ChapterOne
Clementine
The white-haired manat the front of the line grabs the salad tongs for the third time.He’s still holding his paper plate in his left hand and trying to holdbothtongs in his right, which is his first mistake.
Mr.Jessop’s second mistake is trying to grab the salad like a claw in one of those stuffed animal machines.The right move is to scoop it with the bottom tong and use the top one to keep the salad in place.
Listen, when you go to enough spaghetti dinners hosted by the Ladies’ Auxiliary to the Lodgepole Rotary Club, you learn a thing or two.
He’s got salad in the tongs.He’s moving his arm slowly from his shoulder, maneuvering the mass of green closer to his paper plate.Everyonebehind him in line is watching, sweating in this non-air-conditioned basement, and praying that this attempt works.
Move your plate closer to the salad bowl, I think.You have two hands, use them both.
Closer.Closer.
Then, an inch away from his plate, a tomato slice falls to the floor.
“Dang it,” Mr.Jessop says.
“Whoops!”says Katie Parker, the rotund, cheerful woman serving meatballs.“Don’t worry about it, Mr.Jessop, we’ll get it in a minute.”
Mr.Jessop just shakes his head, smiling.
“I’ve got butterfingers these days,” he says.
Please let this line move forward, I think.Mr.Jessop is a sweet old man who owns the tiny grocery in town, and we all love him, but right now we just want this buffet line to move, because I canfeelthe sweat trickling down my spine.
Not that my seat is much cooler, but at least I won’t be standing in heels that I last wore three years ago.I’ve only been upright for ten minutes, but I swear my feet are about to develop gangrene and fall off.
“Great spread as always,” Mr.Jessop says.“I keep comin’ back for the great food and the pretty ladies serving it.”
He’s nearly ninety, so it’s charming instead of creepy when he flirts with a woman in her mid-twenties.
“Enjoy!”Katie says brightly, and Mr.Jessop moves toward his table.
The rest of the line takes a deep breath of relief, all at once.From there it moves more or less smoothly: we pick up plates and forks and knives and napkins.Nancy Turner gives me a regulation amount of spaghetti noodles, and Katie Parker gives me three meatballs and one spoonful of sauce.
Say what you want about the Ladies’ Auxiliary, but they know what they’re doing when it comes to feeding a crowd.Every plate of spaghetti is perfectly uniform, and I’ve got no doubt whatsoever that the last plate they serve will look exactly the same as the first.
These ladies donotrun out of food early.
I put my plate down on the buffet, serve myself salad with a tong in each hand, take a glass of non-alcoholic punch, and finally make my way back to my uncomfortable folding chair next to Jennifer, my boss.
“They ought to clear up that bottleneck at the salad,” she says as I sit down, carefully folding my skirt under myself and lowering my butt toward my chair like a person used to wearing heels.
“It’s the tongs,” I say.“They’d be better off with the plastic ones you squeeze, but they always use those fancy wooden ones that the Boy Scouts gifted them a couple years ago.”
Jennifer just shakes her head, then points to my plate and hers.
“Look at this.I bet if we were to get out a scale, we’d have exactly the same amount of spaghetti, sauce, and meatballs.They’ve got military precision with meatballs, but they can’t control their salad?”
She’s mostly kidding.Like, eighty percent kidding.The other twenty percent of Jenniferlovesefficiency and is obsessed with finding solutions to inefficient problems.
Why she decided to work for the U.S.Forest Service, which isn’t exactly a model of efficiency, is beyond me.
I sit down, cut a meatball in half, and wind some spaghetti around my fork.
“Areyougonna go tell Nancy how to make her buffet dinner better?”I ask, grinning at Jennifer.
