The Cooler on the Courthouse Bench

The Toast

The prime rib came out on big white plates with a baked potato and green beans. It smelled wonderful. I’ll give the steakhouse that much. Everybody quieted down the way people do when good food arrives.

Then Josh tapped his glass with his knife and said, “Tyler wants to say something,” and Tyler went red to his ears, and stood up anyway.

Tyler isn’t a speaker. He held his iced tea in one hand and a folded piece of notebook paper in the other, and I could see the paper shaking. He’d written it out. That just about killed me.

“I want to thank my mom first,” he said. “Mom raised me by herself from the time I was four. She worked at the bank all day and did the books for the Lutheran church at night. Everything good in me came from her.”

I looked at Gail. Everybody looked at Gail. It was her moment, the one every mother waits for.

Gail wasn’t looking at her son. She was looking out the window, at the bench across the square.

And her eyes were wet. Not angry wet. I’ve seen angry tears. These were the other kind, the kind that come up from somewhere a long way down.

Tyler kept going. “And I want to thank Diane,” he said, “for raising Kelsey, and for getting up at four this morning to make us lunch, even if…”

He stopped, because his mother had set her glass down. She set it down hard enough that the tea jumped.

Then she pushed her chair back from the table, and the legs scraped on the old wooden floor.

“Mom?” Tyler said.