The Tenderloin at My Sister’s Window

Mom picked up the tenderloin with both hands. She held it up a moment and just looked at it, and then she looked at me, and she smiled.

Then she took a bite.

She chewed slow and careful, the way Dr. Kettler told her. Her eyes closed. She swallowed, and opened her eyes, and took another bite.

I sat across from her in my orange vest, my dark blond hair falling out of its clip, with my chin in my hand, and I just watched my mother eat. I didn’t touch my soda. I didn’t touch the fries. I don’t think I had ever been so happy to watch anybody do anything in my whole life.

“It’s good,” Mom said, with her mouth still a little full. “Lord, Liesl. It’s so good.”

The farmer at the next table, a man I half knew from the elevator, looked over and tipped his cap at her. He didn’t know what it meant. He just saw an old woman enjoying her lunch, and he tipped his cap, and Mom tipped her head right back at him.

Behind us, the side door of the drive-in opened. I heard it squeak, and I heard the screen bang shut.

Kenna was walking toward our table. She’d taken off her paper hat. She was still holding her order pad in one hand like she’d forgotten it was there.

She stopped at the end of the bench and looked at Mom. Mom looked back at her, chewing, and didn’t stop.

Then my sister sat down across from Mom, next to me, on the same bench, and put her elbows on the table and her face in her hands.

“I took my break,” she said through her fingers. “I only get fifteen minutes.”

“Then you’d better talk fast,” Mom said gently, and took another bite.

I’m not going to pretend I remember every word of what Kenna said. Some of it was lost because she was crying too hard. Some of it I didn’t want to hear, and some of it I needed to.

She told it the way she’d told it to Mom in July. The truck was a week from getting picked up. The man had called her at work twice. Without the truck she couldn’t get to the drive-in, and without the drive-in she couldn’t pay anything at all.

“I told myself Mom could wait a month,” Kenna said. “One month. I’d catch up on the truck and then I’d pay her back, and it’d be like nothing happened.”

“And then?” I said. It was the first thing I’d said to her.

She looked at me with her face all wet. “And then a month was two. And then I couldn’t look at her. And then it was easier to just drive by.”

“She lost twenty-two pounds,” I said quietly. “She quit going to Wednesday circle. She put her hand over her mouth every time the mailman came.”

I didn’t say it to be mean. I said it because it was true, and because someone had to say it out loud at a picnic table in daylight, where it couldn’t hide anymore.

Kenna put her face back down in her hands.

Mom finished half the tenderloin. She wrapped the rest in a napkin to take home, and she wiped her fingers one at a time, the way she always has, and then she reached across the table.