The Taco Trailer That Crossed the Street

Teenage boys from the football team who had gotten a note from the coach to pick up an order for the whole bench.

A man I did not know, in a truck from two counties over, who had seen the post shared on a Facebook page for county fair people.

The tacos came out of that window in paper boats. Three for eight dollars. A dollar of every eight went into an ice cream bucket that Clyde’s parts counter kid had labeled in marker, food pantry, and carried out to the end of the counter.

I took money at the second window. I had spent fourteen years making sure a column of numbers came out right, and I made change for two hours without making a single mistake.

At twelve fifteen, an old man at the back of the line stopped talking and straightened his back.

It was Mr. Hendricks. Eighty four years old, in his good gray jacket, with a walker he had been using since his hip surgery.

He had come up Main Street from his house on Locust, one block at a time, and now he stood at the end of the line with the woman with the baby in front of him and a Lutheran Men’s Club regular behind.

I stepped out from the second window. “Mr. Hendricks,” I said. “You don’t have to stand in line. Come up. I’ll bring one out.”

“No, ma’am.” He put his cap back on, very carefully. “I’ll wait my turn.”

“It’s a long line, sir.” He reached the window at twelve forty.

Mallory leaned out and put the paper boat in his hand herself, and then she came around the end of the trailer, which she had not done for anyone all day, and held his elbow while he sat on a folding chair Marvin had set out.

He ate the first taco very slowly. Then he put it down and held it in his hand and looked up at the row of green tractors for a while.

“My Evelyn made these,” he said, finally. “Not exactly. Her mother was from Chihuahua. She’d braise the pork all night with the oranges.” He shook his head. “I haven’t had one in nineteen years.”

Mallory said nothing. She held his elbow. I turned my back, because I was crying, and I was not going to do that in an implement lot in front of two hundred people.

Marvin was standing behind me. He had been behind me the whole time. He did not say anything. He put his hand on the back of my neck and left it there.

By one o’clock the cash box and the tally sheet agreed on two hundred and fourteen plates. Mallory was out of carnitas by twelve fifty.

She switched to the black beans and the rice, then ran out of tortillas, and the last forty people in line left with boats of rice and beans and pico and an apology and a promise of next Friday.

Nobody complained. Not one person. Russ stood in his front window with his arms folded. He had been standing there since eleven. I had seen him at eleven fifteen, and again at noon, and he had not moved.

He was looking across the street at a line of people he had known all his life, standing in an implement lot in the cold with paper boats in their hands.