The Booth My Father Kept Returning To

He had to stop there. My father, who did not cry at the funeral. He stood against that combine tire and he pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes and he waited until he could go on, and I did not move to help him because I understood this was something he had to say standing up.

“So I’ll tell you why I take them there,” he said finally. “I’m not stuck, and I’m not cheap, whatever your aunt thinks. I take a woman to that booth because that booth is the truest thing I have got. Your mother is all over it. And I sit a woman down across from me in it, and I watch, and I wait to see what she does with your mother sitting there. Because she is sitting there. Sharon Kessler was right about that part. Eileen is right there in that booth every time I walk in. And a woman who can’t bear that, who tells me the woman is gone and I ought to pretend she never was, that is a woman I have got no use for. I buried your mother. I did not throw her away. If I ever sit across from somebody and she can look at that booth and not be afraid of it, not be jealous of a dead woman, maybe even want to hear about her, then I’ll know. Then I’ll know I found one worth keeping. Until then I would rather eat my chicken fried steak with a stranger and come home at nine than disrespect the forty-six best years God ever gave a man.”

I pulled my truck over on the county road on the way home. I could not drive and cry at the same time, and I was doing a great deal of the second one. All those months I had thought my father was a stuck, rigid, grieving old man marching women through a cheap routine. And the whole time he had been doing the bravest and most faithful thing I have ever heard of. He was holding the door open for the right one by refusing to lie about the one he lost. He was using that booth like a test and like a shrine at the same time, and I had almost, almost, talked him out of it.

I did not tell Aunt Carolyn any of it. Some things are not hers.

Now I have to tell you about Pearl.