Reduced Lunch

We all had a four-digit number.

spoken into the cafeteria air like,

like a confession.

The last digit told a story.

Odd meant paid. Even meant free.

And zero, least common of all,

meant reduced.

I knew where I belonged before

I knew what class meant.

I would step to the register,

lean toward the cashier,

and lower my voice.

My number was not shame.

It was simply my family's business,

and I preferred to keep it that way.

The tray slid forward: forty cents.

Not seventy-five like my friends.

I would count the coins from a

pocket worn soft by worry,

place them in her hand,

And move on.

Nobody said anything.

That was the comfort.

A child learns early that privacy

And pride are first cousins.

I was the only one among my friends.

The gifted program met at their own

table of bright futures, most of them

Delivered there in new pickup trucks

driven from houses where everything worked.

They were good kids.

They were my friends.

But I learned that intelligence

and money often arrived

together like guests attending

the same wedding. Only a few of us

Stood near the edge of that photograph.

Too poor to be middle.

Too middle to be poor:

the upper side of working class.

That narrow American ledge, where

every bill gets paid eventually,

and every dollar has a destination

before it is earned. And maybe

Things take a little while:

a kerosene heater for a month in

winter until the HVAC guy can be paid.

Hungry in the way growing feels.

Hungry because forty cents was

still money, and money should

not be wasted. I knew that.

So I ate. Every bite. Every day.

Every cube of Jello.

Every spoonful of peas.

Every crumble of corndog.

Every living morsel to the last bite.

My mother always said

I'd eat whatever was “throwed” at me.

She was right. I treated lunch

the way a farmer treats rain.

With gratitude and kind attention.

With the understanding that

abundance is not guaranteed.

Meanwhile, the full-pay kids pushed

Away milk cartons, left fries cooling

on the tray, let half a chili dog travel

to the trash. Maybe the free lunch

kids did too. I don't know. I only know

The reduced lunch kids didn't.

We were investors.

Forty cents bought ownership.

Bought an appetite sharpened by arithmetic.

We cleaned our plates.

Not because someone told us to.

We attended another type of class.

Because value is a different teacher.

Because somewhere at home a

mother and father had stretched

a paycheck just far enough

to make sure that tray reached our hands.

Ask me today, and I couldn’t tell you

my number, except it ended in zero.