Things Our Mother Made Us Eat

Fiction by Andrew Careaga

We carried our school lunches in brown paper bags. Not in lunchboxes like the more affluent kids, the kids whose moms bought them Flintstones or Batman or Looney Tunes or Barbie lunchboxes and who carried them with the same earnest manner their fathers carried their briefcases to their office jobs. Their lunchboxes held peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, sometimes tuna salad, and a cookie or brownie for dessert. Our lunch bags ported fried egg-and-ketchup sandwiches, the whites crispy and yolks chalky and the whole thing wrapped in wax paper. And there were celery and carrot sticks, also in wax paper, and a small apple, the size of my puny child fist, for dessert. By the time the lunch bell rang, the ketchup had seeped through the white bread, turning it pink like a wound wrapped in gauze.

It was worse after Easter. That’s when mother resurrected the hard-boiled eggs we had decorated on Good Friday and hunted on Easter Sunday into a week’s worth of egg salad.

We were recent transplants to the suburbs of Boston, living among families more urbane and sophisticated than us. Our father’s company had transferred him there, so we pulled up our Midwest roots. We were desperate to fit in with our new classmates and neighbors, in this state of the Kennedys and strange accents. One kid asked a sister if we lived on a farm where we came from, and she lied and told him of course, then told me I had to repeat her lie if I were ever asked.

Our mother was present in body only. Her spirit and soul remained in the small Missouri town where she grew up.

On weeknights our mother made the food of the heartland, heavy dishes of pot roast or baked chicken or fried pork chops, served with some kind of potatoes and Wonder bread. Sometimes she made casseroles, sometimes beans with cornbread or a thing she called “hoe cake,” a tasteless fried substance that would crumble in our hands when we tried to slather grape jelly onto it. We hoped the jelly would hold it together like glue, but it only hastened its messy demise.

Sometimes she would feed us beef liver, smothered in onions and gravy. Those were the worst meals of all, worse than the fried egg sandwiches. Only our father would eat it, and half-heartedly, more as a show of solidarity for our mother than for any sort of gastronomical enjoyment. The rest of us pushed the strange, gray organ meat around on our plates, attempting to hide it under mashed potatoes or green beans.

Friday night was trash-bean soup night, so named by my father for our mother’s end-of-week concoction. She made the soup by combining the week’s leftovers into a big pot. It contained various meats and vegetables, sometimes some macaroni, and potatoes, always potatoes. Despite its name, the soup was bearable.

In the mornings before school, she fed us each a bowl of oatmeal or white rice, and she allowed us a dash of brown sugar and cinnamon to take the edge off. Saturday mornings, before cartoons, she rewarded us with Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes. This was my favorite meal of the week.

* * *

After the divorce, everyone but our father moved back to Missouri and in with my mother’s parents. When our mother got sick and could no longer cook for us, our diets didn’t change much. Her mother cooked the same foods, and until Grandma got us on the free lunch program, we continued to take our fried egg sandwiches to school in paper bags. Remarkably, the egg yolks were even more solid and chalky than the ones our mother had made us eat. Once we got on the free lunch program, we had warm, school-prepared meals of meat loaf and tater tots.

By then, our mother lived in a hospital. I didn’t know why, exactly. As the youngest of her children, a nine-year-old, I wasn’t privy to the details. I was only told she was “very sick.” Once, however, I overheard Grandpa tell someone on a phone call that our mother was “not expected to live.” When I heard this news, I ran to one of my sisters, the one who lied about us living on a farm, to tell her what Grandpa had said and asked if it was true.

“She’s very sick,” my sister said. “But we’re praying that she’ll be okay. You pray too.”

I didn’t know how to pray. No one had ever taught me how. Whenever there was any mention of prayer in our family, it was just that “God is great, God is good, let us thank Him for our food” prayer all us kids recited before an evening meal.

The closest thing to prayer I knew was a kind of incantation this same sister taught me to recite to myself whenever I felt scared: God is with me. I was five years old and afraid of the dark when she gave me these words. The incantation helped then, but it wouldn’t work in this case. I wasn’t the one in need of the incantation. So instead, whenever I bothered to remember, I modified the chant to “God is with Mom.”

One day after school, Grandpa took me to visit Mom in the hospital. She lay frail in her hospital gown, her face a sickening, unnatural yellow. I stood at her side, near an IV tube, unsure what to say. She seemed unsure also. I reached in to hug her, and she responded with a weak squeeze of my bony shoulders.

“You be a good boy,” she said.

Grandpa steered me out of the room.

Late one night, about a week after my visit to the hospital, alone in the small upstairs dormer bedroom of my grandparents’ house that had become my quarters, I was stirred awake by a commotion of adults and siblings downstairs. In my dinosaur pajamas I crept down the stairs, stopped at the flight, when Mom’s brother, who lived in Denver, caught me with his gaze. His face was grim. He stared for a moment, then looked away and turned to my grandmother, who turned to another of my sisters, who approached the stairs.

“Let’s go upstairs,” she whispered in a tone as grim as my uncle’s face.

We sat together on the narrow bed where I slept.

“I’ve always thought I was the closest to you,” she said, “so I wanted to be the one to tell you.”

I already knew what was coming. I could feel it in my bones.

“Mom didn’t make it, honey. She died tonight at the hospital.”

I sobbed and buried my face into her shoulder.

“We were all there with her,” she said, and at these words, my anguish grew into anger.

“Why didn’t you take me,” I sobbed.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “We wanted to protect you. We didn’t want you to see her like this.”

My face grew hot, my sobs turning into convulsions, chest heaving, tears streaming.

“But I didn’t even get to say goodbye,” I said through sobs.

My sister held me closer, tried to console me. Tears were streaming down her face and mingled with mine as she said more words.

I pushed her away. I pulled myself into a ball on the bed as she stood up.

I lay in a ball on the bed with my face in my pillow and sobbed until my throat burned with fury and I could sob no more.

* * *

The next morning, the sister who lied to the Massachusetts kids about living on a farm entered my bedroom. Sunshine slanted through my bedroom window, landing at the foot of the bed. “Time to get up,” she said. “You need to get something to eat.”

“I don’t want nothing,” I said, burying my head deeper into my pillow.

She nudged me gently. “People have brought us a lot of food,” she said. “You should see all of it.”

I rose and let her lead me down the steps. I was in my dinosaur pajamas, groggy, the flesh around my eyes red from weeping.

In the living room, my grandparents and uncle sat in a semicircle with a man I recognized as the minister from the church my grandparents attended. “She was a good Christian woman,” I heard my grandmother say, and the minister nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, she was.”

My sister led me past the adults, into the dining room, where plates of food were arranged: coffee cakes, deviled eggs, deli meats and cheeses, casseroles covered with cellophane, and other things our mother never would have fed us.

“Look at all this food,” my sister said. “There’s enough to feed an army.”

She led me to the kitchen, where an open box of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes sat on the counter. She poured two bowls, one for each of us, added milk, and the two of us stood in the kitchen and ate.

*Originally published by by Club Plum Literary Magazine

BIO: Andrew Careaga is a writer from Rolla, Missouri whose work has appeared in Club Plum Literary Magazine, Roi Faineant, Spillwords, Syncopation Literary Magazine, MoonLit Getaway, Bulb Culture Collective, Witcraft, and elsewhere. He is active on Twitter and BlueSky at @andrewcareaga and blogs frequently on his website, andrewcareaga.com.