The Recording That Silenced My Brother

Cobb Corner is the kind of town where the volunteer fire department still holds a fish fry every August to pay for a new truck, where the Baptist church and the Methodist church trade off hosting the Thanksgiving potluck every other year so nobody’s feelings get hurt, and where a diner on the corner of the county road is not just a place to eat, it is the place, the one everybody’s grandfather proposed in or got the news of a layoff in or sat quietly in the corner booth of after a funeral because nobody in town would ask them to talk about it if they didn’t want to. Goldia’s diner had been that place for longer than most of the people who ate there had been alive, and growing up, I never once thought of it as a business. I thought of it as the extra room in our house that happened to have a jukebox in it.

My brother Cletis left Cobb Corner the summer after his high school graduation and did not come back for longer than a weekend for the better part of twenty years. I do not say that to be cruel. I say it because it is simply the arithmetic of what happened to our family, and arithmetic does not care about anybody’s feelings. Cletis went off to the city to make something of himself, as he liked to put it at Thanksgiving when he did show up, usually with a new job title and a new girlfriend and a new idea he needed a little help getting off the ground.

I stayed. I was twenty-three, laying block for a masonry outfit two counties over and saving toward a place of my own, when Grandma Goldia’s hip gave out on the same week her dishwasher quit and her only cook walked off over a pay dispute. She called me on a Tuesday night and said, in that flat, matter-of-fact voice she used for things that scared her, that she didn’t know how she was going to open on Wednesday. I was standing at the griddle by five the next morning, and I never really left it again.