The Pay They Docked For The Funeral

Earl was eleven hundred miles away and six months out of having his chest cracked open and his doctor had told him in plain English not to travel. Earl listened to Vernon for about four minutes. Then, the way I heard it from Peggy later, he hung up the phone and he stood up out of his recliner and he said to his daughter, get the truck, we are going home. Peggy argued. Peggy is a strong woman and she argued hard, because she had watched them wheel her father out of surgery and she was not going to lose him to a fourteen hour drive over a cafe. And Earl, who loved that daughter more than his own life, looked at her and said, Peg, I handed that place to a stranger and he used it to kick a good woman while she was burying her mother. I can mend a heart. I cannot mend that from a recliner. Now I am going with you or I am going without you.

She drove him. Of course she drove him. They left Phoenix before dawn on Sunday and they drove the whole day and most of the night, Earl in the passenger seat with his pill organizer and a throw pillow held against his sternum the way you have to hold it after they wire you back together, and they pulled into Dunmore a little after nine on Monday morning, into a town where every soul who was not at work or at school was packed into the Starlite Cafe.

I was carrying a bus tub when the little bell over the front door rang, and the whole room, which had been as loud as a county fair, went dead silent all at once, and I turned around.

Earl Dillard was standing in his own doorway. He had lost weight. He was leaning on Peggy and he had a cardigan buttoned wrong and he looked every one of his seventy six years, and he looked at that room full of his neighbors, and he looked at me standing there with a tub of dirty dishes and my eyes already going, and I watched him take in the whole thing, the crowd and the jar and the sheet of paper by the register, and his jaw set.

He did not come to me first, though I will love him forever for the look he gave me that said he wanted to. He walked, slow, one hand on Peggy and one hand on the counter, to the register. He picked up the written warning. He read it. The whole room watched him read it. And Earl Dillard, who had owned that cafe for forty years and whose daddy built it with his hands, tore that piece of paper in half, and then in half again, and he set the pieces down very gently on the counter like he was laying something to rest.

Then he turned around and he found Brett.

I will give you what he said as close to word for word as my memory can hold it, because the whole town heard it and the whole town has helped me keep it right.