’m calling about my mother, Zelda Vrba,” I said. “She’s supposed to have dentures coming. I wanted to see how far out the lab is.”

“Let me look,” she said. I heard her typing. Then I heard her stop, and type again.

“Can you spell the last name for me, hon?”

I spelled it. V, R, B, A. People always want to put another letter in it.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t have a Zelda Vrba. I don’t have anything under that name at all. No appointment, no impressions, no deposit.”

“Could it be under my sister? Kenna Vrba?”

More typing. “No, hon. Nothing. And our lab isn’t backed up. We usually turn a full set around in about two weeks once the impressions are done.”

I thanked her. I don’t remember what else I said. I hung up and sat in the truck with my vest on and the door open, and a cattle truck went by slow, and the driver lifted one finger off the wheel at me.

I want to be fair to my sister, because she is my sister, and because I know what it is to be thirty-nine and short on money in a small town.

Kenna works the window at the drive-in on the edge of town, the red-and-white one that has been there since the fifties, with the picnic tables out front and the root beer in frosty mugs.

She has worked there off and on since high school. She is good at it. She remembers everybody’s order, and the old farmers love her because she never rushes them.

Her truck is a used half-ton she bought two years ago, and she has been behind on it more than once. I knew that. Mom knew that. Everyone who has ever loaned Kenna twenty dollars knew that.

But there is a difference between being behind on a truck and taking your mother’s teeth to pay for it. I sat on the shoulder of that road and tried to find a way for it not to be what it was, and I couldn’t.