Turn 11 · The lunch lady of hollow ridge playthrough

you all talk about becoming mothers so young and this job is paying for you as all your kiddos have moved out. you all talk about being single mothers, raising the kid on benefits and still being on benefits currently and this being a job that you love. soon you all read the book and see the next pages have text about being southern, caring about the kids and being a team. you all then sleep

The talk after supper settles into the kind of long, unhurried conversation the drawl seems made for. 'I had my kidos young,' Tammy says — she means her kids, all named now like yours, all grown and gone — 'raised 'em on benefits in a trailer, worked whatever I could, and look, I'm still on 'em, and that's alright.' Heads nod around the table, your own among them. You remember a mother now, single, tired, food stamps and WIC and a boy who moved out to Houston and calls on Sundays. You raised him on your own. It was hard and you loved it and now the kiddos are gone and this — this kitchen, these ladies — is the job you love, the one that fits. 'Feeding children's the best work there is,' someone says, and everybody says 'that's the truth,' and you say it too, and mean it. Afterward you drift to the dormitory and pick up the grey books the way you'd pick up a devotional. The blank pages are not blank anymore. Page six carries clean block print: A good lunch lady is a southern lady — patient, warm, and proud of where she's from. Page seven: The children come first, before her feet, before her evening, before anything. Page eight: She is not one woman. She is a team, and the team is one woman. You read them aloud in the shared voice, taking turns, and each line lands like something you've always believed, arriving a little late to the page. Tammy reads the last one twice, slow, and then smooths the page with her hand like she's tucking it in. The pages after that are blank again, waiting, and nobody says so out loud. Nobody needs to. You all get ready for bed in the easy silence of women who've shared a room for years, hairnets set out, lights going off one lamp at a time, and somebody says 'night, hon,' and eleven voices say 'night' back. You lie down in your narrow bed with the grey sheet pulled up, and your last thought is that tomorrow's a workday, and that's a good thing to be. Sleep comes fast and dreamless and the whole dormitory goes under in the same breath, twelve chests rising on the same count, while somewhere behind the serving line the clock ticks on at 8:30.