The Pay They Docked For The Funeral

Two years ago Earl’s heart gave out on him in the middle of a Rotary breakfast. They flew him to Omaha and opened his chest and ran him through a quadruple bypass, and when he came out the other side his daughter Peggy would not hear of him coming back to stand on a tile floor twelve hours a day. She lived outside Phoenix. She took him home with her to the desert to mend, and Earl, who had never spent a winter anywhere but Dunmore in his whole life, went, because a man who has just felt his own heart stop does not argue with his daughter. Before he left he did the only responsible thing he could think of. He signed a contract with a company out of Lincoln called Cornerstone Hospitality Group to manage the Starlite until he was strong enough to come back. He thought he was protecting the place. I believe that right up until the day I die.

Cornerstone sent us Brett Kessler.

Brett was maybe thirty two. He wore a quarter zip pullover with the Cornerstone logo stitched on the chest and he carried an iPad everywhere he went, even into the walk in cooler, and he said the word efficiency the way Pastor Hofer said the word grace. The first week he was there he stood in the dining room during the morning rush with that iPad and he did not say good morning to a single soul. He was counting. He was timing how long it took me to get from the pass to table six. He told me later, like it was a kindness, that I had what he called a lot of wasted motion. I told him the wasted motion was me refilling Vernon Pruitt’s cup, and Vernon had been coming in every morning for thirty years, and Vernon’s wife was dead and his son was in Colorado and that cup of coffee was the closest thing Vernon had to being touched by another human being all day. Brett wrote something on the iPad. He did not look up.

He changed things fast. He took the free refills away from the seniors and called it a pricing correction. He put a sign by the register that nobody but him ever read. He started a thing he called attendance points, where every time you were late or missed a shift you got a point, and he printed out a little chart and taped it in the back by the time clock, and he explained to us in a meeting that smelled like his cologne that six points meant termination. He talked to us like we were a problem he had been hired to fix. Marlene, who had worked the counter beside me for seventeen years and who buried two husbands and never missed a day either time, came out of that first meeting white in the face and said to me in the kitchen, Ruthie, that boy thinks we are overhead.

That was the word. Overhead. We had been a family and now we were a line on his iPad.