Sunday Dinners

The cupboards bare, the grimy fridge ravaged but for the half empty blue box of pasta on top of it, Sophie grabbed the half eaten almond cookie from her school bag. She didn’t eat the half that was missing but when someone leaves a gift on the lunch table you don’t decline. Gifts of abandoned milk cartons, granny smith apples, and half eaten cookies filled the inbetweens when school lunch was days from a real dinner.

Sophie didn’t know what if anything her mother would make for dinner on most nights. When they weren’t eating overcooked pasta they were eating popcorn, maybe hot dogs for dinner.

She took her treat to her bedroom and reached for her favorite book from under the bed and sat at her desk. Sophie nibbled her cookie and flipped pages of the book until she landed on the scene of the grand banquet.

There were days when she didn’t have the knot in her inside every time she thought of her next meal. Days when the time and cost of a meal weren’t unknown. Sunday dinners were the one meal of the week the oven came to life in the apartment. Sophie would find something to do while the oven was working its magic. She would run down the block to aunt Kristie’s place, bike to the park three blocks away, stroll to the market, only to hurry back to smell and feel the warmth of a real dinner.

Her mother planned every Sunday meal meticulously: breakfast was thick french toast with strawberries and powdered sugar with a side of perfectly browned Canadian bacon, lunch was breaded chicken sandwiches with rosemary potatoes, and for dinner, Sophie helped her mother prepare meatloaf, asparagus and homemade mac and cheese. She loved chopping ends of asparagus, tossing them in oil, grating cheese and spreading breadcrumbs on top of the mac and cheese.

Sophie slammed the book closed and raced out of her room reaching for her blue coat on the kitchen chair as she headed out the door. She reached the bottom of the stairs and eyed the greasy brown bags her upstairs neighbor carried passed her.

She didn’t want to ask her friends for food. She didn’t want the look in their eyes when she asked for help, but Sophie had made her mind that she couldn’t afford pride, it’s more costly than food.

She crept through the front garden, passed brown shrubbery and ran her open palm gently over the top of the big red ribbon tied to one shrub. She stood at the front door of Clara’s house waiting for the holiday reef in front of her to spiral and pull her into another time, a past when her father was alive and her family were all together at her grandmother’s place. Not that food or anything was in abundance back then but at least things were easier.

Sophie knocked on the door. No answer. She knocked on the door again, a hurried, desperate knock. No answer. She hadn’t owned a phone in coming up on a full year. Her mother, in her rosy, playful voice, put it to her like this: “You can have a phone or we can have heating in January. Your choice.” She left her friends house and turned onto the avenue walking in the opposite direction of her apartment.

The school held a food drive every year. How many times did Sophie avoid any thought about the families who needed canned peas and lima beans? She had passed the food pantry, a little rectory next to the old Lutheran church, a couple hundred times in her life but never once thought about going inside the building.

A gray wolf foraging in the white snow, a great heron diving at the blue sea, survival is majestic not easy.

Sophie rushed inside the food pantry. Mothers and children walked aisles of half empty shelves, a white haired woman drinking from a small foam cup took a seat in a folding chair against the wall in the back. Sophie stood two feet from the door examining every face.

“Food insecure,” in bold black letters read the fliers stacked on a table to her left. The door opened and she turned into the chill at her back. A father and daughter walked by with placid smiles on their faces, Sophie followed them further into the pantry. She eyed the brown spots on the bananas in a white box and picked a can of strawberries in syrup from the shelf to her left. The woman in the folding chair kept her gaze on Sophie as she carried the can of strawberries with her around the pantry.

Not knowing if your family would have enough food to last the week is tough, but knowing there was a little help when needed loosened the knot in her belly. Sophie paused in front of a shelf of canned vegetables and lost herself in the yellow light glisterng on top of the cans.

The white haired woman grabbed a brown, clothe bag from the folding table in front of her and headed for the familiar girl in the blue coat.