Twelve Hundred Eighty Dollars of Lunch Debt

Addie told her it was Friday and kissed her on the top of the head.

Saturday morning I opened the shop at eight. Faye Combs was my first appointment, as she has been every other Saturday for six years.

Faye runs the cafeteria at Cane Run Elementary. She has served lunch to three generations of that town, and she sits down in my chair like a woman setting down a tray.

She did not say hello. She said, “Jenna, I’m sorry.” I told her it wasn’t hers to be sorry for, and she said she wasn’t so sure about that.

She had been given a printout on Friday morning, and had been asked to confirm the number of children with a negative balance.

“How many?” I said.

“Forty-one.” She looked at her hands in her lap. “The rule is over ten dollars, and forty-one are over it. I’ve been writing those numbers up every month for three years, and nobody has ever once done anything about it.

Nobody. We feed them anyhow. You can’t send a child through the line with an empty tray, it isn’t in me.”

I wrapped the cape around her. “Faye. Are any of them on rosters? Choir, the basketball club, the fall program.”

She didn’t answer right away. In my mirror I watched her decide. Finally she said, very low, “Nine. I counted them Friday after I heard. Nine of them have their names on something this fall.”

“And has anybody taken those nine off?”

She met my eyes in the mirror. “Just Addie.”

Wes got in Sunday at nine at night, gray in the face from eleven hours of driving. He ate cold chicken standing up at the counter while I told him what I had in mind.

I said I was going to pay the whole list. Every child at Cane Run with a negative balance, out loud, in front of the board.

He put his fork down. “Jen. That’s the transmission money.”

It was. We had $1,310 sitting in savings at Farmers Deposit Bank, and it had a name, which was the transmission on my truck.

It shifted hard between second and third and had for about two months. I had been telling myself it would last until spring.

“I know what it is,” I said.

“How much is the whole list?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m finding out in the morning.”

Monday at 8:02 I walked into the Tolliver County Schools central office, which is a low brick building next to the bus garage, and stood at the counter.

A clerk with reading glasses on a beaded chain told me Mr. Cobb would be out in a minute. He came out in short sleeves and a tie, holding a coffee, a stooped man of fifty-eight with a gray mustache.

Dennis Cobb has kept the books for this district since before I was in high school. He recognized me and he recognized my last name and I watched his face go through three things in a row, and the third one was tired.

“Mrs. Hargrove,” he said. “I believe I know why you’re here.”

“I’d like to know what’s owed on student meal accounts at Cane Run Elementary,” I said. “The total. Not names. I don’t want any names.”

He studied me for a second. Then he set the coffee down and walked to a desk behind the counter and tapped on a keyboard with two fingers.