The Booth My Father Kept Returning To

My father took every woman he dated to the same booth and the reason finally undid me

My mother had been gone a year and seven months the first time my father mentioned a woman’s name at the supper table, and I remember I set my fork down slow, the way you do when you are trying not to spook something.

Her name was Lucille. She kept the books at the co-op in Dinsmore, Kansas, where I grew up and where my father, Ray Dunmore, had farmed the same three hundred and twenty acres of wheat and milo his whole life. He said it plain, no apology in it. He had asked Lucille to dinner and she had said yes. He was seventy that spring. I was forty-four. And the feeling that came up in me was not jealousy, though I expected jealousy. It was relief. My father had been a gray, folded-up man since the morning we buried my mother, and here was a flicker of something that was not grief.

“That’s good, Dad,” I said. “Where are you taking her?”

“Ketterman’s,” he said.

I did not think anything of it then. Ketterman’s was the only real sit-down place in Dinsmore that was not a gas station counter. It had been there since before I was born, a narrow brick storefront on Main with a tin ceiling and a jukebox that only played about nine songs and a pie case by the register. Of course he took her to Ketterman’s. There was nowhere else to go unless you drove the forty minutes to the chain places out by the interstate, and my father did not believe in driving forty minutes for a meal he could get in town.

So Lucille came and went. It did not take. He told me over the phone, in the flat way he told me about rain that missed us, that he did not think he and Lucille suited each other. I said I was sorry. He said it was fine. And that was that.

Then there was Donna, a widow from the Methodist church two towns over, who liked to travel and had a camper and wanted a man to drive it. Then there was a woman named Pat whose husband had run off decades back, who my aunt Carolyn had set him up with. Then a retired nurse named Sheila. Over about fourteen months my father, who had not dated a single soul in the forty-six years he was married to my mother, went out with five different women.

And he took every one of them to Ketterman’s.