21. Della
DELLA
Doc Ellison has opinions as other men have hobbies, and at my follow-up he takes his glasses off before he says any one of them, which is how I know to sit still for it.
“Bloodwork’s beautiful. Taper’s ahead of schedule, if anything.
” He polishes the glasses on his sweater, unhurried, a man who has delivered half this county and buried none of his composure doing it.
“Which is my professional way of saying it’s coming on the early side, Della Rae.
Your body’s been waiting years for the green light, and it is not going to idle at the intersection. ” Glasses back on. The look over them.
“You know the signs better than I do. You’ve catered them.”
“From the hallway side of the door.”
“Well,” says Doc, gentle as a man closing a till, “the door side now. Eat double, sleep more. And decide what you want the stretch to look like before your body files the paperwork for you, because it will, and its handwriting is nothing like yours.”
I drive home informing the van that I have never once in my life had paperwork filed for me, while the van, which has known me longest, keeps its counsel.
Here’s what the catering side taught me, nearly a decade of meal trains and drop-offs and discreet double orders.
Pre-heat announces itself in the appetite first, then the thermostat, then the hands.
The omega starts eating like a line cook, then complains the room’s too cold and too hot in the same shift, and then, always, every time, I could set the van’s clock by it if the van had a clock, the hands start pulling the den together.
Soft things migrate first. Blankets go missing off couches and turn up in bedrooms. One customer of mine, a paralegal out toward the county line, sweet woman, built hers entirely out of her pack’s laundry well before she’d admit to a single symptom, and when her alpha called in the standing order he said, laughing, so fond it bent the phone line, “She’s furious about it.
She’s re-folding everything and putting it back and an hour later it’s in the bedroom again.
It’s like watching a woman argue with the tide. ”
I catered that woman’s whole heat. I remember thinking, from the hallway side, with my trays. Bless her heart, imagine losing an argument with your own hands.
So the appetite arrives first, per the literature.
I eat a full breakfast sitting down, sitting, at my own counter, before open, eggs, biscuits, the good preserves, plate after plate.
My body receives it like a county receiving disaster relief, and fine, that one I’ll allow.
Doc said double, I’m a woman who follows a recipe.
Then the thermostat goes. I run my kitchen a certain temperature; I have run it that temperature for years; in one single shift I adjust the back-room thermostat four times and accuse the Pelham twins’ corner booth of harboring a draft it has never harbored.
Hank looks up from his crossword at the fourth adjustment, looks back down, writes a note, and I’d bet the register it wasn’t a crossword answer.
And then it’s the hands.
At least I caught them at it, which is more than the paralegal managed.
I come upstairs after close, and I’m halfway through the apartment door before I see what I’m carrying.
The wool throw from the office chair, the office chair downstairs, which means I took it off the chair, carried it up a flight of stairs without one conscious thought in my head, and I stand there in the doorway holding it like a woman who’s found a stranger’s baby on her hip.
The bedroom’s worse than the doorway.
The good quilt’s already migrated off the guest bed.
Both pillows off the daybed. The sheepskin from the van seat.
My hands went out to the van at some point, in the cold, and I have no memory of the trip.
It’s all arranged, too, never piled, arranged, in the corner between the bed and the wall, walls on two sides as, I know this, I know it professionally, as they like it, defensible, warm, away from the window.
It is, Lord help me, well done. Whoever built this knew what she was doing.
My hands have apparently been moonlighting.
And on top of the pile, folded with more care than I fold anything I own.
Theo’s flannel. The one he put on my shoulders like a medal ceremony, that I have been meaning to launder and return with a professional briskness that has somehow not materialized in all this time.
Jonah’s fleece, left on the end stool after a small-hours visit.
The visit after the visit, when he came in for eggs, we both agreed to pretend the base needed, then sat and let me feed him, then forgot his fleece, if a man like that forgets things, which he does not, which I have declined to examine.
And Wade’s canvas jacket.
That one stops me cold, because Wade Merritt hasn’t set foot in my diner since before the fork drop.
His crew comes down, two of them, and the third seat stands empty like a tooth gone missing, while his thermos moves on and off my back step like the world’s most repressed correspondence.
But his jacket’s been on my lost-and-found hook since the day of the walk-in, when he shed it to help Jonah carry trays and left it.
I have been meaning to send it up the mountain with one of the others for a stretch of time, I am not prepared to number.
My hands are provisioning a nest with that man’s jacket in it, and my mouth hasn’t said six sentences to him since the jar came open.
I sit down on the edge of my bed, across from the corner arrangement, and I am furious. Genuinely, thoroughly furious, hands shaking with it, at nobody I can charge for it.
“Well, hell,” I tell the nest, out loud, flat-out, which from me is a five-alarm event.
This whole county has heard me say “unchristian things” about a failed hollandaise and never once heard the things themselves.
And the nest sits there being soft, true, full of stolen flannel, entirely unrepentant, like it knows the swearing’s a confession too.
Since I took the keys, I have run this body like a kitchen.
Inventory in, inventory out, feelings priced, portioned, everything on the ticket.
And here it is after hours, off recipe, freelancing, pulling three men’s laundry into a corner to build a soft nest that feels defended and honest. It didn’t ask, it never asks.
First the forks, then the pillow, now this.
I snatch the flannel off the top and get as far as the bedroom door with it, refolding as I go, full of briskness, a woman putting her house back in order, and I stop at the door.
I stand there, the flannel smelling of cut pine and clean rope, then I go back and put it down where it was.
Where it was, which is where it goes, not where I found it.
There’s a difference, and I felt the difference in my hands, and that’s the part that scares me worse than Willard’s whole cream folder.
You can lie with your mouth all day, I’ve watched this town do it gently for years.
Nobody lies with their hands. The hands are the sworn testimony.
So I do what I do. If the body’s going to file paperwork, fine. I’m the fastest paperwork in the county.
I go down to my kitchen at the wrong hour and I cook.
Batch after batch. The trays, the good foil ones, the casserole in the dish nobody has to return.
Meals for Hank, who won’t cook for himself when the crossword’s hard; for the Pelhams, who fight over kitchens; for Arlene; for Mrs. Alder, soup, the soft kind; for Wren, who feeds a town every morning and comes home to a bakery with no bread in it.
I cook the county’s usual orders for a heat, every one of them from memory, and I label the trays with the pie pencil.
Reheat low, add the crumbs at the end, you know the drill.
I stack them in the walk-in by pickup sequence, with no dates anywhere, ready to hand out the door.
Provisioning everyone else for my own absence.
I see it, you think I don’t see it? Somewhere in this town there should be one tray with my name on it, and I am constitutionally incapable of cooking it, and I stand in my walk-in at the coldest, honestest hour there is, surrounded by other people’s suppers, informing the compressor, “I’ve catered this exact stretch a hundred times.
I know the drill better than my own body does. ”
The compressor offers its usual philosophy.
Upstairs, in the warm corner of my bedroom, arranged by hands that have never once perjured themselves, there’s a nest built for four with three men’s clothes in it, and every tray in this walk-in says the drill isn’t the part of me that’s telling the truth.