The Tenderloin at My Sister’s Window

The drive-in on the edge of town. The red-and-white one. The one where my sister works the window.

“Mom,” I said. “Are you sure?”

She looked out the windshield. “I’ve been eating oatmeal since June because I didn’t want people to see me,” she said. “I’m done with that. I’d like a tenderloin. I’d like it at a picnic table. And I’d like it from my daughter.”

It was about twenty to four when we pulled in. A clear October afternoon, the light coming gold and long over everything, the maples along the road gone orange and red.

There were a few pickups in the lot. A farmer and his grandson at one table, sharing a basket of onion rings. Two road guys I knew from another crew, eating in their truck with the windows down.

I parked where Mom could walk straight up to the window. She didn’t wait for me to come around. She got out on her own, smoothed her cardigan, and walked across the gravel with her purse on her arm.

I followed a few steps behind. I wanted her to have it.

The window was closed against the cool. Behind the glass, I could see my sister in her paper hat, wiping down the counter, her back half turned.

Mom tapped the glass with one knuckle, the way she used to tap on our bedroom doors on school mornings.

Kenna turned. She slid the window open with a smile already on, the customer smile, the one she’s been using since she was sixteen.

Then she saw who it was, and the smile stopped right where it was.

“Hi, honey,” Mom said. “I’ll have the breaded tenderloin. Ketchup and pickle. And a small fries.”

She smiled when she said it. Wide and easy, every new tooth showing in the gold light.

Kenna didn’t write anything down for a long moment. She looked at Mom’s mouth. Then she looked past Mom, at me, standing there in my orange vest with my hands in my hoodie pocket.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to.

Then my sister looked down at her order pad, and she wrote it down. Her hand was shaking a little.

“And two sodas,” I said quietly. “Please.”

“Fourteen twenty,” Kenna said, and her voice cracked right down the middle of it.

Mom paid her. She counted it out of her coin purse, exact change, and set it on the counter, and said, “Thank you, honey,” the same way she’d say it to anybody.

We waited at the side of the window while they fried it. Nobody said anything. Through the glass, I could see Kenna standing at the fryer with her back to us and her shoulders very still.

When it came up, she didn’t hand it out herself. Another girl did, a teenager with a ponytail who said, “Enjoy, you guys,” and didn’t know a thing.

I carried the paper basket and the two sodas to the picnic table right out front, the one in plain view of that window. Mom sat down on the bench facing the sun.

The tenderloin was as big as a dinner plate. The bun sat in the middle of it like a hat on a scarecrow. The fries were hot and salty, and the basket had already gone see-through in one corner with grease.