The Pay They Docked For The Funeral

I want to tell you exactly what that Monday was like, because it is the whole reason I am writing any of this down.

I got there before the sun, same as always. I let myself in the back. Donnie the cook was already at the flat top and he looked up at me with a look I did not understand yet, something careful and almost excited, and he said, mornin Ruthie, and then he said, you doin all right, and I said I was, and he went back to the grill but he kept glancing at me. On the counter by the register there was a square envelope with my name on it in Brett’s blocky handwriting, and I knew what it was. The written warning. I opened it and I read it. It said I had accrued two attendance points for unexcused absences on Thursday and Friday. It said two hundred and eighteen dollars had been deducted from my upcoming check to reflect the shifts not worked. There was a line at the bottom for my signature.

I took a pen out of my apron. I signed it. I did not say a word. I set it back on the counter where he would find it and I tied my apron and I started the second pot of coffee and I got ready to open the doors at six thirty like I had done five thousand times, because that is what you do. You keep pouring. You do not give a man like Brett Kessler the satisfaction of your tears. I thought that was the end of it. I thought I would carry this one quiet, the way I had carried the other hard things.

Then I unlocked the front door, and I understood that the whole town had gotten there before me.

I had not seen the lot when I came in the back. The front lot was full. Not Monday full. Not even Friday full. It was Fourth of July full, trucks and cars nosed in every which way and parked along both sides of Main, and standing on the sidewalk in the gray March cold was what looked like every person I had ever carried a plate to in twenty two years. Vernon was at the front with his cane. The Ladies Aid in a knot behind him. Coach Brummond and half the Cougars booster club. Dale Mettler, who must have run his route all weekend to be free on a Monday. Katie with the baby bundled up like a little loaf of bread. Families I had watched grow from a high chair to a letter jacket. They were quiet. They were waiting for me to open the door. And when I did, Vernon took off his cap, and he said, Ruthie, we heard what that man did, and we have got something to say about it.

I did not know yet what they had done. I found out as the morning went, the way you find out anything in a small town, in pieces, from six different people who each think they are telling you the part you do not know.