The Mortgage Receipts Beside the Gravy Boat
The slap was not hard.
I want to say that first, because people hear the word and picture something out of a movie. It was an open hand, quick, the way you would swat a dog down off the counter. It caught me on the left cheek while my hand was still on the bread basket I had just set down by the pot roast.
It was the sound that did it. A flat little pop in a room where the only other noise was the furnace ticking and somebody’s fork coming to rest on a plate.
“Not in my house,” Lorraine said.
She was standing. I had not seen her get up. She had her lavender cardigan buttoned to the collar the way she wore it to church.
“I found the sack in my trash,” she said. “Under the potato peelings. Hy-Vee bakery, one dozen, the orange sticker still on it.”
She pointed at the basket.
“You put those in my mother’s basket,” she said. “Under my mother’s towel. And you carried them to my table like you made them.”
“I never said I made them, Lorraine.”
“You let us think it.”
My cheek had started to heat up. Not pain so much as a warm print, the exact shape of four fingers. I took my hand off the basket very carefully, because it wanted to shake and I was not going to let it.
Aunt Dot had gone to the kitchen for the coffee. She was standing in the swinging door with the pot in her hand, and she had forgotten she was holding it.
At the head of the table, Gene had both hands flat on the oak on either side of his plate. He was looking at his wife as if she had spoken to him in another language.
And my husband, beside me in the red flannel shirt I had ironed for him that morning, was looking at his mashed potatoes.
I waited.
“Brian,” I said.
He did not lift his head. He moved a piece of roast an inch to the left with his fork.
“She’s just teaching you, Katie.”
That was all. Six words, said to a dinner plate.
Let me tell you how I came to be sitting at that table with a pink cheek and a purse full of paper.
My name is Katie. I am thirty-two years old and I clean teeth for a living, four days a week and every other Saturday, at a dental office on Washington Street in Chillicothe, Missouri. I have done it for nine years. I am good at it. Children who cry for everybody else will sit still for me.
I did not grow up on a farm. I grew up in an upstairs apartment in St. Joseph with a mother who worked nights at the hospital laundry and slept days. Supper was whatever I could reach. Nobody ever stood at a counter beside me and showed me how to tell when dough has had enough.
I say that not for pity. I say it because for four years my mother-in-law had treated it as a moral failing.
Lorraine was sixty-eight that fall. She had come to that farmhouse as a bride at nineteen and had never, as far as I could tell, sat all the way down in it. She made her own noodles. She canned ninety quarts of green beans a summer. She took the yeast rolls to every funeral dinner at the church for forty years, and people asked for them by name.