Looking Real Good

carrots and a scoop of corn on them, and they shimmied down the line to pick their protein. On the menu today was baked chicken and gravy. The gravy was clumpy and beige, not at all aesthetically pleasing, but it smelled like gravy, and that was sometimes as good as it got at the kitchens.
It was better than nothing anyway.
More people filled the place of the mother and her son. I offered smiles and friendly greetings to everyone who stopped in front of my station. I asked them about their day and asked a gentleman in a long coat and fingerless gloves how many people were still waiting in line.
“About three times as many who are eating in here,” he told me with a crooked smile. He was missing three of his front teeth.
“How long did you have to wait?”
“I don’t have a watch,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you. But I’d guess it took me an hour or so to get inside. Not bad at all. Not bad at all. Smells good, too. You make this?”
I laughed and shook my head. “No, and be glad for it. My cooking never turns out. I always put too much salt in things and I overcook it. This stuff here? This is the good stuff.”
The man flashed me another one of his crooked smiles before carrying on down the line toward the chicken. The rest of the afternoon moved along in a blur. There were no pauses in the steady stream of people filing in and filling their plates.
There were a lot of hungry people out there to feed.
I didn’t mind. I liked being busy, and I liked meeting new people. Volunteer work made me feel fulfilled. I could remember a childhood that didn’t feel all that long ago when I’d been the one in need. I grew up in a rough area where people didn’t have a lot of money. My grandmother raised me after my own mother gave me up and lost herself in drugs. Sometimes as a young girl, I used to wonder what it might have been like to have a mother in my life who loved me more than she loved her addiction.
Now as a grown woman, I could see how warped that thinking was.
Addiction stripped choices away, among other things. It wasn’t that my mother hadn’t loved me. Quite the opposite actually. She’d left me with her own mother because she knew she would fall short. She knew I deserved a fair shot and the only way I’d get that was with my grandmother.
And my mother had been right.
My grandmother was a kind woman who worked too many hours at a bakery six blocks away from our apartment. We made a happy home together, but the money never went far enough. Soup kitchens like this were familiar to me. I ate many meals at collapsible tables with strangers packed in elbow to elbow.
I even made friends in those places.
I’d met my best friend in one of the apartment buildings in the complex, for instance. She and I were thick as thieves growing up. We used to play kick the can with the other neighborhood kids. Sometimes, we’d change things up and have a game of capture the flag, but kick the can was our standard go-to.
I never won, but that wasn’t the point.
Three hours had passed since I assumed mashed-potato duty. I was happy to take a break when Rodney tapped me on the shoulder.
“Hey, Kayla,” he said, nodding toward the kitchen doors. “I finally have more coverage in the back to stay on top of the dishes. There was something I wanted to talk to you about. Can you spare a minute?”
I nodded and handed the spatula to the woman beside me manning the wax-beans station. I gave a coy look and asked if she was sure she could double-fist it.
She told me to get going so I could come back sooner and relieve her.
I followed Rodney through the kitchens to the back room where he kept a small personal office. It was from this space that he managed the kitchens. He was a one-man show staying on top of fundraising events, bottle drives, specialty menus, donations, and much more. He had stacks of papers everywhere, including on the one chair at his desk, and he gathered them up and stacked them on top of an already overwhelming pile on the floor.
“Sit,” he said, nodding pointedly at the chair.
I sat.
Rodney leaned up against the wall across from me. “I have a partnership with the local school district to provide free lunches to hungry kids and I recently got word that their funding has been cut in half due to lower donations this year.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Indeed. That means fifty percent of their kids will go without lunches if we can’t get more money together to cover the losses. We’ll have to rely on outside community groups to revive it. Even that’s a stretch. We’re going to need our own manpower to handle deliveries and such. I have volunteers willing to take that task on but I need some help on the ground level to reach out to these community groups and other local organizations to kind of get the ball rolling. I was hoping you’d be willing to lend a hand. It’s never easy asking for money but you have higher success rates than anyone I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s the charming smile and the disarming sense of humor,” I said not so humbly.
Rodney laughed. “I’m not going to disagree with that. I know it’s a lot to ask and you’re already a very busy woman. If you can’t fit this into your schedule, I understand. I can ask someone else.”
“Who?”
He scratched the back of his neck. “I hadn’t gotten that far but I always manage to make something work, don’t I?”
I smiled graciously. “Don’t worry, Rodney. I can handle it. It’s not too much. I promise. Besides, you know this is something I’d love to be involved in.