Two Lawn Chairs at the Flagpole

Mom did not panic. Mom spent thirty one years in a fourth grade classroom. She held the tin steady, sat up straight, and used the voice.

“All right,” she said. “Line up right here. Single file. Everybody gets half a pie. Nobody grabs. And everybody says thank you, or you go to the back of the line.”

They lined up. I have never seen anything like it. A whole crowd of eight year olds lined up in the grass in a perfectly straight row, quiet as church.

The recess aide came across the lawn then, a woman about my age in a school windbreaker with a whistle around her neck and a clipboard tucked under her arm. Her name tag said Tessie.

“Ma’am,” she said to Mom, kindly, “I’m sorry, I have to check. We’ve got a few allergies in this group. What’s in these?”

“Flour, lard, dried apples, sugar, a little cinnamon,” Mom said, without a pause. “No nuts. No eggs. No milk. Nothing in the house that day but what’s in the pies.”

Tessie flipped through her clipboard, running her finger down a list of names. She looked up at two of the children in line and nodded at them, and then nodded at Mom.

“You’re all right,” she said. Then she smiled for the first time. “Were you a teacher?”

“Fourth grade aide,” Mom said. “Thirty one years in Jackson County.”

“I could tell,” Tessie said. “They don’t line up like that for me.”

Mom broke a pie in half and handed it up to her. “Then you’d better have one too, so they see you’re on our side.”

Tessie laughed out loud, and took it.

Mom broke every pie in half, one at a time, with her old careful fingers. She handed each half to a child and waited for the thank you, and she got one every single time.

One little boy said thank you so quietly she made him say it again, and then she told him he had nice manners and he turned red to the ears and went off grinning.

Mason sat at her feet through all of it, eating his pie slowly to make it last, sugar on his chin.

Every so often he looked up at her like he was making sure she was still there.

When the line was gone and the tin was nearly empty, he stood up and looked at her lap, and then at me, and then at the other kids around them.

Then he climbed right up into her lap, all fifty eight pounds of him, his sneakers dangling down past her knees.

“You’re too big for that,” I said, without thinking.

“He is not,” Mom said, and wrapped both arms around him, and put her chin on his shoulder. “He’ll never be too big for that. Not as long as I’ve got a lap.”