The lunch lady of hollow ridge playthrough

Turn 28 of 32

Cook chicken tenders and fires with the other Tammys as the stations rotate again. after eating and cleaning, you ready the book and it talks about the outfit, hair, hairnet, gloves and how a lunch lady lives. after, sleep time.

Supper time comes on the dot, and the wheel turns another notch — yesterday's cooks fetch, the fetchers serve, and you step up to the fryers with three of you, baskets of chicken tenders going down into the oil in even waves. The fries come next, shoestring and plenty, salted the moment they're drained, and the kitchen smells like Friday at school, like the best day of the cafeteria week. 'Don't crowd her now, hon, let the oil breathe,' Tammy says at the next fryer, and you give the baskets room, and the tenders come up golden and the fries come up crisp, and the line serves twelve plates the same — four tenders, a fair scoop of fries, a little cup of fruit — and it tastes like the good years, and it is very good.

The cleaning after is quick, the pride of it shared all the way around, the yellow gloves slick with suds and the counters shining, and then you take up the grey books on the dormitory beds, because it's that hour again. The blank pages are not blank anymore.

Page fifteen says: Her uniform is her honor, worn clean and complete, for the children know her by her dress. Page sixteen says: Her hair is put up neat under her net, for not one hair of hers belongs in the food. Page seventeen says: She gloves her hands and keeps them to the work, for a lunch lady's hands serve, and do not take. And page eighteen says: She rises with the morning, serves with the day, and sleeps with the sun, for the kitchen keeps her hours, and she keeps the kitchen's.

You read them aloud, taking turns like always, and every line lands like something you have known since you were a girl. 'We sure do, don't we,' Tammy says at that last one, and the room agrees, twelve voices, one voice, and you look down at your gloved hands folded in your lap, at the apron neat over your belly, at the net snug over the bun, and everything about you is finished and right.

The lamps go out one at a time and twelve chests rise on the same count, and the clock ticks on at 8:30, and Tammy is content.