The Cooler on the Courthouse Bench

The Steps

I want to be fair to everybody in this story, including me, so I’ll tell you what I almost did.

I almost said something sharp. I had it right on my tongue.

Something like, “Well, Gail, some of us cook,” or, “Nobody asked you to book anything.” I’ve had twenty-two years of practice talking to seventh graders who think they’re funny.

Tyler opened his mouth too. He’s a good young man, twenty-eight, a service tech at the implement dealer out on the highway.

He can rebuild a combine header in a morning, but he has never in his life known how to stand between his mother and anybody.

Kelsey squeezed his hand. I saw her knuckles go white. And I saw her look at me with the same face she used to make in the backseat when Dave and I were fussing about directions. Please don’t, Mom. Please not today.

She’s twenty-six. She and Tyler did the courthouse instead of a church wedding because they’re saving every dime for a down payment on a little house out on the edge of town. I was proud of them for it. I still am.

They’d gotten the license at the recorder’s office the week before, thirty-five dollars and the three-day wait that Iowa makes you sit through.

The magistrate married them in courtroom two, under the clock that’s been five minutes slow since I was in grade school.

Gail and I were the two witnesses. We stood shoulder to shoulder and signed the certificate with the same blue pen. I remember thinking, well, at least we agree on something.

Now here we were on the steps, and the agreement was over.

I thought about putting the cooler back in my car. That was the sensible thing.

But it was going to be close to seventy degrees by afternoon, and my car was parked in the sun on the far side of the square.

That potato salad would sit in a warm trunk until three o’clock at least. You don’t serve potato salad after that.

Anybody who grew up going to church potlucks knows it, and anybody who doesn’t learns it the hard way once.

And I don’t throw away food. I never have. My mother raised five of us on a hog farm south of Marshalltown, and she would have come back from the grave to slap my hand.

So I didn’t argue. I didn’t say one word. I bent down, picked up the cooler by both handles, and carried it down those wide stone steps.