Twelve Hundred Eighty Dollars of Lunch Debt

The county office takes the roster at five o’clock on the last Friday of the month. She has sent that roster for nine years.

I finished Bonnie’s foils. I rinsed her, toned her, and dried her hair, and at 5:20 I walked her to the door and told her I’d see her in two weeks.

Then I locked the shop, sat in my truck on Main Street in front of the old Western Auto building, and called my husband.

Wes drives a milk tanker out of the creamery in Elizabethtown, mostly Ohio runs. He was somewhere past Cincinnati, and I could hear the road under his voice.

I read him the email. He didn’t say anything for a long time, and then he said, “Want me to go see her? I can be there tomorrow night.”

“No,” I said. “If you go over there, it’s a family fight. Everybody tells it how they want, and by Sunday it’s about Mama and who said what at Labor Day.

I don’t want a fight. I want it where people can see it.”

“See what, Jen?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. I really did not. I just knew that a fifteen-dollar problem had been turned into something else on purpose, and that a phone call between two sisters was exactly where she would want it to stay.

So I tried the legitimate ways, in order, because I am a person who does that. I drove out to Cane Run Elementary at ten to six.

The front doors were locked, the lot was empty, and her white Equinox was gone. I called the superintendent’s office and got a recording that said the office would reopen Monday at eight.

I did not have Dr. Peck’s cell number. Nobody on Main Street has a superintendent’s cell number. I drove home with the radio off.

Addie was at the kitchen table when I came in, with her index cards fanned out in front of her like a hand of rummy.

Her teacher, Mrs. Dye, had already texted her mother, who had texted Addie’s friend’s mother, who had told Addie. That is how news moves in a town of two thousand people. Faster than any email.

“Mama,” she said. She wasn’t crying. She had that flat, careful voice that children use when they are trying hard not to. “Is it because of Grandma?”

I put my purse down and sat across from her. “Is what because of Grandma?”

“Aunt Melissa. Is she mad at us because of Grandma?”

I want to tell you I said something wise. What I said was, “I think there are two different things, baby, and I’m going to take care of both of them.” Then I asked her what word she was on, and she said it was the Greek ones, and I said I would quiz her after supper.

My mother sat at the end of the table in her blue cardigan, listening with her head tilted. Her name is Ruby. She is seventy-one, and for twenty-nine years she typed the bulletin at Cane Run Baptist Church and never once misspelled a visiting preacher’s name.

In the spring she had a string of small strokes, the kind you cannot see on a scan until afterward, and since then the days come and go on her.

She moved into my back bedroom in June. Some mornings she calls me Melissa. Some mornings she calls me ma’am, very politely.