The Saturday I Poured Her Father’s Coffee
My husband Jeff died eleven years ago in March. He was forty-four. He was unloading feed at the elevator and he sat down on the tailgate of his pickup and said he felt funny, and that was the last thing he said to anybody. Kyle was seventeen.
So for eleven years it has been me, and what I carry home in my apron pocket.
I have a paid-off house and a 2011 Buick with a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it that starts every morning. I am not complaining. I am telling you so you know what twenty-five hundred dollars is, to me.
It is a coffee can. A red Folgers can on the top shelf of my pantry, behind the canning jars. For three years I had been putting my Saturday tips in it, only the Saturdays, toward a newer car. Pheasant season Saturdays are the best of the year, when the hunters come in from Minnesota in their orange caps and eat like threshers and tip like men who are on vacation. I had a little over four thousand in that can.
In September, a week after Brooke showed me the ring, Kyle came by the house alone. He stood in my kitchen and turned his cap around in his hands the way his father used to.
“Brooke wants to do an engagement party,” he said. “A nice one. Her dad’s paying for the wedding, he already said so, and she doesn’t want to ask him for this on top of it. We’ve got some saved but it’s all going at the down payment.”
“How much is a nice one?”
He told me. The room at the clubhouse, the food, the bar for two hours, the flowers.
I got the stepladder out.
I counted it on the kitchen table in twenties and tens and fives, and a fair number of ones, because that is what tips are. Twenty-five hundred dollars. I put it in a bank envelope and then I thought better of that and drove to the bank the next morning and had them make it a cashier’s check, so my son would not have to hand his fiancée a stack of bills that smelled like, well.
I did think that. In September. I thought, don’t hand that girl money that smells like the diner. So do not imagine I had never noticed.
Twenty-four years of it gets into you. I know that. I shower when I get home and I wash my hair with the lemon kind and I hang my work coat on the back porch, not in the house. I keep a clean coat for church. I have done that since Kyle was little, because one time in second grade a boy told him his mom smelled like french fries, and he came home and asked me if it was true.
I told him it was true. I told him it was the smell of our light bill being paid.
He was seven. He said, “Okay,” and went out to ride his bike.
I thought that was the end of it. I thought I had raised a boy who knew what that smell was.
Wednesday morning I went in at half past five like always and Linda was already there, rolling out pie crust.