The Pay They Docked For The Funeral

Earl said, Son, what is your name again. And Brett said his name, and his voice cracked on it. And Earl said, Mr. Kessler, I am told you explained to Ruthie that the schedule does not care about her personal life. And Brett did not answer. And Earl said, I want to make sure I have got that right, because I am about to tell you something and I need you to hear the shape of it. This building does not have a schedule. It never did. It has got Ruthie Coyle, who has opened these doors more mornings than you have been alive, and it has got Vernon out there who I have fed for thirty years, and it has got that baby in the back that is the fourth generation of its family to be held in this room. That is not a schedule. That is a town. And you looked at a town and you saw a cost. He said, I gave you my daddy’s cafe to mind for me, and you used it to take money out of a grieving woman’s pocket, and you did it in writing. He said, you are done. Not someday. This morning. Cornerstone will hear from me by noon. He said, Peggy, help me to a stool, I have driven a long way and I would like my waitress to pour me a cup of coffee.

Brett Kessler left. He gathered up his iPad and his Cornerstone pullover off the hook in the back and he went out the side door, and nobody said a word to him, and I have not seen him since, and I bear him less ill will than you might think, because a man that small was going to run into a town this size eventually and I just happened to be the wall he hit.

I poured Earl his coffee. My hand was shaking so bad I slopped it in the saucer and he put his old hand over mine on the pot, the same as Vernon had, the same as half this town had that morning, and he said, quiet, just for me, Ruthie, I am sorry it took me so long to get here. And I told him he had gotten there exactly on time, because he had.

Earl made it right the way Earl makes things right, which is all the way and then some. He put the two hundred and eighteen dollars back in my check and he rounded it up to a week’s pay for my trouble and he would not hear a word against it. The pickle jar came to four thousand one hundred and sixty dollars, which I did not want to take and which Vernon informed me I did not have a vote on, and I finally took it when Pastor Hofer pointed out that refusing a gift is its own kind of pride and my mother would have swatted me for it. I put most of it toward my mother’s stone.