Sunday Gravy
Marisol set my glasses back on my nose with both hands, the way you’d fit a pair on a child, and said, quietly enough that only I could hear, “Mrs. Whitaker, would you walk with me one second?”
Kendra said, “Excuse me, we have a table waiting,” and Marisol, without turning her head, said, “Of course. Rosa will take your party to the back room. Complimentary prosecco for the adults. Mrs. Whitaker will join you in a moment.”
I’d never seen Kendra outranked in a doorway. She opened her mouth and found nobody to aim it at.
My name is Joan Whitaker. I’m seventy, a retired school-cafeteria manager from Dayton, Ohio, which means I spent twenty-nine years feeding four hundred children a day and noticing which ones ate like they were afraid someone would take the tray. I raised my son, Michael, on a cafeteria salary and a widow’s pension after my husband, Don, died in 1998 of a heart attack on a county road, in a plow truck, with the heater running.
I also fostered. Nobody ever put it on a résumé. From 1999 to 2011, I took in nineteen children through the county, in my spare room on Maple Street, for anywhere from a weekend to two years. The state paid $19 a day. I spent about thirty. I kept a notebook on the kitchen shelf where each child’s name went, with the date they came and the date they left, and a line beneath for anything worth remembering. Tyrell, 9, hates peas, loves the radio. DeShawn, 14, taught himself to fix the dryer.
I didn’t tell Michael how many there were. He was a teenager and had opinions about sharing a bathroom.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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