Angel

My guardian angel, if you believe in that sort of thing, came in the form of a server at Dairy Queen. I was there in an attempt to distract my children and myself from the heat, from the fact that Lowe's was sold out of portable ACs, from the long hours that remained of this last day of the long weekend.

Max ordered an icey lemonade and Lucas a chocolate soft serve, which I ended up eating.  A tiny strip of shade had enticed us to sit on the curb in front of our car. Lucas took one lick then became obsessed with the garbage can, picking up pieces of city grime from the ground and discarding them over and over again through the garbage can's stinky swinging door.  Each time, I gave chase and tried to block him from reaching his hand right into the last customer's abandoned half of a parfait. Max looked through his new Spongebob book, his face a fresh beet.

Then, there she was. She walked out of some unseen back door to the DQ and smiled brightly at me from under her uniform sun visor. "How old are your boys?" she asked.  I was a bit taken aback because she entered our crazy little dirty curbside ice cream circle of mayhem as if it was a meeting we had been planning for weeks.

"I have two girls. My sister has two boys," she said. "It's really exhausting, isn't it?"  I nodded. "Whether they're girls or boys, it just gets tougher too"...a rare honest comment that somehow made me feel less like this Dairy Queen parking lot on a 95 degree day in my grimy city was indeed hell.

She mentioned that she was a school teacher. She had worked at Dairy Queen for 25 years during the summers. She asked if I was a stay-at-home mom. "No. I'm a widow. I work full time," I said. She just nodded, again like this was not news to her. Perhaps the giveaway was my stained clothing, lack of shower, any smudged dirt that might have ended up on my face as a result of monitoring Lucas's garbage can game. Or maybe she just knew.

She stopped Lucas from pulling out more dirty plastic spoons from the garbage can and offered to wipe his hands off with a soapy cloth from inside. I said I could clean him up with the baby wipes in the car. More customers started arriving. She mentioned that she should go but then quietly waited with Max as I chased Lucas and stopped him from speeding toward the road.

I methodically loaded the kids into the car, answering each of their questions about the Spongebob special, whether we were going somewhere else, whether I could please roll every window down for the entire ride home. She smiled and listened and asked if I needed any help. I shook my head and thanked her while forcing Max's seat belt buckle into place.

Then she went back to work.