The Tenderloin at My Sister’s Window

She put her hand on top of Kenna’s head, on her hair, the way she used to when Kenna was little and had a fever.

“Look at me, honey,” she said.

Kenna looked up.

Mom smiled at her. Full, wide, with every new tooth. The crooked one in front catching the light.

“That’s the tooth,” Mom said, “that you knocked loose on the swing set in 1992. Dr. Kettler put it back crooked just for you.”

Kenna made a sound I’d never heard from her. Half a laugh and half something else. She grabbed Mom’s hand off her hair and held it against her own cheek with both of hers.

“I’m so sorry, Mama,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

“I know you are,” Mom said. “I’ve known it since June. I was waiting on you to know it too.”

It was Kenna’s idea to pay it back. I want to be clear about that. Nobody asked her. I hadn’t brought it up, and I wasn’t going to, not that day.

She wiped her face on her sleeve and looked at me across the table. “Who paid for them?”

“I did,” I said. “Out of our truck fund. Merritt said to.”

She nodded slowly. She looked down at the order pad in her hand, and then she tore off the back page, and wrote something on it with the little pen they keep on a string at the window.

She slid it across to me. It said, in her round handwriting, $50 every Friday, starting tomorrow.

“I can do fifty,” she said. “I worked it out. If I pick up Saturday mornings, I can do fifty.”

“That’s thirty-two weeks,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “I can count.”

Then her break was over. She stood up and went around and hugged Mom from behind, her chin on top of Mom’s silver curls, and Mom reached up and patted her arm.

Then she went back in through the side door, and slid the window open again, and leaned out to take the next order, a man in a seed cap. Her eyes were still red. She did it anyway.

Mom and I sat there a while longer in the sun. The light was getting longer and more gold, and the shadow of the drive-in roof was stretching out across the gravel toward us.

Mom ate three more fries, slowly, one at a time. Then she said, “I’m full,” and for the first time in four months she said it like it was true.

“Liesl,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Merritt paid for half of it,” I said.

“I’ll thank him too. I’ll make him a pie.” She thought about it. “A real pie. With a crust I can eat.”

On the drive home she rolled her window down a few inches and let the cool air come in, and she hummed along to the gospel station out of Ottumwa, and every so often I saw her reach up and touch her own lip with one finger, like she was checking it was still true.

On Sunday, Mom went to church. She sat in her usual pew, third from the front on the left, and when they stood for the last hymn she sang with her whole mouth open, and Opal reached over and squeezed her hand.

After the service, there was a potluck in the basement for a couple celebrating fifty years. Mom went down. She got a plate. She sat at the long table with the other ladies from Wednesday circle and ate ham loaf and green bean casserole and a piece of sheet cake.