The Diner That Kept Her Husband’s Seat Warm

We ate breakfast at that diner the morning after our wedding and most mornings after that for fifty six years. We raised one daughter, Connie, who lives in Denver now with a husband who sells farm insurance and two boys we see twice a year if the roads are good. We buried Carl’s mother and then mine, in that order, and then Carl’s father, and we kept farming through two droughts and one year the hail took the whole crop in eleven minutes flat, and every single morning in between, we sat in the fourth booth from the door and drank our two coffees and did not say very much, because fifty six years teaches two people that silence between them is not empty. It is full. It is the fullest thing there is.

Carl’s heart gave out on a Thursday in September while he was oiling the chain on the grain auger in the machine shed. He was eighty one. The doctor said it would have been fast, and I have chosen to believe that, because the alternative is not something I can carry.

We buried him on a Tuesday. Of course it was a Tuesday. Even the funeral home, without knowing a thing about chicken fried steak, had picked his favorite day.

Resurrection Lutheran seats two hundred and some, and every pew was full, and the overflow stood three deep along the back wall in their good coats because September in Nebraska can still turn cold without warning and nobody wanted to leave a coat in the car. Harold Doyle gave one of the two eulogies, the other given by our nephew from Grand Island, and Harold could not get through the part about the grain truck and the pond without having to stop and look at the ceiling for a minute before he could go on. Pastor Halvorsen read the twenty third psalm the way he reads it at every funeral in that county, slow, with the pauses in the same places, and I sat in the front pew between Connie and my sister in law and did not cry once, because I had decided, somewhere in the two days since the hospital called, that crying was a thing I would do later, in private, when there was nobody left to watch me do it.

After the service, the ladies of the church put out the same funeral spread they put out for everybody, ham and scalloped potatoes and three kinds of jello salad in the fellowship hall, and I shook two hundred hands and heard he was a good man forty different ways, and every single person meant it, and every single person was also, I understood only weeks later, already quietly deciding which morning of the week belonged to them.