The Booth My Father Kept Returning To

They were married that fall. It was a small wedding at First Christian, the same church where my mother taught Sunday school for thirty-one years, the same front where my father shook two hundred hands at her funeral. I stood up for my father. Pearl wore a blue dress and no veil and carried a little bunch of flowers from her own garden.

And before the reception supper, which the church ladies put on in the basement, Pearl did something I will never get over. She had arranged, quiet, without telling my father, for Lon Ketterman to cater the meat from the cafe. Chicken fried steak, for the whole room. And when it came time to eat, before anybody touched a fork, Pearl stood up at the head table and she said she wanted to say a few words. And she did not talk about herself. She said, “Most of you knew Eileen Dunmore. She said grace in a certain booth in Lon’s cafe every anniversary for forty-six years, out loud, and she didn’t care who heard her. So I’d like to do that now, for her, before we eat. I don’t aim to take her place. Nobody could. But I’d be proud to carry on a thing she started.”

And she reached down and took my father’s hands across that table the way my mother used to, and she said grace out loud in front of the whole room, and she thanked God for the hard years as well as the good ones, because, she said, anybody can thank Him in a good year.

She could not have known those were nearly my mother’s exact words. My father had not told her. He told me later he never told her that part, about the hard years and the good years. She just said it. And when she said it my father put his face down into their joined hands and he wept, right there at the head table, in front of the whole church, my father who did not cry at the funeral, and nobody thought a thing of it because half the room was crying too.