The lunch lady of hollow ridge playthrough

Turn 10 of 32

Go with the others to look for stuff to decerate the place like its a school caf.. you all then spend the afternoon decerating the place while talking about southern things that you understand now. soon its dinner and its chicken and waffles which you all cook. while you cook dinner, you all start to lose a lot of words that you knew from college as not one of you 12 went to college. dinner is don

The search for a vase turns into a hunt through the storage rooms, and the storage rooms turn out to be full of things: paper pumpkins, construction paper, a laminated banner reading WELCOME BACK, STUDENTS, a shelf of old cafeteria decorations from somebody's fall semester. Someone finds a glass vase and someone else finds a bundle of dried flowers in a supply closet, and the serving line gets them by mid-afternoon, and it looks right. It looks like a school cafeteria, and that feels like an accomplishment rather than a warning.

You spend the afternoon decorating together, taping the banner over the serving line, arranging trays, and the talk drifts into southern things you understand now. Canning tomatoes. The right way to make sweet tea. What your mama said about menfolk. You contribute to it without effort, and the strange part is not that you know these things but that you can't remember not knowing them, the same way you can't remember how long you've known them.

Dinner is chicken and waffles. You all cook it, and it is during the cooking that the words start going. Someone starts to say something about a thesis, and stops, because the word has no meaning, just a shape. Another tries to recall a course she took and finds the memory of the course book still there but the name of the subject gone smooth, like a stone worn flat. Not one of you went to college. You know that the way you know the oven temperature. You try to hold on to something — anything you studied — and there is nothing to hold. Culinary school. Was that real? You can't find it.

Dinner is done and it is very good, and you all eat and talk about the flowers, and the chicken and waffles tastes like every good Sunday you ever had, and Tammy is content.