The Pay They Docked For The Funeral

I called the Starlite that Wednesday morning and I got Brett, because of course I did. I told him my mother had passed in the night. I told him I would need the Thursday and the Friday, that Marlene had already said she would cover my Thursday and that Donnie could run the counter Friday because Friday was slow. I had it all worked out. I had solved his problem for him before I even asked. That is how you learn to live under a man like that. You bring him the answer so he cannot say no.

He said no anyway.

He said, and I remember every word because I have carried every word, he said, Ruth, I am sorry for your loss, but the schedule does not care about your personal life. He said we were already short that week and he could not have people just deciding not to come in. He said if I took the two days it would be two attendance points and a written warning, and he said it in the same voice he would have used to tell me we were out of the French toast.

I did not scream at him. I want you to know that, because I have gone back and wished I had, and then I have been glad I did not. I just said, all right, Brett. I said, I will see you Monday. And I hung up the phone and I went and I buried my mother.

The funeral was on a Friday, and half the town came. The church was full to the vestibule. Vernon Pruitt wore a tie that had been pressed so recently I could see the iron lines in it, and he stood at the back the whole service because his hip would not let him get up and down in a pew, and when it was over he came and took both my hands in his two big cracked farmer hands and he could not get a word out, not one, and he did not have to. Dale Mettler parked his rig in the church lot because he did not have time to take it home and he came in his work clothes and sat in the back row with his cap in his lap. Katie Ambrose came with her little one, and partway through, when I could not hold myself together through the second hymn, she came up the side aisle quiet as anything and sat down right next to me and held the baby out, and I held that warm heavy sleeping baby through the rest of the service and it kept me on this earth. Pastor Hofer said that my mother had spent her whole life feeding people and that there was no truer picture of the kingdom of heaven than a table with room at it, and I thought about the Starlite, and I thought I will not be able to think about the Starlite the same way ever again.

I went back to work on Monday morning at six.