The Booth My Father Kept Returning To

I want you to understand how strange that was, because it took me a long while to see it as strange myself. A man takes a woman to the one nice place in his small town. That is not peculiar. But my father did not vary it by so much as a cup of coffee. Same place. And when I started paying attention, I realized it was the same booth. The second one from the front, on the window side, under the old framed photograph of the Dinsmore grain elevator from 1952. Booth seven, Lon Ketterman called it, though there were no numbers on the tables and I never did learn how the booths got their numbers.

Every woman. Booth seven. Home by nine.

There were small things that stuck with me afterward, once I knew to look back on them. Donna, the widow with the camper, told my aunt that Ray was a nice man but that he had barely touched his supper and kept looking out the window, and that when she suggested they take a trip out to the Colorado mountains that summer he had gone polite and distant on her, the way a man does when a door has quietly shut. Pat lasted exactly one evening. Sheila, the retired nurse, told Carolyn that she liked my father fine but that he had spent half the meal talking about his late wife’s Sunday school class, which Sheila found, in her word, depressing. I remember being embarrassed for him when I heard that. I thought, Dad, you cannot sit across from a woman and talk about Mom all night, no wonder none of them come back. I had it exactly backward and did not know it.

I started to worry about it the way a daughter worries. I thought maybe he was being cheap, that he had decided a widowed farmer on a fixed income could afford exactly one meal out and no more, and that he was marching these poor women through the same cheap script. I thought maybe he had just gone rigid the way older people sometimes do, afraid of anything new, unable to bend. I even wondered, and I am ashamed of this, whether he had stopped being able to imagine any life bigger than that one booth.

My father was raised Christian but he was never a man who talked about it. My mother carried the faith in our house out loud, in grace at the table and hymns while she did dishes and that Sunday school class she never missed. My father carried his quiet. He was in his pew every Sunday of my childhood, and he put his envelope in the plate, and he bowed his head, but you would have had to pry his insides open with a crowbar to hear him say a word about what he believed. So it never once crossed my mind that what he was doing in that cafe was a kind of prayer. That he was keeping faith with my mother and with God both, in the only language he had, which was stubbornness and a chicken fried steak and a booth by the window.