The Towel I Kept for Orva

I said, “Let me call Pastor Ellen.” She said no. I said, “Let me at least take the pan.” She said, “You will not touch that pan. It is for tomorrow.” Then she looked at me for the first time, and she said, very quietly, “Promise me you won’t tell anyone, Dirk. I do not want to hear the word careful for the rest of my life.”

I promised. I stood in that church kitchen for another ten minutes with my cap in my hand, and she slid the loaf into the oven, with her left hand, with the door hanging off one hinge, and I watched her do it and I did not stop her. I have asked myself since what kind of man stands there. What I know now is that I was working out a sum, and the sum came out the same way no matter how I carried the numbers.

She was going to bake that loaf every first Sunday until the day she could not stand at that oven, and the day she could not stand at that oven was going to be a day when nobody else was in the building.

One Roll

I have to take you back thirty-three years, because Orva does not know why I could not simply tell her to stop, and the only way to explain it is to start with a dinner roll.

My father left on Saturday, the twelfth of December, 1992. He took the pickup and the money from the coffee can and a chest of drawers I had not known he planned to take, and he left my mother, Wynette, a note that she read once and burned in the stove. I was ten years old. My brother, Reid, was seven. My mother had a job on the night shift at the egg plant on the edge of Tarrant, packing eggs from ten at night until six in the morning, and she took it the following Monday.

So from that Monday on, I was the man of the house, which meant I put my brother in his bed at eight and I sat on the couch with the lights off and the radio low until I heard her truck at ten to six. I do not think I slept eight hours in a row between Christmas and the end of that school year.

The lunch line at school was the best meal of our day, and I knew it, and so did Reid. At Tarrant Consolidated, the hot lunch was cooked by a woman in a hairnet and a white apron named Mrs. Ketterling, who knew every child’s name and which of us took seconds. She made her own rolls, two hundred and ten every morning, still warm at eleven with the tops split where the steam had come through. They were the best thing I had ever eaten.

In the second week of January, I sat down with my tray at the end of a table and I ate the soup and the green beans and half of my roll. Then I wrapped the other half in a paper napkin and put it in my coat pocket for Reid, who was in second grade and ate at a different hour. I did it the way you do something you hope nobody has seen.

She had seen. I know now that she had been watching me for a week. She came out from behind the steam table the next day, when the line was nearly done, and she stopped beside me with a dish towel over her shoulder, and without a word she set a second roll on my tray, a whole one, on top of my napkin. She said, “That’s the end of the batch, honey. It won’t keep.” I said thank you. She said, “Don’t thank a roll.” There was an end of the batch every day after that, and she never once said what it was for.