Mr. Two Bulls turned the paper around so that everyone in the backyard could see the letterhead, a feather and a circle in blue ink, and the words Lakota Children Nourishment Fund running along the top in plain black letters. He is sixty six, a tall, quiet man with a braid down his back the color of iron, and he held the page in both hands the way I have seen men hold a flag at a funeral. “Mr. Brad,” he said, “my name is Raymond Two Bulls. I direct a food program for children on the reservation road. Every Friday afternoon for three years, a young woman has delivered a car full of food to eighty four families. She never told us her last name.”
Brad stood with his champagne glass in the air, as if the glass were stuck. He is fifty, a trim, handsome, silver temple man with a tan from the boat and a lanyard from his drug company still around his neck, and I saw his eyes go to Shayla, to the old man, to the paper. “Sir, I am sure there is some mistake,” he said. “My niece works in a school cafeteria.” “Yes,” said Mr. Two Bulls. “She does. She carries the leftover tater tots and the chicken patties and the green beans out in the trunk of a ten year old Corolla. We call her the Tray Girl. The children wait for her at the end of the gravel.”
My granddaughter had not moved from the table where she stood cutting cake. Shayla is twenty six, round faced and broad shouldered, with the eyes of her grandfather and her hands red from the dishwater, and she kept her gaze on the knife. “Uncle Brad, I did not tell you,” she said, “because I did not think you would understand it. It is not a job. It is only that nobody should be hungry on a Friday.” Her voice shook on the last word. “And I was not sure you would say it was a waste of gas.”
A gray lunch tray sat on a cake table at a graduation party and gave one grandmother the cutting of the cake to bring her son in law back to the road.
I wish I had a camera for the face of my son in law. He had said, in front of sixty people, that his assistant made double what Shayla did, and now the man from the reservation was reading, in a deep unhurried voice, a list of the things she had done. The seventeen Fridays she drove through snow. The week the Corolla broke down on the road to Wanblee and she hitched a ride with a rancher and carried the boxes in on foot. The boy named Elijah, ten, who had stopped fainting in class. “Last winter,” said Mr. Two Bulls, “a grandmother told me, that girl is the only reason I have not buried a child.”
Brad set down the glass. Slowly, as though it were very heavy, he lowered himself onto a folding chair. My daughter, his wife, had her hand over her mouth, and she was crying openly, unashamed. “I did not know,” he said, to nobody. “I did not know.” “Mr. Brad,” said the old man, gently, “most men do not. It is a very quiet kind of work. That is why I drove three hours, with my wife, and why we did not call ahead. We wished to be sure that Shayla would be thanked in front of her own family.” He turned the paper another quarter turn. “And we wished to give her this.”
The letter was a scholarship. It came from a foundation of Lakota women who had raised, over twenty years, a fund to send one person from the community, or one person who had given to it, through a degree in nutrition and public health. Full tuition. Books. A stipend. The college was in Rapid City, an easy drive. Shayla read the page slowly, standing perfectly still, and then she looked at the old man and said, in a very small voice, “Mr. Two Bulls, I cannot. I have no money for the part that is not tuition.” “It is the stipend,” he said, smiling. “Read the last line.”
She read it. Her face crumpled. She put down the knife and she put her hands over her eyes, and my granddaughter, who has never once in her life asked anyone for anything, wept at the graduation party of her sister, with sixty relatives watching, and the old man with the iron braid held out his arms and she walked into them. I stood there, seventy four years old, and I could not hold in my own tears. Beside me, Megan, the graduate, whose party it was, took my hand without a word.
Brad came to Shayla after the cake. He did not make a speech, which I will give him credit for. He stood in front of her with his big tanned hands hanging at his sides, and he said, “Shayla, I want to buy a new car for the food route. A van. With a cooler. The company has a community fund, and I sit on the board.” He swallowed. “I have been sitting on that board for six years and I have never once asked what it was for.” “Uncle Brad,” she said, “I would like that.” And then she added, with that dry, sweet bluntness that she has from her grandmother, “And you can come on Fridays and carry the boxes.”
He came every Friday for the rest of the summer, in jeans, which did not suit him. He was terrible at it. He dropped a case of applesauce on the gravel road and a small boy named Elijah caught the last can. He learned the names of the children. By August he had stopped checking his phone, and one evening he stood beside the open back of the new van, with the sun going down over the Badlands and a line of little hands reaching up, and I saw him close his eyes and listen to the sound of children saying thank you.
Shayla started classes that fall. She still works the cafeteria in the mornings, from five to two, in her hairnet and her gloves, and she tells me she likes it better now, because now she understands the chemistry of a potato. On the refrigerator in my kitchen, next to a photograph of the whole family on the lawn, hangs the lunch tray from the party, a gray plastic one, with a name written in marker on the underside by a ten year old boy. It says, Shayla. And under it, in smaller letters, Best Tray Girl.