Soup Last

Alone in a corner of the soup kitchen, the hubbub of many conversations coloring in the room behind his back with a bokeh of blurry faces, the old man hunched protectively over his bowl. He dipped his spoon into the steaming broth and brought the nourishment up to his mouth, letting it cool on the doorstep of his lips.

By and by, the soup cooled enough to taste. It was good. The old man smacked his whiskery lips and then kept on smacking them like a sleeping baby dreaming of the nurse. It was not merely the flavor that made him smile, but a sudden remembrance of his mother, a lanky woman with a dandelion gray puff of hair crowning her head. Always dressed in the colorful mumus of a sit-com housewife, she had lived to feed her son, scurrying from stove to table with one morsel after another. She was extremely conscious of any kind of waste, scooping just enough concentrate out of the can to make her boy a glass of orange juice for breakfast, but at the same time would toss anything he judged not to his taste directly into the trash, as if it embodied some kind of sacrilege.

Her oddest behavior regarded soup. She would always serve it last like a dessert.

Decades of alcoholism prevented the old man from remembering much of the journey that led him astray from his doting mother. He did recall that he was serving time in County the summer she died. He didn’t feel guilty about this exactly. Nevertheless, the brute fact of losing her made the little daily punishments he endured feel, if not deserved, then not undeserved. He did not own a single photograph of his mother to prove that someone had once loved him.

Indeed, maybe he had no right to smile all alone there in the corner, except he remembered that he’d preserved at least one tiny bit of Louisa Sue Pankhurst.

He always ate his soup last.