The Saturday I Poured Her Father’s Coffee
“You smell like a fryer, Tammy. I’m sorry, but you do.”
Brooke said it in the kitchen of the little rented house in Aberdeen, on a Tuesday evening, with a dish towel folded over her arm like she was the one waiting tables.
I had come straight from the Chatterbox. Twenty-two miles, with my apron still in the front seat and my feet still humming. I had brought them a pan of scalloped potatoes and ham, because Kyle had worked late all week at the implement dealer and I knew neither one of them had cooked.
The pan was still warm in my hands.
“It’s in your hair,” she said. “It’s in your coat. I gave you a ride home from church in September and my car smelled like it for two days.”
I looked at my son.
Kyle is twenty-eight years old. He is six foot one and he can pull the injectors out of a combine engine in an afternoon. He was standing by the sink in his work shirt with his name stitched over the pocket, and he was looking at the dishwasher like it had something written on it.
“Brooke,” I said. “What are you asking me?”
She took a breath. She is a pretty girl, and she is not a stupid one, and I could see she had practiced this.
“The partners are coming Saturday,” she said. “Both of them, and their wives. Mr. Halvorsen is bringing his mother. Half the office will be there. It’s the clubhouse, Tammy. It’s not the Legion hall.”
“I know where it is. I helped pay for it.”
“And I’m grateful. We both are.” She glanced at Kyle. He did not glance back. “I just think it would be easier, for everybody, if you sat this one out. You’d be on your feet at work all morning anyway. You’d be coming straight from there. You’d be tired.”
I set the pan on the stove. I did it carefully, because my hands had started to feel like somebody else’s.
“Kyle,” I said.
He rubbed the back of his neck.
“Mom,” he said, and that was all. That was the whole sentence. He left it lying there on the linoleum between us and he did not pick it up. A grown man, and he left his mother standing there.
I want to tell you I said something fine. I did not. I said, “Three fifty for an hour, covered, or the cheese on top will go hard.” Then I got my purse off the chair.
Brooke followed me to the door. “It’s one afternoon,” she said. “You’ll be at the wedding. Of course you’ll be at the wedding.”
“Will I need to wash first?”
It was the only sharp thing I said, and I was sorry for it before I had the storm door open. She flinched. I saw it.
“Good night, Brooke,” I said. “Tell my son his supper’s on the stove.”
I drove home with the windows down. It was the last week of October and thirty-eight degrees, and I drove the whole twenty-two miles with all four windows down, and I am not going to tell you why because you already know.
I should tell you about the twenty-five hundred dollars.
I have worked at the Chatterbox for twenty-four years. It is the only place to sit down and eat in our town, unless you count the gas station, which has two stools and a roller of hot dogs. We have nine hundred people, a grain elevator, a Lutheran church, a Catholic church, a school that goes through eighth grade, and the Chatterbox. If you live here you eat there. That is not a coincidence. That is just arithmetic.