The Booth My Father Kept Returning To

Pearl Adair came into it the following winter, and she did not come through my aunt, which is maybe why it worked. Pearl ran the little lending library the church kept in what used to be the choir room, and she had lost her husband, Gene, four years before, to his heart, out in his own field on his own tractor. She was sixty-six. She had a soft low voice and she wore her hair in a plain gray braid and she drove a rusted-out Buick she refused to replace because Gene had bought it. My father knew her a little from church the way everybody in a small town knows everybody a little. What changed things was that Pearl’s furnace quit in January and my father, who can fix anything, went over to look at it as a favor, and he ended up staying for coffee, and then he asked her to supper.

You know where he took her.

I was not there this time, but I heard it from Lon Ketterman himself, because Lon and I had gotten close over that year, me stopping in, him watching out for my dad. Lon told me the whole thing standing at his register with a dish towel over his shoulder, and his eyes were wet by the end of it, and Lon Ketterman is not a soft man.

My father brought Pearl in and sat her down in booth seven. And Lon, who by then felt like he was part of the family of that booth, he hovered a little, bringing water, watching. And he said Pearl settled in and looked around the cafe the way a person does, and then she looked up at that old photograph of the 1952 grain elevator, and then she looked at my father, who had his hand on the edge of the table the way he does, and Lon said she got very quiet and then she said, “Ray, is this the booth? Carolyn told me once, years back, that you and Eileen always came here for your anniversary. Is this the one?”

And my father said it was.

And Pearl Adair, Lon told me, she did not get up and she did not get strange and she did not say one word about moving on. She reached across the table and she put her hand flat on the wood, not on my father’s hand, on the table itself, like she was touching something, and she said, “Then I’m honored to sit in it. Will you tell me about her? I never knew her well, but everybody said she was something.”

Lon said my father did not say anything for a minute. And then he started to talk. And Lon said he had never in thirty years of owning that cafe heard Ray Dunmore talk so much, and that the two of them sat in booth seven for near three hours, long past when my father usually came home, and that when they finally got up to go, Pearl Adair stopped at the register and she took Lon’s hand in both of hers and she thanked him for keeping such good care of that table all these years. For keeping it, she said. Like she knew exactly what it was. Like she knew it was being kept.