The Casino Sign My Mother Read

The steak

We went in.

She read the whole menu board at the buffet entrance out loud, every item, the carving station, the dessert list, the sign that said please take a clean plate each trip, and the girl taking tickets smiled at her like she was a child at Christmas and did not know she was watching a resurrection.

She stopped at the dessert case before we even sat down and read every little placard out loud, the bread pudding, the peach cobbler, the sugar free Jell-O for the diabetics, and she said, “They’ve got cobbler, Dana,” like she had discovered it. She had read the word cobbler. That was the miracle to her, not the cobbler, the word.

We got our steaks. Mine was fine. Hers, she said, was the best steak she had ever put in her mouth, and I believe that it was, because she was tasting it with her eyes too, reading the little dish of butter, reading the salt packet, reading everything, drunk on edges and letters.

Halfway through she set her fork down and reached across and took my hand with her little cold hand, the one with my daddy’s wedding band still on it worn thin, and she held it and did not say anything for a bit. Then she said, “You know what I’m going to do first thing tomorrow. I’m going to sit in my chair by the window with my Bible and read the whole book of Ruth start to finish, just because I can. I’ve missed Ruth.” And she went back to her steak like she had not just about broken me in half right there in the buffet line.

A man two tables over had won something on a machine on his way in and he was telling everybody, and my mother leaned over to me and read his hat out loud, “Vietnam Veteran,” and then she waved at him and told him thank you for his service, and he came over and talked to us for twenty minutes, a widower named Earl from up near Clarksdale, and the three of us closed that buffet down.

It was the best night I have had in I could not tell you how long.