The Cooler on the Courthouse Bench

“I’d throw that out,” Gail Hanson said, and she pointed one finger at my cooler the way you’d point at something the dog dragged onto the porch. “Nobody eats out of a cooler at a wedding, Diane.”

We were standing on the courthouse steps in the bright October sun. My daughter, Kelsey, had been married for about eleven minutes. Her new husband, Tyler, still had the license folder in his hand.

Gail didn’t lower her voice. She never does. She’s sixty years old, she keeps her hair done every Thursday, and she says things in a tone that makes you feel like you’ve already agreed with her.

“I booked the steakhouse across the square,” she went on. “Twelve-thirty. Table for eight. I told them it was a wedding party, so they’re putting us by the window.”

Nobody had told me. Not Kelsey, not Tyler, not Gail herself until that minute. I looked down at the red-and-white cooler at my feet, and I felt my face go hot clear up to my hairline.

I had been up since four o’clock that morning. I want to tell you what was in that cooler, because it matters to the rest of this, and because I’m still a little proud of it.

Ham sandwiches packed in layers, the ham shaved thin at the meat counter, on soft white sliced bread with real butter and a little mustard.

A glass bowl of potato salad, my mother’s recipe, with hard-boiled eggs and celery and a spoonful of pickle juice.

A pan of scotcheroos cut into squares and wrapped in wax paper. Bottles of sweet tea packed down in the ice.

A bag of chips, a stack of paper plates, and napkins I’d bought special because they were white with a little silver edge.

All of it came to about $180 at the grocery store. That’s not nothing on a school bus driver’s pay.

I’ve driven Route 4 for this district for twenty-two years, and I count my dollars the way I count my kids at the last stop.

The cooler itself was my husband’s. Dave bought it at the farm store the summer Kelsey was born, and it rode in the back of his pickup to every ball game, every county fair and every family reunion for twenty years.

Dave has been gone four years this past March. His heart, in the middle of spring planting, out in the machine shed.

I still have his seed cap on the hook by the back door. I still use his cooler, because what else would I do with it.

So when Gail said throw it out, it didn’t land on sandwiches. It landed on him.