The Pay They Docked For The Funeral

I want to be fair, because my mother raised me to be fair even to people who have not earned it. The Starlite was not making much money, and maybe it never had, and maybe a place cannot run forever on pie and mercy. Maybe Brett was only doing the job the contract told him to do. I have turned that over a thousand times. But there is a difference between a man who has to make hard choices and a man who enjoys that the choices are hard, and Brett Kessler enjoyed it. You could see it. He liked being the only one in the room who understood the numbers. He liked that we were afraid of the chart by the time clock.

My mother was named Loretta, and for the last three years of her life she lived at the Pine Haven Care Center out on the county road, in a room with a window that looked at a cornfield, which she said was the best television there was. A stroke had taken most of her words but none of her self. She still knew me. She still reached for my hand with the one hand that still worked and held it with a grip that surprised the nurses. I went to her every day I was not at the Starlite, and on the days I worked the early shift I went in the afternoon, and I would sit and tell her everything about the cafe, all the small news, who had a new grandbaby and whose crops came in and what pie we had run, and she would watch my mouth move and sometimes she would smile in a way that was only half a smile now, and that half was enough. It was always enough.

She died on a Wednesday in March. The home called me at four twenty in the morning. I was already awake because I am always awake before four, I have been a morning person my whole life, it is the one gift the restaurant business gives you and then holds you hostage with. I drove out to Pine Haven in the dark with the heater not yet warm and I held her hand while it went cool, and I will tell you that there is a particular kind of quiet in a room where your mother has just left it. It is not empty. It is full of everything she ever was, all at once, for just a minute, and then it settles.

I had to bury her. That is not a figure of speech. In a small town the family does the burying. There is a funeral to plan with Pastor Hofer and a plot to open next to my father out at the Methodist cemetery and a lunch to put on in the church basement afterward, ham and funeral potatoes and seven kinds of bar cookies the Ladies Aid will not let you pay for. There were two days of my life that belonged entirely and only to my mother, the day we buried her and the day before it, and I needed those two days the way you need air.