The Booth My Father Kept Returning To

What I did not think, not once in all those months, was that there was a reason. A real one. The kind of reason that, when I finally heard it, made me pull my truck over on the county road and put my forehead on the steering wheel and cry like I had not cried since the funeral.

I am going to tell it the way it came to me, because the order matters.

My mother was Eileen Dunmore, and she was the straightest, kindest, most stubborn woman I have ever known. She taught the three-and-four-year-old Sunday school class at First Christian for thirty-one years. She could make a Sunday dinner stretch to feed whoever showed up, and someone always showed up, because that was the kind of house she kept. She got her diagnosis the week after Easter. It was in her pancreas, and by then it was in other places too, and the doctor in Wichita used a lot of careful words that all meant the same short thing. She lived nineteen weeks. She died in the front bedroom of the farmhouse on a hot August night with the window fan going and my father holding her hand and me on the other side holding the other one.

My father did not fall apart at the funeral. He stood at the front of the church in his one good suit and he shook every hand and he said thank you for coming to two hundred people. He fell apart later, slow, in private, the way men of his kind do. He stopped eating right. He let the garden go to weeds, my mother’s garden, which about broke my heart to see. He would sit on the porch in the evening and not turn a light on. I would drive out from town and find him in the dark and we would sit there and not say much, and I would go home feeling like I had left him at the bottom of a well.

So when Lucille’s name came up, and then Donna’s, and the rest, I was glad. I told my husband, Dale, I was glad. I said, let him go out, let him sit across a table from somebody, it is good for him. And Dale, who is a quieter and smarter man than I usually give him credit for, said, “You notice he keeps going to the same place.”