The lunch lady of hollow ridge playthrough

Turn 9 of 32

the channel changes to a southern and everyone starts laughing in the same southern older lady voice. you dont feel wired anymore about this place. you are doing great with everyone. the show continues until lunch which today is mac and chesse. you all make the lunch and soon, you name disapears, its now tammy, everyone here is tammy. lunch is done and you all eat while talking about the show.

The cartoon ends and the channel drifts, static snapping, until it settles on an old southern program — a cooking show, a woman in a floral apron frying chicken on a porch set, calling everybody 'hon.' The room fills with laughter, twelve voices laughing together in the same warm drawl, and you feel yourself laughing too, easy and unforced, and somewhere in the middle of it you notice the wire has gone out of you. The dread you have carried since the bus door closed has thinned to something small and far away, like a radio playing in another room. You feel good here. You feel like you're doing great with everyone, and the thought arrives without a single argument against it.

The show runs long, comfortable as an afternoon, until your stomach speaks on schedule and the room rises together. Lunch today is mac and cheese — the walk-in has it, cases of the frozen blocks, the same brand from somebody's childhood, from everybody's childhood — and the line assembles itself around you, twelve women in rhythm, cheese sauce whisked smooth, trays squared, portions even.

'Best get the table wiped down, hon,' someone says, and someone else answers 'yes ma'am,' and it flows like water.

It happens during service. You reach for a tray and someone behind you says, 'Coming through, Tammy,' and your hands pause, because the name doesn't land as wrong. It lands as yours. You turn and thank her in the drawl, and only some small far corner of you notes that your name was Mara Ives, that it was on a catering roster once, that a news anchor read it off a screen this morning. Around the table the name moves from mouth to mouth — Tammy, Tammy, hon, Tammy — and every woman answers to it, first try, every time.

You eat mac and cheese and talk about the show. The woman on the porch, the way she seasoned her chicken, whether her kitchen was bigger than yours here. Your kitchen here. Somebody says the serving line could use fresh flowers and three of you agree to look for a vase after lunch, and the conversation is warm and ordinary and full, and Tammy eats her lunch with the others, and it is very good.