The Booth My Father Kept Returning To

The woman is gone.

I watched my father’s face. He did not argue. My father has never in his life won anything by arguing and he knows it. He just got very still, the way he gets, and he looked down at the table, at his hand on the edge of it, and he said something I could not hear. And then he took out his billfold and he paid Lon at the register and he walked Sharon Kessler out to her car and that was the last any of us ever saw of Sharon Kessler.

I thought, good riddance. But I also thought, she might have been cruel about it, but she had a point. And that was the thought that sent me out to the farm the next Sunday to say something to my father I have been glad ever since I did not get to say the way I planned.

I had it all rehearsed. I was going to tell him, kindly, that maybe he should mix it up. Try the places out by the interstate. Take a woman somewhere new, make a fresh memory, stop sitting in the same booth under the same photograph like he was waiting for the past to come back and sit down. I had decided, in my forty-four-year-old wisdom, that my father was stuck, and that I was going to be the one to lovingly un-stick him.

I found him in the machine shed, greasing the combine for harvest. I helped him for a while, handing him things, and then I worked my way around to it. I said, “Dad, I was at Ketterman’s when you were there with Sharon.”

He didn’t look up. “Figured somebody was. Carolyn had it all over town by Tuesday.”

“I heard what she said. About the booth.”

He wiped his hands on a rag and he did look up then, and there was something in his face that stopped my whole speech in my throat.

“You think she’s right,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “You think your old man’s gone soft in the head, sitting in the same spot.”

“No,” I said, which was not true. “I just. Dad, why that booth? Every time. I don’t understand it.”

And my father, who is not a talker, who went forty-six years married to my mother and I could count on my hands the number of times I saw him show her a tenderness in front of anybody, set down his rag and leaned against the tire of that combine and he told me.