The Saturday I Poured Her Father’s Coffee
Every Saturday. For seven years.
I taught her to make change at the register, standing on a milk crate. I taught her to roll silverware. When she was twelve she got her first period in our restroom, with her mother too sick to tell, and I am the one who went across to the drugstore and came back and explained things through the door.
When Jean died, Brooke was fourteen. Don came in the Saturday after the funeral by himself. He sat on his stool and I poured his coffee and neither one of us said a word, and when he left there was a twenty under the saucer.
She went to Northern State, right there in Aberdeen, and got her accounting degree, and went to work for a firm with its name in gold on the window. I was proud of her. I told everybody at that counter. I said, that’s our Brooke.
So, you see. When she stood in that kitchen and told me what I smelled like, she was not telling me anything she had not known since she was seven years old.
Linda brought the hot beef out herself. White bread, roast beef, a scoop of mashed potatoes in the middle, gravy over all of it. She set it down in front of Don and gave me a look and went back to the kitchen without a word, which for Linda is a considerable effort.
Don ate the way he always does, steady, starting at the left side.
He was about halfway through when he looked at the clock over the pie case.
“You’re cutting it close,” he said.
“Am I?”
“Party’s at two. I figured Linda’d have you out of here by noon.” He wiped his mouth. “I’ve got to go home and get cleaned up myself. Brooke laid a shirt out for me Thursday. Told me if I showed up in this coat she’d disown me.”
He said it fondly. He meant nothing by it.
I picked up the pot and topped off his cup, though it did not need it.
“I’m not going, Don.”
He set his fork down.
“Linda couldn’t spare you?”
“Linda gave me the day off in August.”
He waited. He is a patient man. You do not farm that country if you are not.
Now, I had not laid for him. I want that understood. I had thought he would eat and go, and that would be that.
But he asked me a straight question, sitting on that stool, and in nineteen years I have never once told that man a thing that was not so. Not when he asked me if Brooke had eaten or just pushed it around. Not when he asked me, the last spring, if I thought Jean looked worse. I was not going to start over a hot beef sandwich. I will not carry tales. I will not lie to a man who asks me straight, either.
“Brooke asked me not to come,” I said.
I kept my voice down. Roger and Jim were six stools away.
“Asked you not to.”
“Tuesday night. At their place.”
“Why would she do a thing like that?”
“She said I smell like a fryer. She said it’s in my hair and my coat, and the people from her office are going to be there, and it would be easier for everybody if I sat it out.”
I said it flat. I had no heat left in me by then. It was like reading him the specials.