The Pay They Docked For The Funeral

Here is what they had done.

The news had gotten out of the cafe the way news always gets out, which is that Donnie told his wife, and Donnie’s wife was in the Ladies Aid, and the Ladies Aid had just spent all of Friday in the church basement putting on my mother’s funeral lunch. By Saturday morning the whole town knew that Brett Kessler had docked Ruthie Coyle’s pay for burying Loretta. And the town, which is slow about a great many things, was not slow about this.

What they did first was pass a coffee can. It was not even organized at the start. Vernon just set an empty Folgers can on the counter at the Co-op on Saturday and wrote RUTHIE on it with a grease pencil, and by noon it was full, and he had to get a second can. The church took a special offering Sunday that was not on any program. Coach Brummond put the word out through the booster club. Dale got on the CB and told half the drivers between here and Grand Island. By the time I unlocked that door on Monday there was, sitting on the counter beside my signed warning, a large glass pickle jar from the Co-op with the label still half on it, and it was full, stuffed full, of folded bills and checks and one child’s drawing of a cup of coffee with a heart on it.

But that was not the thing. The money mattered, Lord knows the money mattered to a woman who had just lost two hundred and eighteen dollars she did not have to lose, but the money was not the thing they came to say.

The thing was, every one of them had come to sit down. And here is what they wanted me to understand: they had decided together, on the phone and in the church parking lot and at the Co-op, that they were going to come in that Monday and they were going to fill every seat in the Starlite, and they were going to order, and they were going to be waited on by me, and they were going to tip me like the kings and queens of the earth, and they were going to do it right in front of Brett Kessler so that there could be no mistaking what it meant. They were not boycotting. A boycott punishes the place. They loved the place. They were doing the opposite. They were going to pack it so full of the thing Brett could not count that he would have to stand in the middle of it and drown.

And that is what they did. I waited tables that morning in a cafe so full that Donnie ran out of eggs by eight and had to send Tyler the busser to the IGA for four more flats. Vernon tipped me a twenty on a one dollar cup of coffee and when I tried to argue he closed my hand around it with both of his and said, I have been trying to find a way to thank you for thirty years and this is the only one you ever let me get away with. People who could not fit inside stood out on the sidewalk and waited for a stool. Katie’s husband, who I had met maybe twice, shook my hand and could not look at me because his eyes were wet. The booster club took the big round table in the back and ran up a bill on purpose and left me the change from a hundred on a forty dollar tab.