The Cooler on the Courthouse Bench

The Bench

There’s a bench at the bottom of the courthouse steps, over to the right, right next to the bike rack.

The maples along that side of the square had gone bright yellow that week, and the leaves were coming down all over the sidewalk.

A man was asleep on that bench. I’d seen him when we walked in for the ceremony.

He was lying on his side with his knees pulled up, and his hands were tucked against his chest like a pillow.

He had a gray beard, kept short, and a tan canvas jacket that had been a good one once.

His boots were set neatly side by side on the ground below him, the way a man sets his boots by the door at home.

I’ll be honest. When we walked past him the first time, I didn’t look at him long. I did what most of us do. I noticed, and I kept walking, and I thought about my own day.

This time I walked right up to him in my navy cardigan and my good white blouse and my khaki pants, and I set Dave’s cooler down on the end of the bench beside him.

The sound woke him. He sat straight up, fast, the way people do when they’ve had to learn to wake up fast.

He pulled his jacket close and looked at me like he expected to be told to move along.

“Ma’am,” he said, “I’m not causing any trouble. I’ll go.”

“I know you’re not causing trouble,” I said. “And you don’t have to go anywhere. My name’s Diane. Are you hungry?”

He looked at the cooler. Then he looked at me. Then he looked up the steps, where I knew my whole family was standing and watching, and I saw him put it together that something was going on he hadn’t been told about.

“I’m Earl,” he said finally. “Earl Pruitt.”

I flipped open the lid. The sun hit the wax paper and the potato salad bowl and the bottles of tea, and it all looked just as nice as it had at four o’clock that morning on my kitchen counter.

Earl didn’t reach in. He sat there with his hands on his knees and he waited.

I’ve seen kids do that on the bus, the ones who don’t get breakfast at home. They wait to be sure you mean it.

“Go ahead,” I said. “It’s ham. The potato salad has egg in it, and there’s pickle juice, so if you don’t like pickles, I apologize in advance.”

That got the smallest smile out of him. “My mother made hers with egg,” he said quietly. “Never had the pickle juice, though.”

He took one sandwich. Just one. He unwrapped it slow and careful and folded the wax paper into a square on his knee, like he didn’t want to make a mess on the courthouse lawn.

I took out two more and put them in his hand. I filled a paper plate with potato salad and found him a plastic fork.

I poured him a cup of sweet tea, and I set two scotcheroos on the edge of the plate.

“That’s too much,” he said.

“It’s a wedding,” I told him. “There’s no such thing as too much.”