The Cooler on the Courthouse Bench

The Steakhouse

The steakhouse sits on the north side of the square in the old hardware building.

It has a pressed tin ceiling and dark wooden booths, and it’s where people in our town go for anniversaries and for the dinner after a funeral.

There were eight of us. Kelsey and Tyler. Gail and me. My sister, Pam, who’d driven over from Newton.

Tyler’s best friend, Josh, and his wife, Amy. And Kelsey’s friend from the dental office, a sweet girl named Kim who cried through the whole ceremony.

Gail had asked for the long table in the front window, and that’s where they put us. The menus were already at our places, and the lunch prime rib was $34 a plate.

Gail told the waitress, before anybody had opened a menu, that it would be the prime rib for everyone.

I did the arithmetic without meaning to. Eight plates at $34, before tea and tax and tip. Close to three hundred and fifty dollars, for a lunch that I’d already made.

I want to say clearly that Gail paid for all of it. She never asked anybody for a cent.

Whatever else I thought of her that day, she wasn’t cheap, and she didn’t make the kids pay for her idea.

Pam leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Where’s your cooler?”

“I gave it to a man named Earl,” I whispered back.

Pam looked at me for a long second. Then she patted my knee under the table and said, “Good for you,” and buttered her roll. That’s my sister.

Here is the thing I didn’t think about when Gail picked that table.

From her chair, at the end by the window, you could see straight across the square to the bottom of the courthouse steps. You could see the bike rack. You could see the bench.

You could see Earl sitting there with my cooler beside him, eating my potato salad off a paper plate, slowly, like a man who wasn’t sure when he’d eat that well again.

Gail kept looking out there.

She looked during the salads. She looked when the rolls came. She looked while Josh told a long story about Tyler getting a skid loader stuck in a creek bottom in high school, and everybody laughed but her.

Every time she looked, her jaw went tight, and she turned away. Then a minute later she looked again. She hardly touched her salad. She kept turning her water glass in a circle on the tablecloth.

I’ll be honest with you. I thought she was angry with me.

I thought she was sitting there stewing about the woman who’d embarrassed her on the courthouse steps by feeding a stranger in front of God and everybody.

And I’ll be honest about one more thing. Part of me was glad. Part of me thought, well, let her look.

Let her see what her steakhouse cost. I’m not proud of that part, but it was there.

Kelsey caught my eye across the table once. She tipped her head a little toward Gail. I shrugged. Neither one of us understood it.

I looked out the window myself after that. Earl had finished the potato salad. He’d stacked the paper plate neatly on top of the closed cooler, and he was sitting with his hands folded, guarding it, just like he’d said he would.

A woman came by walking a little dog, and the dog went over to sniff the cooler. Earl leaned forward and said something to her, polite, and she smiled and pulled the dog along. Nobody was going to touch Dave’s cooler. He’d given his word.

I thought about all the mornings I’d driven my bus past that bench at 6:40, with the heater running and the radio low and thirty kids behind me. I couldn’t tell you how many of those mornings he’d been sitting there. I’d never once looked close enough to know.

That’s a hard thing to admit about yourself at fifty-seven. You think you’re a decent woman. You think you notice people. And then a man on a bench keeps his word about your cooler better than most folks keep their word about anything.