The Booth My Father Kept Returning To

“It’s the only place,” I said.

“It’s not the only place,” Dale said. “There’s the whole world forty minutes up the road.”

I did not have an answer for that. I filed it away.

The woman who finally made me pay attention, though not in a good way, was Sharon Kessler.

Sharon was not from Dinsmore. She was from Pratt, and she sold real estate, and she had a loud confident laugh and good clothes and a way of looking at a room like she was appraising it. My aunt Carolyn, who could not leave my father’s love life alone, had met her at some Chamber function and decided she was a catch. “She’s got her own money,” Carolyn told me, like that settled anything. “She’s not looking for a meal ticket. That’s rare, Carrie.”

My father took Sharon to Ketterman’s, of course. Booth seven. And this time I happened to be there, two booths down, because Dale and I had taken the kids for pie after a ball game, and so I saw the whole thing, and I heard most of it, because Sharon Kessler had a voice that carried.

She did not like the cafe. You could see it on her from the minute she sat down. She wiped her fork on her napkin. She asked Lon, who had owned the place for thirty years and whose father owned it before him, whether the menu ever changed. She said it in a laughing way, but it was not a kind laugh. My father ordered the chicken fried steak, which is what he always ordered, and Sharon ordered a salad and a glass of wine, and Lon had to tell her gently that they did not serve wine, had never served wine, and she rolled her eyes at that like she had wandered into a cartoon.

I want to be fair. A woman is allowed to not like a small cafe. That is not a crime.

But then it got to the part I could not forgive.

I did not hear how they got onto the subject of my mother. I think my father must have said something about the booth, because he had a habit by then of touching the edge of the table when he sat down, a small thing, a thing I had not understood I was seeing. And Sharon said, and her voice came clear down the row of booths, “Ray, can I be honest with you? You can’t keep bringing women to the same booth you sat in with your dead wife. It’s a little morbid, don’t you think? It’s like she’s sitting right here with us. You have got to move on. The woman is gone.”